1 Motivation Towards Open Ontology Engineering

Ontologies are widely regarded as the backbone of the Semantic Web and the research is very active. However, when searching the Web, only few useful ontologies can be found. The reasons for this phenomenon are manifold; [1] identifies four bottlenecks: first, many relevant domains of discourse, such as in e-commerce, comprise a high degree of conceptual dynamics. Second, the benefit of building and using ontologies is often adumbrated by the cost, especially in rapidly changing domains. Third, a prerequisite for using an ontology and thus committing to its view of the world is to exactly understand the meaning of concepts and relations. This is hampered by the fact that most ontologies are built by a group of engineers and the user community does not have control over the evolution of the ontology due to the lack of efficient tool support for a broad audience with only limited ontology engineering skills. Forth, existing standards specifications and all kinds of controlled vocabularies are subject to intellectual property rights. A community-oriented approach has several advantages towards an isolated, engineering-oriented approach: (1) A community can keep up with the pace of conceptual dynamics in a domain more easily. (2) It is cheaper for a community to collaborativel