Mind the Gap: Transcending Contextualised Communal Knowledge Sharing

The key objective of communal knowledge sharing at the scale of the World Wide Web is the ability to collaborate and integrate within and between communities. Ontologies, being formal, computer-based specifications of shared conceptualisations of the worlds under discussion, are instrumental in this process by providing shared semantic resources. To this end, the pragmatic aspects of the exchange of knowledge and information are crucial. Pragmatics represent the intentions, motivations and methodologies of the persons involved and need to become formalised and unambiguous for effective exchange to occur. On the one hand, this is something that humans manage fluently in their daily face-to-face social discourses. On the other hand, as contemporary knowledge engineering methods consider only the non-human system parts, they usually focus on mere syntactic aspects of concept modelling. The elicitation (semantics) and application (pragmatics) context are often weak or even ignored. This paper aims to bridge this gap between "reality" and its modelling concepts by (i) transcending knowledge engineering methods to a semiotics view on contextualised communal knowledge engineering and sharing; and (ii) by presenting the DOGMA ontology framework and how it provides extension points to this semiotics engineering.