Action and semantics of time in agro-ecology

In the systemic approach, the system is perceived as an action or a collection of overlapping actions expressed in reference to Time, Space, and Morphology (or Energy). When the system is studied by different disciplines, the referentials differ, as well as the semantics of terms used to describe the action. In order to establish the vocabulary of a collection of actions involving several disciplines, we propose a formal method for describing each action. The linguistic-based method enables (i) transcription of the literal description of an action in a semantic network, and (ii) building of a vocabulary in a formal setting. The method is illustrated through a complex biological system, i.e. the mutualistic relationship between two vine pests, while focusing particularly on temporality. The method provides a support for implementing multidisciplinary around a complex system. (Résumé d'auteur

Integrating descriptions of knowledge management learning activities into large ontological structures: A case study

Ontologies have been recognized as a fundamental infrastructure for advanced approaches to Knowledge Management (KM) automation, and the conceptual foundations for them have been discussed in some previous reports. Nonetheless, such conceptual structures should be properly integrated into existing ontological bases, for the practical purpose of providing the required support for the development of intelligent applications. Such applications should ideally integrate KM concepts into a framework of commonsense knowledge with clear computational semantics. In this paper, such an integration work is illustrated through a concrete case study, using the large OpenCyc knowledge base. Concretely, the main elements of the Holsapple & Joshi KM ontology and some existing work on e-learning ontologies are explicitly linked to OpenCyc definitions, providing a framework for the development of functionalities that use the built-in reasoning services of OpenCyc in KM ctivities. The integration can be used as the point of departure for the engineering of KM-oriented systems that account for a shared understanding of the discipline and rely on public semantics provided by one of the largest open knowledge bases available

Frameworks: the future of formal software development?

It could be argued that the primary issue to be dealt with in software engineering today is re-use of software. Current software development rarely, if ever, starts from nothing. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the development of specifications. To overcome this problem, various works have attempted to show how specifications can be built using architectural principles. We discuss one such approach in particular, the Architectural Semantics of Open Distributed Processing. We show the limitations of this work with regard to the architecting of specifications and propose a new approach, based on frameworks. To highlight the approach we use the work currently being done in the TOSCA project in its development of a service creation and validation environment for telecommunication services