Formal Ontology engineering for Culturally-Aware technoLogies

The era of globalization has seen an increase in immigration and communication amongst people from diverse cultures. Issues of miscommunication or friction resulting from cultural differences are of growing interest to technologists, which has led to the emergence of a research field on culturally-aware technology. A “culturally-aware system” refers to any system where culture-related information has had some impact on its design, run time or internal processes, structures, and/or objectives. Cultural knowledge bases are mandatory for developing culturally-aware technologies. However, existing repositories of cultural information are not easy to use, and frequently refer to a limited set of very specific problems or domains. It is thus extremely difficult for designers and developers of culturally-aware systems to access cultural information of good quality related to the specific issues they want to address in their project.