CREON: A Creative Ontology based on Psychological and Neuroscientific Studies

As in many interdisciplinary domains, creativity theories are affected by a lack of agreement on the nature of their research objects, e.g., processes, products, people, cultures, and what is their granularity, e.g., social, personal, neurological, etc. Eventually, this problem hinders the possibility of operationalizing creativity research and to establish common datasets and experimental protocols. This paper presents CREON, an ontology of creativity based on an analysis of the literature spanning from mainstream psychological theories to recent neuroscience results. CREON distinguishes between theories centered on the mental processes of creative individuals, and those focused on the social context, in which creative people interact. The ontology is formally implemented in OWL2 with class hierarchies, axioms, and conceptual relations. It enables semantic interoperability between different psychological and neuroscience theories, preparing the ground to run inferences over different creativity data and to design experiments based on shared definitions of research objects.