How Controlled English can Improve Semantic Wikis

The motivation of semantic wikis is to make acquisition, maintenance, and mining of formal knowledge simpler, faster, and more flexible. However, most existing semantic wikis have a very technical interface and are restricted to a relatively low level of expressivity. In this paper, we explain how AceWiki uses controlled English - concretely Attempto Controlled English (ACE) - to provide a natural and intuitive interface while supporting a high degree of expressivity. We introduce recent improvements of the AceWiki system and user studies that indicate that AceWiki is usable and useful

Ontoverse: Collaborative Knowledge Management in the Life Sciences Network

This paper regards the two aspects of knowledge networking: data networks for information integration and social networks for information sharing in communities. The importance of ontologies as a means for effective information integration is discussed and related to the current Web 2.0 trends. The Ontoverse ontology wiki is introduced as a tool for collaborative ontology engineering and knowledge management with particular focus on interlinking the research community within the life sciences

A holistic approach to collaborative ontology development based on change management

This paper describes our methodological and technological approach for collaborative ontology development in inter-organizational settings. It is based on the formalization of the collaborative ontology development process by means of an explicit editorial workflow, which coordinates proposals for changes among ontology editors in a flexible manner. This approach is supported by new models, methods and strategies for ontology change management in distributed environments: we propose a new form of ontology change representation, organized in layers so as to provide as much independence as possible from the underlying ontology languages, together with methods and strategies for their manipulation, version management, capture, storage and maintenance, some of which are based on existing proposals in the state of the art. Moreover, we propose a set of change propagation strategies that allow keeping distributed copies of the same ontology synchronized. Finally, we illustrate and evaluate our approach with a test case in the fishery domain from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). The preliminary results obtained from our evaluation suggest positive indication on the practical value and usability of the work here presented

Collaborative Ontology Building with Wiki@nt - A multi-agent based ontology building environment

Collaborative ontology building requires both knowledge integration and knowledge reconciliation. Wiki@nt is an ontology building environment that supports collaborative ontology development. Wiki@nt is based on OSHOQP(D), an extension to SHOQ(D) with O (partial order on axioms) and P (localized axioms in package ) constructors.Wiki@nt supports integration and reconciliation of multiple independently developed, semantically heterogeneous, and very likely inconsistent ontology modules. A web browser based editor interface is provided, with features to support team work, version control, page locking, and navigation.</p

Collaborative Ontology Building with Wiki@nt - A multi-agent based ontology building environment

Collaborative ontology building requires both knowledge integration and knowledge reconciliation. Wiki@nt is an ontology building environment that supports collaborative ontology development. Wiki@nt is based on an extension to with (partial order on axioms) and (localized axioms in package ) constructors. Wiki@nt supports integration and reconciliation of multiple independently developed, semantically heterogeneous, and very likely inconsistent ontology modules. A web browser based editor interface is provided, with features to support team work, version control, page locking, and navigation

A software system for agent-assisted ontology building

This thesis investigates how one can design a team of intelligent software agents that helps its human partner develop a formal ontology from a relational database and enhance it with higher-level abstractions. The resulting efficiency of ontology development could facilitate the building of intelligent decision support systems that allow: high-level semantic queries on legacy relational databases autonomous implementation within a host organization and incremental deployment without affecting the underlying database or its conventional use. We introduce a set of design principles, formulate the prototype system requirements and architecture, elaborate agent roles and interactions, develop suitable design techniques, and test the approach through practical implementation of selected features. We endow each agent with model meta-ontology, which enables it to reason and communicate about ontology, and planning meta-ontology, which captures the role-specific know-how of the ontology building method. We also assess the maturity of development tools for a larger-scale implementation. --Leaf i.The original print copy of this thesis may be available here: http://wizard.unbc.ca/record=b214471

Entwicklung eines kollaborativen Ontologieeditors auf Basis des semantischen Wikis Ylvi

Ontologien sind die wichtigsten Bestandteile des Semantischen Webs und Grundvoraussetzung für die automatisierte Interpretation und Weiterverarbeitung von Information. Zum aktuellen Zeitpunkt besteht jedoch ein Mangel an verfügbaren und qualitativ hochwertigen Ontologien, was einer der Gründe für die langsame Entwicklung des Semantischen Webs ist. Die Gründe hierfür liegen zum Teil in der traditionellen Vorgehensweise bei der Ontologieentwicklung, welche diesen von Natur aus kollaborativen und dynamischen Prozess nicht ausreichend unterstützt. In dieser Arbeit wird ein alternativer Ansatz zur Ontologieentwicklung vorgestellt, welcher die verteilte Infrastruktur eines semantischen Wikis nützt, um den kollaborativen Charakter dieses Prozesses besser zu unterstützen. In diesem System soll es möglich sein, die informale Beschreibung eines Wiki-Artikels so zu erweitern, dass auch eine formale Beschreibung des Artikels vorliegt, sodass das in den Artikeln formulierte Wissen in eine standardisierte Beschreibungssprache exportiert werden kann. Auf diese Weise soll die Ontologieentwicklung einer breiten Masse zugänglich gemacht werden, sodass jeder Benutzer die Möglichkeit hat, aktiv an der Entwicklung mitzuwirken und seine eigenen Wünsche und Anregungen einzubringen. Weil das Internet ein über den gesamten Planeten viel genutztes und jederzeit erreichbares Netzwerk darstellt, wäre die Ontologieentwicklung auf diese Weise keinen örtlichen oder zeitlichen Einschränkungen ausgesetzt, was den gesamten Prozess der Entwicklung und Wartung einer Ontologie beschleunigen könnte. Wenn die Community eines Wikis lebendig und aktiv ist, ist davon auszugehen, dass die Anzahl verfügbarer und brauchbarer Ontologien deutlich zunimmt. Eine höhere verfügbare Anzahl qualitativ hochwertiger Ontologien wiederum könnte die Entwicklung und Durchsetzung des Semantischen Webs beschleunigen, weil dadurch hinsichtlich ihrer Funktionalität immer mächtigere automatisierte Applikationen möglich wären. Das Potenzial dieser mächtigen Applikationen könnte wiederum ein Bewusstsein für das Semantische Web in den Köpfen der Nutzer schaffen, was wiederum einen Anreiz darstellen könnte, die Anzahl verfügbarer Ontologien weiter zu erhöhen.Ontologies are the most important parts within the Semantic Web and necessary for the automated interpretation and processing of information. At this point in time there is however a lack of existing and reusable ontologies, which is one of the reasons the Semantic Web has developed quite slowly so far. One of the main reasons for this lack of ontologies is the traditional approach to ontology engineering. Ontology engineering is inherently a collaborative and dynamic process and these characteristics of this process are not supported by the traditional approach in a satisfiying manner. In this thesis, we present an alternative approach to ontology engineering which makes use of the distributed environment of a semantic wiki to better support this collaborative character. Within this wiki, users should be able to formalize informal explanations of articles so that it is possible to generate a formalized description of an ontology in a standardized language for defining ontologies. This way, even unexperienced users should be able to take part in the process of ontology engineering which could lead to a higher amount of persons involved in the engineering process and consequently to a higher amount of existing and reusable ontologies. The World Wide Web is permanently accessible and is used by a lot of people all over the planet. This means, ontology engineering within the WWW would no longer be exposed to local and temporal restrictions which could lead to an acceleration of the process of ontology engineering. Furthermore, if the community within the wiki is highly active, this could lead to a higher amount of ontologies, which meet the user’s requirements. This in turn, could have a considerable impact to the development of the Semantic Web because a large amount of reusable ontologies could allow for powerful distributed applications, which interact with each other in an automated manner using these ontologies. These powerful applications could make the full potential of the semantic web visible to a large amount of users which in turn could be an incentive to ontology engineers to increase the amount of existing and reusable ontologies

Distributed collaborative structuring

Making Inter- and Intranet resources available in a structured way is one of the most important and challenging problems today. An underlying structure allows users to search for information, documents or relationships without a clearly defined information need. While search and filtering technology is becoming more and more powerful, the development of such explorative access methods lacks behind. This work is concerned with the development of large-scale data mining methods that allow to structure information spaces based on loosely coupled user annotations and navigation patterns. An essential challenge, that was not yet fully realized in this context, is heterogeneity. Different users and user groups often have different preferences and needs on how to access an information collection. While current Business Intelligence, Information Retrieval or Content Management solutions allow for a certain degree of personalization, these approaches are still very static. This considerably limits their applicability in heterogeneous environments. This work is based on a novel paradigm, called collaborative structuring. This term is chosen as a generalization to the term collaborative filtering. Instead of only filtering items, collaborative structuring allows users to organize information spaces in a loosely coupled way, based on patterns emerging through data mining. A first contribution of the work is to define the conceptual notion of collaborative structuring as combinatorial optimization problem and to put it into relation with existing research in the areas of data and web mining. As second contribution, highly scalable, distributed optimization strategies are proposed and analyzed. Finally, the proposed approaches are quantitatively evaluated against existing methods using several real-world data sets. Also, practical experience from two application areas is given, namely information access for heterogeneous expert communities and collaborative media organization