A Clarification of the Ontological Status of "Knowledge Roles"

Our ongoing work aims at defining an ontology-centered approach for building expertise models for the CommonKADS methodology. This approach relies on a core problem-solving ontology (OntoKADS) which extends a foundational ontology (DOLCE) and a core ontology in the domain of semiotics (I&DA). In this article, our presentation of OntoKADS focuses on "knowledge roles" - the modeling primitive situated at the interface between domain knowledge and reasoning, and whose ontological status is still much debated. The main contribution of this paper is to propose a coherent, global, ontological framework which enables us to account for this primitive. We also show how the novel characterization of this primitive allows definition of new rules for the construction of expertise models.