Developing ontologies is not just about eliciting knowledge and formalizing it according to a particular formalism; rather this development process is a social process of collaborative knowledge building mediated by artifacts. In this paper, we adopt a communication based model of ontology design. This approach focuses on ontologies as semiotic objects and on the relationship between the designers’ intended interpretation of an ontology content and the actual user interpretation. We explore some consequences of this perspective for collaborative ontology development and reuse.
