Ontological modelling and conceptual architecture of social cohesion
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.46661/ccselap-13084Keywords:
Ontology-based modelling, Cultural diversity, educational expectations, Tolerance toward immigrants, Social cohesion, Trust, Identity formation, Conceptual integration, EuropeAbstract
Research on tolerance, education, and social cohesion is characterised by conceptual richness but structural fragmentation. Different disciplinary traditions operationalise these constructs at distinct levels of analysis and according to divergent normative and methodological priorities. As a result, theoretical pathways are often implied rather than explicitly specified. This study proposes an ontology-based conceptual model that formalises the relationships between education, diversity, contact, trust, identity, tolerance, social cohesion, and policy models within a unified semantic framework. The model was developed through structured concept extraction from peer-reviewed European literature, hierarchical organisation of core classes, and specification of object properties representing admissible relations between constructs. The ontology was implemented in OWL using Protégé and logically verified with a description-logic reasoner. The resulting ontology clarifies the conceptual relationships between education, diversity, trust, identity, tolerance and social cohesion and demonstrates how these constructs can be organised into a coherent multi-level semantic architecture. The study discusses the implications of ontology-based modelling for integrating fragmented research traditions and for supporting future empirical operationalisation in European comparative studies.
Downloads
References
Adamo, G., & Willis, M. (2022). Conceptual integration for social-ecological systems. In R. Guizzardi, J. Ralyté, & X. Franch (Eds.), Research challenges in information science: RCIS 2022 (Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, Vol. 446, pp. 321-337). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05760-1_19
Ahmadi, P., & Tabar, F. (2025). Modeling structural relationships between dimensions of personal, social, and national identity among students at Islamic Azad University, Hamedan. Health Nexus, 3(2). https://doi.org/10.61838/kman.hn.3.2.14
Allport, G. W. (1954). The nature of prejudice. Addison-Wesley.
Berggren, N., Ljunge, M., & Nilsson, T. (2022). Immigrants' tolerance and integration into society (IFN Working Paper No. 1447). SSRN. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4298603
Bjarnason, T., Stevenson, C., Shuttleworth, I., & Meckl, M. (2020). Spatial mobility and tolerance towards immigrants: the case of Northern Iceland. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 43(10), 1813-1832. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2019.1667003
Castillo, A., Castellanos, A., & VanderMeer, D. (2019). Inferring structure for design: An inductive approach to ontology generation. In Proceedings of the ER Forum 2019 co-located with the 38th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2019) (CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 2469, pp. 84-97). CEUR-WS. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2469/ERForum7.pdf
Chuang, Y., Chuang, K., & Yang, T. (2013). Social cohesion matters in health. International Journal for Equity in Health, 12, Article 87. https://doi.org/10.1186/1475-9276-12-87
Costantini, H., Mujahid, M., Hosaka, K., Ono, T., & Nihei, M. (2024). Instruments to assess people's attitude and behaviours towards tolerance: A systematic review of literature. Societies, 14(7), 121. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc14070121
Davis, S., & Davies, M. (2025). Understanding the effects of social cohesion on social wellbeing: A scoping review. International Journal of Public Health, 70, Article 1607414. https://doi.org/10.3389/ijph.2025.1607414
Dražanová, L., & Gonnot, J. (2023). Attitudes toward immigration in Europe: Cross-regional differences. Open Research Europe, 3, Article 66. https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.15691.1
Giavrimis, P., & Dimitriadou, S. (2023). Interculturality in Greek education: Practices and challenges of implementation. Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Studies, 10(3), 72-88. https://doi.org/10.29333/ejecs/1564
Gorodzeisky, A., & Semyonov, M. (2016). Not only competitive threat but also racial prejudice: Sources of anti-immigrant attitudes in European societies. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 28(3), 331-354. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijpor/edv024
Gorodzeisky, A., & Semyonov, M. (2019). Unwelcome immigrants: Sources of opposition to different immigrant groups among Europeans. Frontiers in Sociology, 4, Article 24. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2019.00024
Guizzardi, G. (2005). Ontological foundations for structural conceptual models (Doctoral dissertation, University of Twente). https://www.inf.ufes.br/~gguizzardi/OFSCM.pdf
Hale, J., Hastings, J., West, R., Lefevre, C. E., Direito, A., Bohlen, L. C., Godinho, C., Anderson, N., Zink, S., Groarke, H., & Michie, S. (2020). An ontology-based modelling system (OBMS) for representing behaviour change theories applied to 76 theories. Wellcome Open Research, 5, Article 177. https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.16121.1
Hastings, J., Michie, S., & Johnston, M. (2020). Theory and ontology in behavioural science. Nature Human Behaviour, 4, 226. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0826-9
Hastings, J., Zhang, L., Schenk, P., West, R., Gehrke, B., Hogan, W. R., Chorpita, B., Johnston, M., Marques, M. M., Webb, T. L., Baird, H. M., Crombez, G., & Michie, S. (2024). The BSSO Foundry: A community of practice for ontologies in the behavioural and social sciences. Wellcome Open Research, 9, Article 656. https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.23230.1
Hwang, S. H., Kim, H. G., & Yang, H. S. (2005). A FCA-based ontology construction for the design of class hierarchy. In O. Gervasi et al. (Eds.), Computational science and its applications - ICCSA 2005 (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 3482 pp. 827-835). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/11424857_90
Javornik, Š. (2023). Students' attitudes toward immigrants: An analysis of ICCS data. International Journal of Management, Knowledge and Learning, 12, 135-142. https://doi.org/10.53615/2232-5697.12.135-142
Kiss, T., & Toró, T. (2025). Minority education in Central and Eastern Europe: Toward a framework for comparative analysis and minority rights advocacy. Nationalities Papers, 54(2), 270 - 295. https://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2025.29
Yu, H., Cheng, X., Ouyang, C., Ge, W., & Guo, X. (2025). Does regulator as a minority shareholder affect bond yield spreads? A quasi-natural experiment. Corporate Governance: An International Review, 33(6), 1660-1681. https://doi.org/10.1111/corg.70004
Kreienkamp, J., Agostini, M., Bringmann, L. F., de Jonge, P., & Epstude, K. (2023). Need fulfillment during intergroup contact: Three experience sampling studies. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 51(6), 1047-1077. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672231204063
Kromczyk, M., Khattab, N., & Abbas, T. (2021). The limits of tolerance: Before and after Brexit and the German refugee crisis. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 44(16), 170-193. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2021.1937670
Kumazawa, T., Kozaki, K., Matsui, T., Saito, O., Ohta, M., Hara, K., Uwasu, M., Kimura, M., & Mizoguchi, R. (2014). Initial design process of the sustainability science ontology for knowledge-sharing to support co-deliberation. Sustainability Science, 9, 173-192. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-013-0202-z
Langer, A., Stewart, F., Smedts, K., & Demarest, L. (2017). Conceptualising and measuring social cohesion in Africa: Towards a perceptions-based index. Social Indicators Research, 131(1), 321-343. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-016-1250-4
Laurence, J. (2011). The effect of ethnic diversity and community disadvantage on social cohesion: A multi-level analysis of social capital and interethnic relations in UK communities. European Sociological Review, 27(1), 70-89. https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcp057
Levrau, F., & Loobuyck, P. (2018). Introduction: Mapping the multiculturalism-interculturalism debate. Comparative Migration Studies, 6, Article 13. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-018-0080-8
Liu, P., Hu, Y., Wang, X., & Liu, K. (2011). A methodology for domain ontology construction in information science. In Proceedings of the 2011 International Conference on E-Business and E-Government (ICEE) (pp. 1-5). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICEBEG.2011.5882759
Matos, A., & Melo-Pfeifer, S. (2020). Art matters in languages and intercultural citizenship education. Language and Intercultural Communication, 20(4), 289-299. https://doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2020.1786917
Mitchell, J. (2021). Social trust and anti-immigrant attitudes in Europe: A longitudinal multi-level analysis. Frontiers in Sociology, 6, Article 604884. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2021.604884
Musen, M. A. (2015). The Protégé project: A look back and a look forward. AI Matters, 1(4), 4-12. https://doi.org/10.1145/2757001.2757003
Peiró-Palomino, J., Gianmoena, L., Picazo-Tadeo, A., & Rios, V. (2024). Social trust and the advanced aspects of social progress: Evidence for the European regions. European Journal of Political Economy, 83, Article 102547. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2024.102547
Pekrun, R. (2024). Overcoming fragmentation in motivation science: Why, when, and how should we integrate theories? Educational Psychology Review, 36, Article 27. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-024-09846-5
Pettigrew, T. F. (1998). Intergroup contact theory. Annual Review of Psychology, 49, 65-85. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.49.1.65
Ponce, A. (2019). Histories of conquest, diversity, and social cohesion in former colonial Europe. Social Currents, 6(5), 440-463. https://doi.org/10.1177/2329496519852575
Ríos-Alvarado, A., Lopez-Arevalo, I., & Sosa, V. (2013). Learning concept hierarchies from textual resources for ontologies construction. Expert Systems with Applications, 40(15), 5907-5915. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2013.05.005
Roux, J. (2002). Effective educators are culturally competent communicators. Intercultural Education, 13(1), 37-48. https://doi.org/10.1080/14675980120112922
Rubin, D. L., Knublauch, H., Fergerson, R. W., Dameron, O., & Musen, M. A. (2005). Protégé-OWL: Creating ontology-driven reasoning applications with the Web Ontology Language. AMIA Annual Symposium Proceedings, 2005, 1179. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1560433/
Schmidt, K. (2021). The dynamics of attitudes toward immigrants: Cohort analyses for Western EU member states. International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 62(5), 281-310. https://doi.org/10.1177/00207152211052582
Sealy, T., Dupont, P., & Modood, T. (2024). Difference and diversity: Combining multiculturalist and interculturalist approaches to integration. The Sociological Review, 73(1), 104-122. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261241238585
Tsai, M., & Tzeng, R. (2022). Globalization and social distance: Multilevel analysis of attitudes toward immigrants in the European Union. PLoS ONE, 17(9), e0274988. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274988
Van Assche, J., Velarde, S., Van Hiel, A., & Roets, A. (2023). Trust is in the eye of the beholder: How perceptions of local diversity and segregation shape social cohesion. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, Article 1036646. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1036646
Verdonck, M., Gailly, F., Pergl, R., Guizzardi, G., Martins, B., & Pastor, Ó. (2019). Comparing traditional conceptual modeling with ontology-driven conceptual modeling: An empirical study. Information Systems, 81, 92-103. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2018.11.009
Visintin, E. P., Green, E. G. T., & Sarrasin, O. (2018). Inclusive normative climates strengthen the relationship between identification with Europe and tolerant immigration attitudes: Evidence from 22 countries. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 49(6), 908-923. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022117731092
Wu, C. (2021). Education and social trust in global perspective. Sociological Perspectives, 64(6), 1166-1186. https://doi.org/10.1177/0731121421990045
Zapata-Barrero, R. (2017). Interculturalism in the post-multicultural debate: A defence. Comparative Migration Studies, 5, Article 14. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-017-0057-z
Zhao, J., Liu, H., Zhang, W., Sun, T., Chen, Q., Wang, Y., Cheng, J., Yan, Z., Zhang, X., Zhang, S., Li, B., & Ding, R. (2024). Research on domain ontology construction based on the content features of online rumors. Scientific Reports, 14, Article 12134. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-62459-4
Zulkipli, Z., Maskat, R., & Teo, N. (2022). A systematic literature review of automatic ontology construction. Indonesian Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 28(2), 887-889. https://doi.org/10.11591/ijeecs.v28.i2.pp878-889
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Olena Mykhailovska, Oksana Liashenko
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This licence allows third parties to share (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format) and adapt (remix, transform and create from the material for any purpose, including commercial purposes), provided that authorship and first publication in this journal (The Journal, DOI of the work) is acknowledged, a link to the licence is provided, and it is stated whether changes have been made to the work.
