Social psychology insights into ontology engineering

• An ontology is a shared conceptualization establishing what must be the “truth”.
• There is a conformism to and of the ontologist and to the choice of formalism.
• The expert, by its special position recognized, has an influence on the individuals.
• Can we use texts as the correct transposition of the domain knowledge?
• The ontologist role is to translate a social representation into a formal language.

The Social Psychology perspective provides a new look into the ontology engineering processes. In this paper, we analyze in particular how ontologies, as formal psycho-social entities, are the outcome of influences. The types of influence range from the sources (originating from the experts and the corpus authors) to the ontologists. As it is impossible to design an ontology without any influence, the ontologist should develop his awareness and has to minimize the influence through the process by taking precisely into account the ecosystem considered.