Keynote: Towards An Ontological Foundation for Evolving Agent Communities

Research in ontology management has reached a certain level of maturity, however, there is still little understanding of, and technological support for, the methodological and evolutionary aspects of ontologies as resources. Yet these are crucial in distributed and collaborative worlds such as the Semantic Web, where ontologies and their communities of use naturally and mutually co-evolve. Through a deep understanding of the real-time, community-driven, evolution of so-called ontologies, a semantic agent system can be made operationally relevant and sustainable over long periods of time. Such a paradigm shift in knowledge-intensive and community-driven systems would affect knowledge sharing and communication across diverse communities in business, industry, and society. In this paper, we give an overview of the practical and theoretical challenges and limitations, and based on that introduce an ontological and methodological foundation for community evolution processes.