Empirical analysis of impacts of instance-driven changes in ontologies

Changes in the characterization of instances in digital contents are one of the rationales to change or evolve ontologies which support the domain. These changes can impacts on one or more of interrelated ontologies. Before implementing changes, their impact on the target ontology, other dependent ontologies or dependent systems should be analysed. We investigate three concerns for the determination of impacts of changes in ontologies: representation of changes to ensure minimum impact, impact determination and integrity determination. Key elements of our solution are the operationalization of change operations to minimize impacts, a parameterization approach for the determination of impacts, a categorization scheme for identified impacts, and prioritization technique for change operations based on the severity of impacts

Change impact analysis for evolving ontology-based content management

Ontologies have become ubiquitous tools to embed semantics into content and applications on the semantic web. They are used to define concepts in a domain and allow us to reach at a common understanding on subjects of interest. Ontologies cover wide range of topics enabling both humans and machines to understand meanings and to reason in different contexts. They cover topics such as semantic web, artificial intelligence, information retrieval, machine translation, software development, content management, etc. We use ontologies for semantic annotation of content to facilitate understandability of the content by humans and machines. However, building ontology and annotations is often a manual process which is error prone and time consuming. Ontologies and ontology-driven content management systems (OCMS) evolve due to a change in conceptualization, the representation or the specification of the domain knowledge. These changes are often immense and frequent. Implementing the changes and adapting the OCMS accordingly require a huge effort. This is due to complex impacts of the changes on the ontologies, the content and dependent applications. Thus, evolving the OCMS with minimum and predictable impacts is among the top priorities of evolution in OCMS. We approach the problem of evolution by proposing a framework which clearly represents the interactions of the components of an OCMS. We proposed a layered OCMS framework which contains an ontology layer, content layer and annotation layer. Further, we propose a novel approach for analysing impacts of change operations. Impacts of atomic change operations are assigned individually by analysing the target entity and all the other entities that are structurally or semantically dependent on it. Impacts of composite change operations are analysed following three stage process. We use impact cancellation, impact balancing and impact transformation to analyse the impacts when two or more atomic changes are executed as part of a composite or domain specific change operation. We build a model which estimates the impacts of a complete change operation enabling the ontology engineer to specify the weight associated with each optimization criteria. Finally, the model identifies the implementation strategy with minimum cost of evolution. We evaluate our system by building a prototype as a proof of concept and find out encouraging results

Knowledge infrastructures for software service architectures

Software development has become a distributed, collaborative process based on the assembly of off-the-shelf and purpose-built components or services. The selection of software services from service repositories and their integration into software system architectures, but also the development of services for these repositories requires an accessible information infrastructure that allows the description and comparison of these services. General knowledge relating to software development is equally important in this context as knowledge concerning the application domain of the software. Both form two pillars on which the structural and behavioural properties of software services can be addressed. We investigate how this information space for software services can be organized. Focal point are ontologies that, in addition to the usual static view on knowledge, also intrinsically addresses the dynamics, i.e. the behaviour of software. We relate our discussion to the Web context, looking at the Web Services Framework and the Semantic Web as the knowledge representation framework

Ontology modelling methodology for temporal and interdependent applications

The increasing adoption of Semantic Web technology by several classes of applications in recent years, has made ontology engineering a crucial part of application development. Nowadays, the abundant accessibility of interdependent information from multiple resources and representing various fields such as health, transport, and banking etc., further evidence the growing need for utilising ontology for the development of Web applications. While there have been several advances in the adoption of the ontology for application development, less emphasis is being made on the modelling methodologies for representing modern-day application that are characterised by the temporal nature of the data they process, which is captured from multiple sources. Taking into account the benefits of a methodology in the system development, we propose a novel methodology for modelling ontologies representing Context-Aware Temporal and Interdependent Systems (CATIS). CATIS is an ontology development methodology for modelling temporal interdependent applications in order to achieve the desired results when modelling sophisticated applications with temporal and inter dependent attributes to suit today's application requirements

Hydrological Models as Web Services: An Implementation using OGC Standards

<p>Presentation for the HIC 2012 - 10th International Conference on Hydroinformatics. "Understanding Changing Climate and Environment and Finding Solutions" Hamburg, Germany July 14-18, 2012</p> <p> </p

Closing the loop of design and analysis: Parametric modelling tools for early decision support

There is a growing need for parametric design software that communicates building performance feedback in early architectural exploration to support decision-making. This paper examines how the circuit of design and analysis process can be closed to provide active and concurrent feedback between architecture and services engineering domains. It presents the structure for an openly customisable design system that couples parametric modelling and energy analysis software to allow designers to assess the performance of early design iterations quickly. Finally, it discusses how user interactions with the system foster information exchanges that facilitate the sharing of design intelligence across disciplines