A Supportive Environment for Knowledge Construction based on Semantic Web Technology: A Case Study in a Cultural Domain

It is indisputable that the process of knowledge construction and knowledge management require a lot of collaborations from many stakeholders such as domain experts and knowledge engineers. To effectively model the knowledge in ontology representation, which can serve business applications and organization's goals, we need tools to support and to facilitate the collaborative works and activities among many stakeholders. In this paper, we propose a CD-OAM framework that provides a supportive environment based on the collaborative development (COD) approach. In this framework, stakeholders can communicate and share their understandings and comments during the process of ontology design in order to improve the quality of the knowledge model. To demonstrate how our approach and framework can support the collaborations and knowledge integrations among multiple domain experts and knowledge engineers, we selected a case study in cultural domain because the cultural knowledge is complex and requires various experts to design the ontology. The key contributions of our framework are: (1) presenting an improvement of collaborative activities through a supportive environment based on the COD approach, and (2) demonstrating a collaborative situation to overcome limitations of a communication between domain exports and knowledge engineers.