Towards a Framework for Meaning Negotiation and Conflict Resolution in Ontology Authoring

Ontology authoring involves making choices about what subject domain knowledge to include. This may concern sorting out ontological differences as well as making choices of conflicting axioms due to limitations in the logic. Examples are different foundational ontologies in ontology matching and OWL 2 DL’s transitive object property versus qualified cardinality constraints. Such conflicts have to be resolved. However, there is currently only isolated and fragmented guidance for doing so, which therefore results in ad hoc decision-making. This work aims to ad-dress this by working towards a framework dealing with the various types of modeling conflicts through meaning negotiation and conflict resolution in a systematic way. The approach was evaluated with an actual case of domain knowledge usage in the context of epizootic disease outbreak