Semiotic based framework for the development of indigenous knowledge systems

Indigenous cultures have encountered a renaissance throughout the years; this made

indigenous groups to perceive the significance of recording and sharing their social legacy

and history. However, the absence of procedural framework that can manage, formalize,

preserve and disseminate Indigenous knowledge has become a problem in the modelling of

indigenous knowledge management systems (IKMS). This research demonstrates an

analytical framework using Ontologies and Semiotic Theory to understand, classify and

formalize Indigenous Knowledge systems (IKS) in Botswana. The Semiotic theory is the

production, interpretation of meaning of signs for communication; it has three branches,

semantic, pragmatic, and syntactic. These branches are incorporated to develop the proposed

framework. The framework developed is applied considering the issues of representation,

acquisition, and creation in order to evaluate and determine how IKS should be preserved and

disseminated throughout Botswana and possibly applied to other African countries and

continents. The Semiotic framework provides a procedural guidance and a coherent way of

identifying IKS by determining if it’s still exists, relevant and known; then it classifies the

knowledge domains that could possibly exist by developing IKS Ontology to impart the proof

of concept for this research. The framework is formalized in the form of Ontology to make the

domain knowledge explicit. The semiotic framework and the ontology are evaluated by

conducting an empirical study of three groups of participants with regard to the relevance,

existence and knowledge of IKS. The Ontology build with Protégé editor was evaluated for

quality against a semiotic metric suite to determine the overall total quality of the ontology.

An organizational framework based on semiotic suite for assessing the quality of ontology is

developed consisting of four metric suites; Syntactic quality, Semantic quality, Pragmatic

quality, and Social quality. The results reveal that upon empirical evaluation of the Ontology

and Semiotic framework, Semantic quality is the most significant with a total of 57%,

syntactic is 28% , Pragmatic is 14%, while social recorded is 1%.The Social recorded 1%

because IKS is an innovative Ontology that is not yet accessed by agents.