Developing Ontological Theories for Conceptual Models using Qualitative Research

Conceptual modelling is believed to be at the core of the IS discipline. There have been attempts to develop theoretical foundations for conceptual models, in particular ontological models as axiomatic reference systems. Although the notion of ontology has become popular in modelling theories, criticism has risen as to its philosophical presuppositions. Taking on this criticism, we discuss the task of developing socially constructed ontologies for modelling domains and outline how to enhance the expressiveness of ontological modelling theories by developing them via qualitative research methods such as Grounded Theory

Improving Knowledge Retrieval in Digital Libraries Applying Intelligent Techniques

Nowadays an enormous quantity of heterogeneous and distributed information is stored in the digital University. Exploring online collections to find knowledge relevant to a user’s interests is a challenging work. The artificial intelligence and Semantic Web provide a common framework that allows knowledge to be shared and reused in an efficient way. In this work we propose a comprehensive approach for discovering E-learning objects in large digital collections based on analysis of recorded semantic metadata in those objects and the application of expert system technologies. We have used Case Based-Reasoning methodology to develop a prototype for supporting efficient retrieval knowledge from online repositories. We suggest a conceptual architecture for a semantic search engine. OntoUS is a collaborative effort that proposes a new form of interaction between users and digital libraries, where the latter are adapted to users and their surroundings

FACETS: A cognitive business intelligence system

A cognitive decision support system called FACETS was developed and evaluated based on the situation retrieval (SR) model. The aim of FACETS is to provide decision makers cognitive decision support in ill-structured decision situations. The design and development of FACETS includes novel concepts, models, algorithms and system architecture, such as ontology and experience representation, situation awareness parsing, data warehouse query construction and guided situation presentation. The experiments showed that FACETS is able to play a significant role in supporting ill-structured decision making through developing and enriching situation awareness. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd

Ontology-based end-user visual query formulation: Why, what, who, how, and which?

Value creation in an organisation is a time-sensitive and data-intensive process, yet it is often delayed and bounded by the reliance on IT experts extracting data for domain experts. Hence, there is a need for providing people who are not professional developers with the flexibility to pose relatively complex and ad hoc queries in an easy and intuitive way. In this respect, visual methods for query formulation undertake the challenge of making querying independent of users’ technical skills and the knowledge of the underlying textual query language and the structure of data. An ontology is more promising than the logical schema of the underlying data for guiding users in formulating queries, since it provides a richer vocabulary closer to the users’ understanding. However, on the one hand, today the most of world’s enterprise data reside in relational databases rather than triple stores, and on the other, visual query formulation has become more compelling due to ever-increasing data size and complexity—known as Big Data. This article presents and argues for ontology-based visual query formulation for end-users; discusses its feasibility in terms of ontology-based data access, which virtualises legacy relational databases as RDF, and the dimensions of Big Data; presents key conceptual aspects and dimensions, challenges, and requirements; and reviews, categorises, and discusses notable approaches and systems

An Ontology for Product-Service Systems

Industries are transforming their business strategy from a product-centric to a more service-centric nature by bundling products and services into integrated solutions to enhance the relationship between their customers. Since Product- Service Systems design research is currently at a rudimentary stage, the development of a robust ontology for this area would be helpful. The advantages of a standardized ontology are that it could help researchers and practitioners to communicate their views without ambiguity and thus encourage the conception and implementation of useful methods and tools. In this paper, an initial structure of a PSS ontology from the design perspective is proposed and evaluated

Commit-Time Requirements for an Ontology Server

An ontology is recognized as the solution for the integration of information systems. The environment of interoperation may involve many players who have agreed to commit to the ontology in order to maintain their system of speech acts and institutional facts in conformance with the coordinated system. When this interoperating community is established, it can generate a large number of institutional facts due to different range of players who can request different facets of information. In this light, however, how those players commit to ontology is still unclear. This paper discusses what sort of requirements that we need to assist how the players commit to the ontology. The approach of this paper is theoretical which is based on the literature of the concepts of speech acts and institutional facts and a case study of the Olympic games. As a result, we have defined several important commit-time requirements to explain situations of players committing to ontology in the context of ontology-based interoperation of information systems

Framework for Describing a Theoretical Perspective: Application to the Bunge-Wand-Weber Ontology and General Systems Theory

A Delphi study reported in Business Information System Engineering (BISE) in 2015 identified “rethink the theoretical foundations of the IS discipline” as a grand challenge for the discipline. Pursuit of that challenge calls for developing a framework for describing a theoretical perspective (an FDTP) because a coherent theoretical foundation ideally should be based on a well-articulated theoretical perspective. This paper defines theoretical perspective and presents a proposed FDTP that consists of 25 topics divided into 7 categories. It illustrates the use of the FDTP by applying it to the Bunge-Wand-Weber (BWW) ontology and to general systems theory (GST), two sets of ideas that could be related to a theoretical foundation for IS. Application of the FDTP reveals topic areas that the BWW ontology and GST cover and others that they do not cover. Subsequent sections explain how the FDTP was produced and suggest follow-on research

Ontology-driven conceptual modeling: A'systematic literature mapping and review

All rights reserved. Ontology-driven conceptual modeling (ODCM) is still a relatively new research domain in the field of information systems and there is still much discussion on how the research in ODCM should be performed and what the focus of this research should be. Therefore, this article aims to critically survey the existing literature in order to assess the kind of research that has been performed over the years, analyze the nature of the research contributions and establish its current state of the art by positioning, evaluating and interpreting relevant research to date that is related to ODCM. To understand and identify any gaps and research opportunities, our literature study is composed of both a systematic mapping study and a systematic review study. The mapping study aims at structuring and classifying the area that is being investigated in order to give a general overview of the research that has been performed in the field. A review study on the other hand is a more thorough and rigorous inquiry and provides recommendations based on the strength of the found evidence. Our results indicate that there are several research gaps that should be addressed and we further composed several research opportunities that are possible areas for future research

Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design

This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications