ONTOCODESIGN: An exercise in using agents to cooperatively develop a CSCWD ontology

This paper presents the ONTOCODESIGN platform for collaboratively designing an ontology for CSCWD. The ontology is meant to help SMC/CSCWD Committee members to better interact and organize their scientific production, and to help the Steering Committee make more informed decisions. Indeed, organized research groups usually have steering committees supporting their actions, and making decisions implementing the group´s strategy. A big picture that reveals a network of topics, exposing how the community reacts to changes (trends, discoveries, social impacts, etc) is critical for making good decisions. We believe that a collaborative approach for building a CSCWD ontology will help keeping track of CSCWD themes and allow developing more consensual and effective initiatives. The ONTOCODESIGN platform uses a multi-agent environment and a multilingual context The paper describes its architecture and its first implementation.