A Process Framework for an Interoperable Semantic Enterprise Environment

Abstract: This paper describes a Process Framework for an Interoperable Semantic Enterprise Environment (PF-ISEE) for conceptualising knowledge by coupling business process activities and the Knowledge Transfer Cycle. The PF-ISEE is triggered by an activity and starts the Knowledge Transfer Cycle. The Knowledge Transfer Cycle provides six core concepts with methods, tools and templates to create, manipulate, store and retrieve information. Within the Knowledge Transfer Cycle, special methods are applied in the context of knowledge intensive business process activities with a representation model that can be a global, role depended or an application inherited concept representation. The paper introduces the main advantages and challenges of each core concept and explains its position in the Knowledge Transfer Cycle. Furthermore, it is shown how the PF-ISEE can be part of an Enterprise Semantic Web in order to integrate semantic tools and technologies in standard enterprise applications

Information Sharing in Major Events

This thesis argues that information sharing is crucial for creating and maintaining shared situational awareness in the context of routine operation and incident management at major events. Information sharing and situational awareness are needed for controlling and coordinating individuals from the police, fire, rescue, voluntary groups, organisers and the public, who were typically linked together in this naturalistic context. The research thus focuses on investigating how information sharing influences situational awareness, what motivates information sharing and what tools are used to mediate and control information sharing. Activity theory is utilised as a conceptual framework and as an analytical tool to portray the motivated activity of information sharing. This activity is directed at creating and maintaining shared situational awareness. Recognising this multi-voiced context, the research was founded upon a qualitative and interpretive paradigm. Review of organisational documentation, observation of current practices and interviews were employed to collect information for concerts and baseball matches in Mexico. Data collected were transcribed verbatim and an open, axial and selective coding approach was used to analyse the data. Themes and activity elements were recognised and utilised to uncover links in the light of contextual features to make sense of relationships between them. From those relationships, surface credibility and normative altruism as motivations and situational awareness as an abstract tool are proposed as contributions to knowledge. In addition, the Situational Awareness Modes in Incident Management (SAMIM) model is proposed to frame and exhibit the necessity for individuals to be aware of diverse situations in context. Moreover, the findings have practical implications concerning the development of adequate protocols for managing incidents; improvement of abstract and material tools; and training to tune the coordination and control of individuals serving as incident responders, including the public. This can be done through practice exercises in routine operation and simulated incident management at major events

Organising knowledge in the age of the semantic web: a study of the commensurability of ontologies

 This study is directed towards the problem of conceptual translation across different data management systems and formats, with a particular focus on those used in the emerging world of the Semantic Web. Increasingly, organisations have sought to connect information sources and services within and beyond their enterprise boundaries, building upon existing Internet facilities to offer improved research, planning, reporting and management capabilities. The Semantic Web is an ambitious response to this growing demand, offering a standards-based platform for sharing, linking and reasoning with information. The imagined result, a globalised knowledge network formed out of mutually referring data structures termed "ontologies", would make possible new kinds of queries, inferences and amalgamations of information. Such a network, though, is premised upon large numbers of manually drawn links between these ontologies. In practice, establishing these links is a complex translation task requiring considerable time and expertise; invariably, as ontologies and other structured information sources are published, many useful connections are neglected. To combat this, in recent years substantial research has been invested into "ontology matching" - the exploration of algorithmic approaches for automatically translating or aligning ontologies. These approaches, which exploit the explicit semantic properties of individual concepts, have registered impressive precision and recall results against humanly-engineered translations. However they are unable to make use of background cultural information about the overall systems in which those concepts are housed - how those systems are used, for what purpose they were designed, what methodological or theoretical principles underlined their construction, and so on. The present study investigates whether paying attention to these sociological dimensions of electronic knowledge systems could supplement algorithmic approaches in some circumstances. Specifically, it asks whether a holistic notion of commensurability can be useful when aligning or translating between such systems.      The first half of the study introduces the problem, surveys the literature, and outlines the general approach. It then proposes both a theoretical foundation and a practical framework for assessing commensurability of ontologies and other knowledge systems. Chapter 1 outlines the Semantic Web, ontologies and the problem of conceptual translation, and poses the key research questions. Conceptual translation can be treated as, by turns, a social, philosophical, linguistic or technological problem; Chapter 2 surveys a correspondingly wide range of literature and approaches.      The methods employed by the study are described in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 critically examines theories of conceptual schemes and commensurability, while Chapter 5 describes the framework itself, comprising a series of specific dimensions, a broad methodological approach, and a means for generating both qualitative and quantitative assessments. The second half of the study then explores the notion of commensurability through several empirical frames. Chapters 6 to 8 applies the framework to a series of case studies. Chapter 6 presents a brief history of knowledge systems, and compares two of these systems - relational databases and Semantic Web ontologies. Chapter 7, in turn, compares several "upper-level" ontologies - reusable schematisations of abstract concepts like Time and Space . Chapter 8 reviews a recent, widely publicised controversy over the standardisation of document formats. This analysis in particular shows how the opaque dry world of technical specifications can reveal the complex network of social dynamics, interests and beliefs which coordinate and motivate them. Collectively, these studies demonstrate the framework is useful in making evident assumptions which motivate the design of different knowledge systems, and further, in assessing the commensurability of those systems. Chapter 9 then presents a further empirical study; here, the framework is implemented as a software system, and pilot tested among a small cohort of researchers. Finally, Chapter 10 summarises the argumentative trajectory of the study as a whole - that, broadly, an elaborated notion of commensurability can tease out important and salient features of translation inscrutable to purely algorithmic methods - and suggests some possibilities for further work