Open ontologies - The need for modeling heterogeneous knowledge

In the context of open environments like the Semantic Web, knowledge-based applications with autonomous knowledge sources have recently gained increased interest. For such sources, neither the consistency nor the reliability or the definiteness of the input knowledge can be ensured. Whereas there already exist promising approaches to the filtering, integration and homogenization of inconsistent and dynamic knowledge, the modeling of knowledge heterogeneity and dynamics itself has been largely neglected so far. In this work, we propose Open Ontologies as an approach to this issue. Open Ontologies are based on a distinct communication-oriented paradigm as they emerge from and evolve with communication processes, and allow the modeling and processing of semantically heterogeneous conceptual knowledge by means of its reification according to its social (i.e. communicational) meaning and relevance, and the probabilistic weighting of inconsistent knowledge facets.