No abstract

No abstract

This paper explores the cultural implications in ontology engineering. It focuses more particularly on collaborative design. Hypotheses are formulated concerning the influence of cultural differences in the definition of ontology, its conceptual organisation and the design process. A preliminary analysis conducted on six well known collaborative systems confirms some of the findings. We argue that a "culture aware" attitude may be of great importance for the development of systems (e.g. web services) that, more or less implicitly, adopt ontologies and for supporting the processes of cross cultural collaborative design.

No abstract

The paper proposes a semiotic framework inspired to the Generative Trajectory of Meaning by A.J. Greimas to the design and analysis of hypermedia. The framework is structured into four levels of signification and allows the designer to control the semantic coherence and optimize the communication during the hypermedia development. We investigate its practical feasibility by constructing an instructional hypermedia regarding a collection of ancient mosaics from a roman villa. Our results indicate that the proposed approach opens novel perspectives, and looks promising towards the definition of semiotic methodologies of hypermedia design.