GOSPL: a Method and Tool for Fact-oriented Hybrid Ontology Engineering Christophe Debruyne and Robert Meersman Semantics Technology and Applications Research Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium {chrdebru,meersman}@vub.ac.be Abstract. In this paper we present GOSPL, which stands for Ground- ing Ontologies with Social Processes and Natural Language. GOSPL is a method and tool that supports stakeholders in iteratively interpreting and modeling their common hybrid ontologies using their own termi- nology for semantic interoperability between autonomously developed and maintained information systems. Hybrid ontologies are ontologies in which concepts are both formally and informally described with the help of a special linguistic resource called glossary. Social interactions between the community members drive the ontology evolution process and result in more stable and agreed upon ontologies. Key words: Ontology Engineering Methodologies 1 Introduction An ontology is commonly defined as: “a [formal,] explicit specification of a [shared] conceptualization” [10]. However, the problem is not what ontologies are, but how they become community-grounded resources of semantics, and at the same time how they are made operationally relevant and sustainable over longer periods of time. In the DOGMA framework [17], fact-oriented approaches such as NIAM/ORM [25,12] have been proven useful for engineering ontologies. A key characteristic here is that the analysis of information is based on natural language fact-types 1 . This brings the advantage that “layman” domain experts are facilitated in building, interpreting, and understanding attribute-free 2 , hence semantically stable ontologies, using their own terminology. The semantics in on- tologies are thus the result from agreements within a community. An important tool in reaching agreements is the use of glosses, natural lan- guage descriptions interpretable by humans. The use of glosses while reasoning and discussing concepts among humans aid in the disambiguation of different 1 A fact-type is the generalization of facts, a collection of objects linked by a predicate. “[Person] knows [Person]” would be an example of a fact-type, and “[Christophe] knows [Robert]” would be a fact in this example. 2 There are only fact-types, no distinction between relations and attributes. The con- straints on roles in these facts determine the “attributeness” of a fact-type.