Devolved Ontology in Practice for a Seamless Semantic Alignment within Dynamic Collaboration Networks of SMEs

The lack of a semantic alignment between collaborating small and medium enterprises causes frequent misinterpretations when exchanging information in the form of documents. If these companies are to achieve a seamless semantic alignment by exchanging documents, we should employ a conceptual model which does not rely on agreeing in advance on a centralised standard for document contents and format, but instead allows individual companies to maintain localised ontologies structuring their own documents allowing the companies to automatically establish a semantic alignment between pairs of collaborating companies, taking into account the ripple effects that such an alignment could trigger. In this article we demonstrate how the conceptual model of devolved ontology is engineered and tested to support such a scenario: we show how we have engineered the devolved ontology through a case study, and present experimental results on the document alignment intrinsically needed for this

Email Analysis and Information Extraction for Enterprise Benefit

In spite of rapid advances in multimedia and interactive technologies, enterprise users prefer to battle with email spam and overload rather than lose the benefits of communicating, collaborating and solving business tasks over email. Many aspects of email have significantly improved over time, but its overall integration with the enterprise environment remained practically the same. In this paper we describe and evaluate a light-weight approach to enterprise email communication analysis and information extraction. We provide several use cases exploiting the extracted information, such as the enrichment of emails with relevant contextual information, social network extraction and its subsequent search, creation of semantic objects as well as the relationship between email analysis and information extraction on one hand, and email protocols and email servers on the other. The proposed approach was partially tested on several small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and seems to be promising for enterprise interoperability and collaboration in SMEs that depend on emails to accomplish their daily business tasks

Semantic technologies: from niche to the mainstream of Web 3? A comprehensive framework for web Information modelling and semantic annotation

Context: Web information technologies developed and applied in the last decade have considerably changed the way web applications operate and have revolutionised information management and knowledge discovery. Social technologies, user-generated classification schemes and formal semantics have a far-reaching sphere of influence. They promote collective intelligence, support interoperability, enhance sustainability and instigate innovation. Contribution: The research carried out and consequent publications follow the various paradigms of semantic technologies, assess each approach, evaluate its efficiency, identify the challenges involved and propose a comprehensive framework for web information modelling and semantic annotation, which is the thesis’ original contribution to knowledge. The proposed framework assists web information modelling, facilitates semantic annotation and information retrieval, enables system interoperability and enhances information quality. Implications: Semantic technologies coupled with social media and end-user involvement can instigate innovative influence with wide organisational implications that can benefit a considerable range of industries. The scalable and sustainable business models of social computing and the collective intelligence of organisational social media can be resourcefully paired with internal research and knowledge from interoperable information repositories, back-end databases and legacy systems. Semantified information assets can free human resources so that they can be used to better serve business development, support innovation and increase productivity

An Adaptive Framework for Improving the Effectiveness of Virtual Enterprises in the Supply Chain

This thesis describes a research project that develops an adaptive framework for improving the effectiveness of virtual enterprises in the supply chains in Mongolia. The research takes empirical and quantitative approach to study the phenomenon of virtual enterprises. Based on a literature review, the factors that influence organisations to join in virtual enterprises are studied by a higher-order factor analysis. As a result, agility is identified as one of the main benefits organisations can gain by joining a virtual enterprise temporarily and changes in business performance are conceived as the measures of effectiveness. Next, a taxonomy of enterprises is developed with five distinguishing clusters that achieve differing levels of agility and business performance. This study suggests that enterprises that are monitoring changes in their business environment take most advantage of agility and achieve the best levels of performance. These findings then allow an adaptive framework based on common reference architectures to be developed as a main contribution of this study. The framework includes a breeding environment as a ‘pool’ of prepared enterprises with the ability to form temporary collaborations to react responsively, rapidly and effectively to the fast-changing opportunities. A structural equation model was used to examine the model fit with the supporting hypotheses, based on the observed data. Then, a powerful clustered expectation maximisation algorithm was applied to the analysis of the grouped enterprises. Finally, a simulation-based case study was conducted to validate the developed framework. The results provide rich empirical evidence of the beneficial impact of virtual enterprises on agile supply chains. The research provides rich empirical evidence of the beneficial impact of virtual enterprises on agile supply chains. It also provides theoretical and managerial insights that can be used to strengthen the drivers, enablers and capabilities that enhance the effectiveness of virtual enterprises collaboration in agile supply chains that can be translated to a global context. These are major contributions the ‘body of knowledge’ in themselves, but the research also adds usefully to the study of applied research methodologies in the area