Modelling the Frontier. Cross-Cultural Ontology Bridges for Semantic Web Services

Abstract

This cross-disciplinary study makes use of theories of concepts, ontologies, conceptual modelling and linguistics. The approach is semi constructive: first, the theories are introduced, and then they are applied to solve the concrete problem: how one should develop cross-cultural Semantic Web Services. The conclusion made is that the best way to do it is to construct ontology bridges. This is proposed to be done in four stages: (1) domain analyses, (2) modelling reality: concept system construction, (3) construction of a culturally disambiguated set of domain-specific ontologies for machine agents and (4) cross-cultural ontology bridges’ construction. The implementation of the method is demonstrated on a concrete example of Web service use.

Keywords: concept, ontology, conceptual model, Semantic Web Services, cross-cultural semantics