Ontology Development is Consensus Creation, Not (Merely) Representation
This addresses the slow and difficult process of creating shared ontologies for communities, emphasizing the need for social skills in technical training.
The paper argues that reference ontology development is primarily a consensus-building process rather than just knowledge representation, highlighting that it cannot be automated with current AI due to social negotiation challenges.
Ontology development methodologies emphasise knowledge gathering from domain experts and documentary resources, and knowledge representation using an ontology language such as OWL or FOL. However, working ontologists are often surprised by how challenging and slow it can be to develop ontologies. Here, with a particular emphasis on the sorts of ontologies that are content-heavy and intended to be shared across a community of users (reference ontologies), we propose that a significant and heretofore under-emphasised contributor of challenges during ontology development is the need to create, or bring about, consensus in the face of disagreement. For this reason reference ontology development cannot be automated, at least within the limitations of existing AI approaches. Further, for the same reason ontologists are required to have specific social-negotiating skills which are currently lacking in most technical curricula.