Managing Requirement Volatility in an Ontology-Driven Clinical LIMS Using Category Theory. International Journal of Telemedicine and Applications

Requirement volatility is an issue in software engineering in general, and in Web-based clinical applications in particular, which often originates from an incomplete knowledge of the domain of interest. With advances in the health science, many features and functionalities need to be added to, or removed from, existing software applications in the biomedical domain. At the same time, the increasing complexity of biomedical systems makes them more difficult to understand, and consequently it is more difficult to define their requirements, which contributes considerably to their volatility. In this paper, we present a novel agent-based approach for analyzing and managing volatile and dynamic requirements in an ontology-driven laboratory information management system (LIMS) designed for Web-based case reporting in medical mycology. The proposed framework is empowered with ontologies and formalized using category theory to provide a deep and common understanding of the functional and nonfunctional requirement hierarchies and their interrelations, and to trace the effects of a change on the conceptual framework.Comment: 36 Pages, 16 Figure

Decision-Making Ontology for Information System Engineering

International audienceInformation Systems (IS) engineering (ISE) processes contain steps where decisions must be made. Moreover, the growing role of IS in organizations involves requirements for ISE such as quality, cost and time. Considering these aspects implies that the number of researches dealing with decision-making (DM) in ISE increasingly grows. As DM becomes widespread in the ISE field, it is necessary to build a representation, shared between researchers and practitioners, of DM concepts and their relations with DM problems in ISE. In this paper, we present a DM ontology which aims at formalizing DM knowledge. Its goal is to enhance DM and to support DM activities in ISE. This ontology is illustrated within the requirements engineering field

A Model-driven Approach for the Description of Blockchain Business Networks

The concept of blockchain technology has gained significant momentum in practice and research in the past few years, as it provides an effective way for addressing the issues of anonymity and traceability in distributed scenarios with multiple parties, which have to exchange information and want to securely collaborate with each other. However, up-to-date, the impact of the structure and setup of business networks on successfully applying blockchain technology, remains largely unexplored. We propose a model-driven approach, combining an ontology and a layer model, that is capable of capturing the properties of existing blockchain-driven business networks. The layers are used to facilitate the comprehensive description of such networks. We also introduce the Blockchain Business Network Ontology (BBO), formalizing the concepts and properties for describing the integral parts of a blockchain network. We show the practical applicability of our work by evaluating and applying it to an available blockchain use case

Philosophy of Blockchain Technology - Ontologies

About the necessity and usefulness of developing a philosophy specific to the blockchain technology, emphasizing on the ontological aspects. After an Introduction that highlights the main philosophical directions for this emerging technology, in Blockchain Technology I explain the way the blockchain works, discussing ontological development directions of this technology in Designing and Modeling. The next section is dedicated to the main application of blockchain technology, Bitcoin, with the social implications of this cryptocurrency. There follows a section of Philosophy in which I identify the blockchain technology with the concept of heterotopia developed by Michel Foucault and I interpret it in the light of the notational technology developed by Nelson Goodman as a notational system. In the Ontology section, I present two developmental paths that I consider important: Narrative Ontology, based on the idea of order and structure of history transmitted through Paul Ricoeur's narrative history, and the Enterprise Ontology system based on concepts and models of an enterprise, specific to the semantic web, and which I consider to be the most well developed and which will probably become the formal ontological system, at least in terms of the economic and legal aspects of blockchain technology. In Conclusions I am talking about the future directions of developing the blockchain technology philosophy in general as an explanatory and robust theory from a phenomenologically consistent point of view, which allows testability and ontologies in particular, arguing for the need of a global adoption of an ontological system for develop cross-cutting solutions and to make this technology profitable. CONTENTS: Abstract Introducere Tehnologia blockchain - Proiectare - Modele Bitcoin Filosofia Ontologii - Ontologii narative - Ontologii de intreprindere Concluzii Note Bibliografie DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.24510.3360

A new fuzzy ontology development methodology (FODM) proposal

There is an upsurge in applying fuzzy ontologies to represent vague information in the knowledge representation field. Current research in the fuzzy ontologies paradigm mainly focuses on developing formalism languages to represent fuzzy ontologies, designing fuzzy ontology editors, and building fuzzy ontology applications in different domains. Less focus falls on establishing a formal methodological approach for building fuzzy ontologies. Existing fuzzy ontology development methodologies, such as the IKARUS-Onto methodology and Fuzzy Ontomethodology, provide formalized schedules for the conversion from crisp ontologies into fuzzy ones. However, a formal guidance on how to build fuzzy ontologies from scratch still lacks in current research. Therefore, this paper presents the first methodology, named FODM, for developing fuzzy ontologies from scratch. The proposed FODM can provide a very good guideline for formally constructing fuzzy ontologies in terms of completeness, comprehensiveness, generality, efficiency, and accuracy. To explain how the FODM works and demonstrate its usefulness, a fuzzy seabed characterization ontology is built based on the FODM and described step-by-step

An ontology co-design method for the co-creation of a continuous care ontology

Ontology engineering methodologies tend to emphasize the role of the knowledge engineer or require a very active role of domain experts. In this paper, a participatory ontology engineering method is described that holds the middle ground between these two 'extremes'. After thorough ethnographic research, an interdisciplinary group of domain experts closely interacted with ontology engineers and social scientists in a series of workshops. Once a preliminary ontology was developed, a dynamic care request system was built using the ontology. Additional workshops were organized involving a broader group of domain experts to ensure the applicability of the ontology across continuous care settings. The proposed method successfully actively engaged domain experts in constructing the ontology, without overburdening them. Its applicability is illustrated by presenting the co-created continuous care ontology. The lessons learned during the design and execution of the approach are also presented