The use of well-founded argumentation on the conceptual modeling of collaborative ontology development

Divergences in conceptual modeling choices are inherent to the collaborative ontology development. Such divergences have been typically solved through some process of negotiation among the participants of the development process. When negotiating, the participants argue to defend their ideas based on their past experiences. We propose to support and to guide the argumentation using philosophical notions brought by the OntoClean methodology to show the participants the consequences of their conceptual modeling choices. So the participants can choose the modeling option that better represents the intended model of the domain. This paper presents an approach for collaborative ontology development in a distributed way, specifically to support activities of the conceptualization phase and the whole process of discussion to reach consensus, aiming at developing ontologies that better fit the intended models for a domain.