The role of collaborative ontology development in the knowledge negotiation process

Norma Rivera, University of Texas at El Paso

Abstract

Interdisciplinary research (IDR) collaboration can be defined as the process of integrating experts’ knowledge, perspectives, and resources to advance scientific discovery. The flourishing of more complex research problems, together with the growth of scientific and technical knowledge has resulted in the need for researchers from diverse fields to provide different expertise and points of view to tackle these problems. These collaborations, however, introduce a new set of “culture” barriers as participating experts are trained to communicate in discipline-specific languages, theories, and research practices. We propose that building a common knowledge base for research using ontology development techniques can provide a starting point for interdisciplinary knowledge exchange, negotiation, and integration. The goal of this work is to extend ontology development techniques to support the knowledge negotiation process in IDR groups. Towards this goal, this work presents a methodology that extends previous work in collaborative ontology development and integrates learning strategies and tools to enhance interdisciplinary research practices. We evaluate the effectiveness of applying such methodology in three different scenarios that cover educational and research settings. The results of this evaluation confirm that integrating learning strategies can, in fact, be advantageous to overall collaborative practices in IDR groups.

Subject Area

Science education|Computer science

Recommended Citation

Rivera, Norma, "The role of collaborative ontology development in the knowledge negotiation process" (2015). ETD Collection for University of Texas, El Paso. AAI10000803.
https://scholarworks.utep.edu/dissertations/AAI10000803

Share

COinS