Collaboration of distributed knowledge communities is a rapidly increasing application field, e.g. international enterprises, scientific research teams, e-learning communities. For efficient collaboration the common understanding of information is a decisive factor. A systematic approach to gain this common understanding is the dynamic creation of ontologies, leading to a more efficient use of shared information resources. At present, the creation of high-quality ontologies is a very time consuming and expensive task. Therefore, such ontologies are available only for few thematic fields, where there is hope for significant economies of scale, e.g. in the health sector, in tourism and in the insurance sector. What is still missing is a methodology supported by tools, which would enable domain experts (who are not ontology building experts) to create ontologies on the fly, yet based on sound principles, created in short time. ´Dynamic´ means that these ontologies can then be extended and refined over time, possibly by other non-IT experts, can evolve to become more axiomatised, and can be personalised and localised by individuals or groups without losing touch with the community´s preferred interpretation. At present, none of the above requirements are sufficiently supported by methodologies and tools. This leads to many poorly analysed ´ontologies´ being published on the Web. This is likely to become a trust problem and an economic hurdle for the ´semantic´ Web.
Forschungs-