Collaborative ontology design for Open Hardware and Open Design

The integration of ICT, open source software and practices, digital fabrication and online marketplaces has enabled designers, engineers, and makers to independently design, distribute and manufacture the physical replication of tangible Open Hardware and Open Design artifacts. Orchestrating these distributed chains, actors and technologies requires comprehensive documentation of elements and across multiple domains and applications. The goal of this paper is to explore how an ontology of Open Hardware and Open Design artifacts could be collaboratively designed and what could be its main elements. In this paper, we present the results from a workshop that explored the prioritisation of domain concepts through a game of card sorting/generation to classify the elements of an ontology. Furthermore, we elaborate insights and Research through Design strategies towards integrating the design of ontologies with the participation of users and their communities, bringing Community-Centred Design to ontology engineering as both Meta-Design and Ontological Design.