Social Annotation of Semantically Heterogeneous Knowledge

An important kind of tacit knowledge in the context of the Semantic Web are the social communication structures among heterogeneous knowledge sources and users. Communication structures heavily influence the way knowledge is generated and used, because in a context of distributed and autonomous information sources like in the Semantic Web, knowledge is constituted and adapted pragmatically through possibly conflictive communication processes. As a way to set social structures in relation to distributively acquired knowledge, this work proposes Open Ontologies and Open Knowledge Bases for the annotation of (first-level) knowledge with emergent social meta-data (social reification). Whereas traditional approaches to knowledge and ontology integration emphasize the consensus finding among the participants, Open Ontologies and Open Knowledge Bases explicitly model semantical heterogeneity in multiple levels of complexity reduction, and allow the probabilistic weighting of inconsistent knowledge resulting from their assertive weight in their communicative context.