Knowledge management for more sustainable water systems

The management and sharing of complex data, information and knowledge is a fundamental and growing concern in the Water and other Industries for a variety of reasons. For example, risks and uncertainties associated with climate, and other changes require knowledge to prepare for a range of future scenarios and potential extreme events. Formal ways in which knowledge can be established and managed can help deliver efficiencies on acquisition, structuring and filtering to provide only the essential aspects of the knowledge really needed. Ontologies are a key technology for this knowledge management. The construction of ontologies is a considerable overhead on any knowledge management programme. Hence current computer science research is investigating generating ontologies automatically from documents using text mining and natural language techniques. As an example of this, results from application of the Text2Onto tool to stakeholder documents for a project on sustainable water cycle management in new developments are presented. It is concluded that by adopting ontological representations sooner, rather than later in an analytical process, decision makers will be able to make better use of highly knowledgeable systems containing automated services to ensure that sustainability considerations are included

Ontology selection: ontology evaluation on the real Semantic Web

The increasing number of ontologies on the Web and the appearance of large scale ontology repositories has brought the topic of ontology selection in the focus of the semantic web research agenda. Our view is that ontology evaluation is core to ontology selection and that, because ontology selection is performed in an open Web environment, it brings new challenges to ontology evaluation. Unfortunately, current research regards ontology selection and evaluation as two separate topics. Our goal in this paper is to explore how these two tasks relate. In particular, we are interested to get a better understanding of the ontology selection task and filter out the challenges that it brings to ontology evaluation. We discuss requirements posed by the open Web environment on ontology selection, we overview existing work on selection and point out future directions. Our major conclusion is that, even if selection methods still need further development, they have already brought novel approaches to ontology evaluatio

Pragmatic Ontology Evolution: Reconciling User Requirements and Application Performance

Increasingly, organizations are adopting ontologies to describe their large catalogues of items. These ontologies need to evolve regularly in response to changes in the domain and the emergence of new requirements. An important step of this process is the selection of candidate concepts to include in the new version of the ontology. This operation needs to take into account a variety of factors and in particular reconcile user requirements and application performance. Current ontology evolution methods focus either on ranking concepts according to their relevance or on preserving compatibility with existing applications. However, they do not take in consideration the impact of the ontology evolution process on the performance of computational tasks – e.g., in this work we focus on instance tagging, similarity computation, generation of recommendations, and data clustering. In this paper, we propose the Pragmatic Ontology Evolution (POE) framework, a novel approach for selecting from a group of candidates a set of concepts able to produce a new version of a given ontology that i) is consistent with the a set of user requirements (e.g., max number of concepts in the ontology), ii) is parametrised with respect to a number of dimensions (e.g., topological considerations), and iii) effectively supports relevant computational tasks. Our approach also supports users in navigating the space of possible solutions by showing how certain choices, such as limiting the number of concepts or privileging trendy concepts rather than historical ones, would reflect on the application performance. An evaluation of POE on the real-world scenario of the evolving Springer Nature taxonomy for editorial classification yielded excellent results, demonstrating a significant improvement over alternative approaches

Engineering polymer informatics: Towards the computer-aided design of polymers

The computer-aided design of polymers is one of the holy grails of modern chemical informatics and of significant interest for a number of communities in polymer science. The paper outlines a vision for the in silico design of polymers and presents an information model for polymers based on modern semantic web technologies, thus laying the foundations for achieving the vision

Past, present and future of information and knowledge sharing in the construction industry: Towards semantic service-based e-construction

The paper reviews product data technology initiatives in the construction sector and provides a synthesis of related ICT industry needs. A comparison between (a) the data centric characteristics of Product Data Technology (PDT) and (b) ontology with a focus on semantics, is given, highlighting the pros and cons of each approach. The paper advocates the migration from data-centric application integration to ontology-based business process support, and proposes inter-enterprise collaboration architectures and frameworks based on semantic services, underpinned by ontology-based knowledge structures. The paper discusses the main reasons behind the low industry take up of product data technology, and proposes a preliminary roadmap for the wide industry diffusion of the proposed approach. In this respect, the paper stresses the value of adopting alliance-based modes of operation

An Overview of the BFO - Basic Formal Ontology - and Its Applicability for Satellite Systems

This work aims to present an overview of the top-level ontology BFO - Basic Formal Ontology - and its applicability for Satellite Systems. As an upper level ontology, the BFO was designed to be extended, providing the basis for the specification of detailed representational artifacts about scientific information domains. These aspects and the challenges of satellite systems complexity and large size compose a suitable scenario for the creation of a specialized dialect to improve efficiency and accuracy when modeling such systems. By analyzing BFO based ontologies in other disciplines and existing satellite models it is possible to describe an application for satellite systems, which can provide a foundation for the creation of a concrete ontology to be applied on satellite modeling

Relation Ontology II

Conceived as follow-up to recent efforts destined to supply .owl ontologies with relational tools of greater complexity, the present article focuses on four main paths, all of them consisting in providing biomedical ontologies with formal means to express (1) deviations from normality, (2) topological connectedness, (3) inherence and (4) causality and function

Initiating organizational memories using ontology network analysis

One of the important problems in organizational memories is their initial set-up. It is difficult to choose the right information to include in an organizational memory, and the right information is also a prerequisite for maximizing the uptake and relevance of the memory content. To tackle this problem, most developers adopt heavy-weight solutions and rely on a faithful continuous interaction with users to create and improve its content. In this paper, we explore the use of an automatic, light-weight solution, drawn from the underlying ingredients of an organizational memory: ontologies. We have developed an ontology-based network analysis method which we applied to tackle the problem of identifying communities of practice in an organization. We use ontology-based network analysis as a means to provide content automatically for the initial set up of an organizational memory

Modelling data intensive web sites with OntoWeaver

This paper illustrates the OntoWeaver modelling approach, which relies on a set of comprehensive site ontologies to model all aspects of data intensive web sites and thus offers high level support for the design and development of data-intensive web sites. In particular, the OntoWeaver site ontologies comprise two components: a site view ontology and a presentation ontology. The site view ontology provides meta-models to allow for the composition of sophisticated site views, which allow end users to navigate and manipulate the underlying domain databases. The presentation ontology abstracts the look and feel for site views and makes it possible for the visual appearance and layout to be specified at a high level of abstractio