An Editorial Workflow Approach For Collaborative Ontology Development

The widespread use of ontologies in the last years has raised new challenges for their development and maintenance. Ontology development has transformed from a process normally performed by one ontology engineer into a process performed collaboratively by a team of ontology engineers, who may be geographically distributed and play different roles. For example, editors may propose changes, while authoritative users approve or reject them following a well defined process. This process, however, has only been partially addressed by existing ontology development methods, methodologies, and tool support. Furthermore, in a distributed environment where ontology editors may be working on local copies of the same ontology, strategies should be in place to ensure that changes in one copy are reflected in all of them. In this paper, we propose a workflow-based model for the collaborative development of ontologies in distributed environments and describe the components required to support them. We illustrate our model with a test case in the fishery domain from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)

Ontology-based collaborative framework for disaster recovery scenarios

This paper aims at designing of adaptive framework for supporting collaborative work of different actors in public safety and disaster recovery missions. In such scenarios, firemen and robots interact to each other to reach a common goal; firemen team is equipped with smart devices and robots team is supplied with communication technologies, and should carry on specific tasks. Here, reliable connection is mandatory to ensure the interaction between actors. But wireless access network and communication resources are vulnerable in the event of a sudden unexpected change in the environment. Also, the continuous change in the mission requirements such as inclusion/exclusion of new actor, changing the actor's priority and the limitations of smart devices need to be monitored. To perform dynamically in such case, the presented framework is based on a generic multi-level modeling approach that ensures adaptation handled by semantic modeling. Automated self-configuration is driven by rule-based reconfiguration policies through ontology

Improving Ontology Recommendation and Reuse in WebCORE by Collaborative Assessments

In this work, we present an extension of CORE [8], a tool for Collaborative Ontology Reuse and Evaluation. The system receives an informal description of a specific semantic domain and determines which ontologies from a repository are the most appropriate to describe the given domain. For this task, the environment is divided into three modules. The first component receives the problem description as a set of terms, and allows the user to refine and enlarge it using WordNet. The second module applies multiple automatic criteria to evaluate the ontologies of the repository, and determines which ones fit best the problem description. A ranked list of ontologies is returned for each criterion, and the lists are combined by means of rank fusion techniques. Finally, the third component uses manual user evaluations in order to incorporate a human, collaborative assessment of the ontologies. The new version of the system incorporates several novelties, such as its implementation as a web application; the incorporation of a NLP module to manage the problem definitions; modifications on the automatic ontology retrieval strategies; and a collaborative framework to find potential relevant terms according to previous user queries. Finally, we present some early experiments on ontology retrieval and evaluation, showing the benefits of our system

Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web

A community based approach for managing ontology alignments

The Semantic Web is rapidly becoming a defacto distributed repository for semantically represented data, thus leveraging on the added on value of the network effect. Various ontology mapping techniques and tools have been devised to facilitate the bridging and integration of distributed data repositories. Nevertheless, ontology mapping can benefitfrom human supervision to increase accuracy of results. The spread of Web 2.0 approaches demonstrate the possibility of using collaborative techniques for reaching consensus. While a number of prototypes for collaborative ontology construction are being developed, collaborative ontology mapping is not yet well investigated. In this paper, we describe a prototype that combines off-the-shelf ontology mapping tools with social software techniques to enable users to collaborate on mapping ontologies

Semantic-based policy engineering for autonomic systems

This paper presents some important directions in the use of ontology-based semantics in achieving the vision of Autonomic Communications. We examine the requirements of Autonomic Communication with a focus on the demanding needs of ubiquitous computing environments, with an emphasis on the requirements shared with Autonomic Computing. We observe that ontologies provide a strong mechanism for addressing the heterogeneity in user task requirements, managed resources, services and context. We then present two complimentary approaches that exploit ontology-based knowledge in support of autonomic communications: service-oriented models for policy engineering and dynamic semantic queries using content-based networks. The paper concludes with a discussion of the major research challenges such approaches raise

Collaboration in the Semantic Grid: a Basis for e-Learning

The CoAKTinG project aims to advance the state of the art in collaborative mediated spaces for the Semantic Grid. This paper presents an overview of the hypertext and knowledge based tools which have been deployed to augment existing collaborative environments, and the ontology which is used to exchange structure, promote enhanced process tracking, and aid navigation of resources before, after, and while a collaboration occurs. While the primary focus of the project has been supporting e-Science, this paper also explores the similarities and application of CoAKTinG technologies as part of a human-centred design approach to e-Learning

Exploiting Synergy Between Ontologies and Recommender Systems

Recommender systems learn about user preferences over time, automatically finding things of similar interest. This reduces the burden of creating explicit queries. Recommender systems do, however, suffer from cold-start problems where no initial information is available early on upon which to base recommendations. Semantic knowledge structures, such as ontologies, can provide valuable domain knowledge and user information. However, acquiring such knowledge and keeping it up to date is not a trivial task and user interests are particularly difficult to acquire and maintain. This paper investigates the synergy between a web-based research paper recommender system and an ontology containing information automatically extracted from departmental databases available on the web. The ontology is used to address the recommender systems cold-start problem. The recommender system addresses the ontology's interest-acquisition problem. An empirical evaluation of this approach is conducted and the performance of the integrated systems measured

OntoMaven: Maven-based Ontology Development and Management of Distributed Ontology Repositories

In collaborative agile ontology development projects support for modular reuse of ontologies from large existing remote repositories, ontology project life cycle management, and transitive dependency management are important needs. The Apache Maven approach has proven its success in distributed collaborative Software Engineering by its widespread adoption. The contribution of this paper is a new design artifact called OntoMaven. OntoMaven adopts the Maven-based development methodology and adapts its concepts to knowledge engineering for Maven-based ontology development and management of ontology artifacts in distributed ontology repositories.Comment: Pre-print submission to 9th International Workshop on Semantic Web Enabled Software Engineering (SWESE2013). Berlin, Germany, December 2-5, 201