How to Find Suitable Ontologies Using an Ontology-based WWW Broker

Knowledge reuse by means of outologies now faces three important problems: (1) there are no standardized identifying features that characterize ontologies from the user point of view; (2) there are no web sites using the same logical organization, presenting relevant information about ontologies; and (3) the search for appropriate ontologies is hard, time-consuming and usually fruitless. To solve the above problems, we present: (1) a living set of features that allow us to characterize ontologies from the user point of view and have the same logical organization; (2) a living domain ontology about ontologies (called ReferenceOntology) that gathers, describes and has links to existing ontologies; and (3) (ONTO)2Agent, the ontology-based www broker about ontologies that uses the Reference Ontology as a source of its knowledge and retrieves descriptions of ontologies that satisfy a given set of constraints. (ONTO)~Agent is available at http://delicias.dia.fi.upm.es/REFERENCE ONTOLOGY

Conceptual Linking: Ontology-based Open Hypermedia

This paper describes the attempts of the COHSE project to define and deploy a Conceptual Open Hypermedia Service. Consisting of • an ontological reasoning service which is used to represent a sophisticated conceptual model of document terms and their relationships; • a Web-based open hypermedia link service that can offer a range of different link-providing facilities in a scalable and non-intrusive fashion; and integrated to form a conceptual hypermedia system to enable documents to be linked via metadata describing their contents and hence to improve the consistency and breadth of linking of WWW documents at retrieval time (as readers browse the documents) and authoring time (as authors create the documents)

What is the problem to which interactive multimedia is the solution?

This is something of an unusual paper. It serves as both the reason for and the result of a small number of leading academics in the field, coming together to focus on the question that serves as the title to this paper: What is the problem to which interactive multimedia is the solution? Each of the authors addresses this question from their own viewpoint, offering informed insights into the development, implementation and evaluation of multimedia. The result of their collective work was also the focus of a Western Australian Institute of Educational Research seminar, convened at Edith Cowan University on 18 October, 1994. The question posed is deliberately rhetorical - it is asked to allow those represented here to consider what they think are the significant issues in the fast-growing field of multimedia. More directly, the question is also asked here because nobody else has considered it worth asking: for many multimedia is done because it is technically possible, not because it offers anything that is of value or provides the solution to a particular problem. The question, then, is answered in various ways by each of the authors involved and each, in their own way, consider a range of fundamental issues concerning the nature, place and use of multimedia - both in education and in society generally. By way of an introduction, the following provides a unifying context for the various contributions made here

Conceptual Linking: Ontology-based Open Hypermedia

This paper describes the attempts of the COHSE project to define and deploy a Conceptual Open Hypermedia Service. Consisting of • an ontological reasoning service which is used to represent a sophisticated conceptual model of document terms and their relationships; • a Web-based open hypermedia link service that can offer a range of different link-providing facilities in a scalable and non-intrusive fashion; and integrated to form a conceptual hypermedia system to enable documents to be linked via metadata describing their contents and hence to improve the consistency and breadth of linking of WWW documents at retrieval time (as readers browse the documents) and authoring time (as authors create the documents)

An approach to relate business and application services using ISDL

This paper presents a service-oriented design approach that allows one to relate services modelled at different levels of granularity during a design process, such as business and application services. To relate these service models we claim that a 'concept gap' and an 'abstraction gap' need to be bridged. The concept gap represents the difference between the conceptual models used to construct service models by different stakeholders involved in the design process. The abstraction gap represents the difference in abstraction level at which service models are defined. Two techniques are presented that bridge these gaps. Both techniques are based on the Interaction System Design Language (ISDL). The paper illustrates the use of both techniques through an example

Web Environments for Group-Based Project Work in Higher Education

We discuss problems confronting the use of group-based project work as an instructional strategy in higher education and describe two courses in which course-specific World Wide Web (Web) environments have evolved over a series of course sequences and are used both as tool environments for group-process support and as the product environment of the project work itself. In particular we describe the use of specific Web-embedded shared workspace, communication-management and evaluation tools and their contribution to the management and educational value of group-based project work. The integration of instructional principles and strategies with the Web-based tools is also of particular importance. The 1996-97 versions of the courses analysed in this article can be found at http://www.to.utwente.nl/ism/ism1-96/home.htm for the first-year course in educational media design, and at www.edu.cs.utwente.nl/~aitnlpbg/, for the first-year course in applications of information technology. Both courses, at the University of Twente, use group-based project work as a major organizational form, but integrate all aspects of the courses within cohesive Web environments

Two Case Studies of Subsystem Design for General-Purpose CSCW Software Architectures

This paper discusses subsystem design guidelines for the software architecture of general-purpose computer supported cooperative work systems, i.e., systems that are designed to be applicable in various application areas requiring explicit collaboration support. In our opinion, guidelines for subsystem level design are rarely given most guidelines currently given apply to the programming language level. We extract guidelines from a case study of the redesign and extension of an advanced commercial workflow management system and place them into the context of existing software engineering research. The guidelines are then validated against the design decisions made in the construction of a widely used web-based groupware system. Our approach is based on the well-known distinction between essential (logical) and physical architectures. We show how essential architecture design can be based on a direct mapping of abstract functional concepts as found in general-purpose systems to modules in the essential architecture. The essential architecture is next mapped to a physical architecture by applying software clustering and replication to achieve the required distribution and performance characteristics

Design of the CAM model and authoring tool

Students benefit from personalised attention; however, often teachers are unable to provide this. An Adaptive Hypermedia (AH) system can offer a richer learning experience in an educational environment, by giving personalised attention to students. On-line courses are becoming increasingly popular by means of Learning Management Systems (LSM). The aim of the GRAPPLE project is to integrate an AH with major LMS, to provide an environment that delivers personalised courses in a LMS interface. However, designing an AH is a much more complex and time-consuming task, than creating a course in a LMS. Several models and systems were developed previously, but the (re)-usability by educational authors of the adaptation remains limited. To simplify adaptive behaviour authoring for an educational author, a visual environment was selected as being most intuitive. This paper describes a reference model for authoring in a visual way and introduces an authoring tool based upon this model