A Pragmatic Approach to Conceptual Negotiation Support

Abstract

Collaborative conceptualisation processes are pervasive to most technical and professional activities, but are seldom addressed explicitly due to the lack of theoretical and practical methods and tools to support it. However, it seems not to be a popular research topic in knowledge representation or its sub-areas such as ontology engineering. Our view is that collaboration between stakeholders for specifying an ontology should be addressed at the conceptual, semi-formal level, in order to foster a collective learning of the domain and reaching agreements about its representation. We developed a method to support conceptual integration based in the conceptual blending theory - ColBlend - and implemented it in a collaborative modelling environment. This "conceptual modelling environment - conceptME" supports teams of specialist and facilitators in eliciting conceptual structures with the help of collaborative model editing and terminology services. Conceptual integration and agreements a