An Ontology Approach for Knowledge Acquisition and Development of Health Information System (HIS)

This paper emphasizes various knowledge acquisition approaches in terms of tacit and explicit knowledge management that can be helpful to capture, codify and communicate within medical unit. The semantic-based knowledge management system (SKMS) supports knowledge acquisition and incorporates various approaches to provide systematic practical platform to knowledge practitioners and to identify various roles of healthcare professionals, tasks that can be performed according to personnel’s competencies, and activities that are carried out as a part of tasks to achieve defined goals of clinical process. This research outcome gives new vision to IT practitioners to manage the tacit and implicit knowledge in XML format which can be taken as foundation for the development of information systems (IS) so that domain end-users can receive timely healthcare related services according to their demands and needs

A conceptual architecture for semantic web services development and deployment

Several extensions of the Web Services Framework (WSF) have been proposed. The combination with Semantic Web technologies introduces a notion of semantics, which can enhance scalability through automation. Service composition to processes is an equally important issue. Ontology technology – the core of the Semantic Web – can be the central building block of an extension endeavour. We present a conceptual architecture for ontology-based Web service development and deployment. The development of service-based software systems within the WSF is gaining increasing importance. We show how ontologies can integrate models, languages, infrastructure, and activities within this architecture to support reuse and composition of semantic Web services

An approach to relate business and application services using ISDL

This paper presents a service-oriented design approach that allows one to relate services modelled at different levels of granularity during a design process, such as business and application services. To relate these service models we claim that a 'concept gap' and an 'abstraction gap' need to be bridged. The concept gap represents the difference between the conceptual models used to construct service models by different stakeholders involved in the design process. The abstraction gap represents the difference in abstraction level at which service models are defined. Two techniques are presented that bridge these gaps. Both techniques are based on the Interaction System Design Language (ISDL). The paper illustrates the use of both techniques through an example

A cookbook for temporal conceptual data modelling with description logic

We design temporal description logics suitable for reasoning about temporal conceptual data models and investigate their computational complexity. Our formalisms are based on DL-Lite logics with three types of concept inclusions (ranging from atomic concept inclusions and disjointness to the full Booleans), as well as cardinality constraints and role inclusions. In the temporal dimension, they capture future and past temporal operators on concepts, flexible and rigid roles, the operators `always' and `some time' on roles, data assertions for particular moments of time and global concept inclusions. The logics are interpreted over the Cartesian products of object domains and the flow of time (Z,<), satisfying the constant domain assumption. We prove that the most expressive of our temporal description logics (which can capture lifespan cardinalities and either qualitative or quantitative evolution constraints) turn out to be undecidable. However, by omitting some of the temporal operators on concepts/roles or by restricting the form of concept inclusions we obtain logics whose complexity ranges between PSpace and NLogSpace. These positive results were obtained by reduction to various clausal fragments of propositional temporal logic, which opens a way to employ propositional or first-order temporal provers for reasoning about temporal data models

Identifying and Modelling Complex Workflow Requirements in Web Applications

Workflow plays a major role in nowadays business and therefore its requirement elicitation must be accurate and clear for achieving the solution closest to business’s needs. Due to Web applications popularity, the Web is becoming the standard platform for implementing business workflows. In this context, Web applications and their workflows must be adapted to market demands in such a way that time and effort are minimize. As they get more popular, they must give support to different functional requirements but also they contain tangled and scattered behaviour. In this work we present a model-driven approach for modelling workflows using a Domain Specific Language for Web application requirement called WebSpec. We present an extension to WebSpec based on Pattern Specifications for modelling crosscutting workflow requirements identifying tangled and scattered behaviour and reducing inconsistencies early in the cycle

Reusable Knowledge-based Components for Building Software Applications: A Knowledge Modelling Approach

In computer science, different types of reusable components for building software applications were proposed as a direct consequence of the emergence of new software programming paradigms. The success of these components for building applications depends on factors such as the flexibility in their combination or the facility for their selection in centralised or distributed environments such as internet. In this article, we propose a general type of reusable component, called primitive of representation, inspired by a knowledge-based approach that can promote reusability. The proposal can be understood as a generalisation of existing partial solutions that is applicable to both software and knowledge engineering for the development of hybrid applications that integrate conventional and knowledge based techniques. The article presents the structure and use of the component and describes our recent experience in the development of real-world applications based on this approach

Toward the automation of business process ontology generation

Semantic Business Process Management (SBPM) utilises semantic technologies (e.g., ontology) to model and query process representations. There are times in which such models must be reconstructed from existing textual documentation. In this scenario the automated generation of ontological models would be preferable, however current methods and technology are still not capable of automatically generating accurate semantic process models from textual descriptions. This research attempts to automate the process as much as possible by proposing a method that drives the transformation through the joint use of a foundational ontology and lexico-semantic analysis. The method is presented, demonstrated and evaluated. The original dataset represents 150 business activities related to the procurement processes of a case study company. As the evaluation shows, the proposed method can accurately map the linguistic patterns of the process descriptions to semantic patterns of the foundational ontology to a high level of accuracy, however further research is required in order to reduce the level of human intervention, expand the method so as to recognise further patterns of the foundational ontology and develop a tool to assist the business process modeller in the semi-automated generation of process models