An Ontological Structure for Gathering and Sharing Knowledge among Scientists through Experiment Modeling

Abstract

This chapter presents a proposal for modeling / simulating experiments conducted by scientists working in common scientific problems, based on gathering and exploiting knowledge elements produced among them. The authors’ approach enables the adaptation of knowledge structures (bounded to scientific problems) and is based on recurrent refining processes that are fed by indicators, which come from collaboration among the scientists involved. This scheme captures a web-based infrastructure, which allows scientists to collaborate on synthesizing experiments online. The proposed model is approached as an ontology that contains scientific concepts and actions. This ontology is linked to the scientific problem and represents both the “common understanding” for such a problem and the way it could be managed by the group. This dynamic ontology will change its structure according to the collaboration acts among scientists. Frequent collaboration over certain elements of the experiment will make them prevail in time. Besides, this process has been defined in a way that provides a global understanding of the scientific treatment that could be applied on any scientific problem. Hence, the ontology represents a virtualization of the scientific experiment. This whole representation is aimed at providing the media for developing e-research among scientists that are working on common problems.