IDEF5 Ontology Description Capture Method: Concept Paper

The results of research towards an ontology capture method referred to as IDEF5 are presented. Viewed simply as the study of what exists in a domain, ontology is an activity that can be understood to be at work across the full range of human inquiry prompted by the persistent effort to understand the world in which it has found itself - and which it has helped to shape. In the contest of information management, ontology is the task of extracting the structure of a given engineering, manufacturing, business, or logistical domain and storing it in an usable representational medium. A key to effective integration is a system ontology that can be accessed and modified across domains and which captures common features of the overall system relevant to the goals of the disparate domains. If the focus is on information integration, then the strongest motivation for ontology comes from the need to support data sharing and function interoperability. In the correct architecture, an enterprise ontology base would allow th e construction of an integrated environment in which legacy systems appear to be open architecture integrated resources. If the focus is on system/software development, then support for the rapid acquisition of reliable systems is perhaps the strongest motivation for ontology. Finally, ontological analysis was demonstrated to be an effective first step in the construction of robust knowledge based systems

Evolution in the Ontology Based Knowledge Management Systems

An ontology-based knowledge management system uses an ontology to represent explicit specification of a business domain and to serve as a backbone for providing and searching for knowledge sources. But, dynamically changing business environment implies changes in the conceptualisation of a business domain that are reflected on the underlying domain ontologies. Consequently, these changes have effects on the performance and validity of the KM system. In this paper we make an analysis of the problems induced by using not-evolved ontologies and present an approach for enabling consistency of the description of knowledge sources in an ontology-based KM system in the case of changes in the domain ontology. This approach is based on our research on ontology evolution and ontology-based annotation of documents. The proposed method is implemented in our semantic annotation framework so that efficient acquiring and maintaining of ontology-based metadata is supported

Building ontologies in a domain oriented software engineering environment

Ontologies can be used in Domain Oriented Software Engineering Environments (DOSEEs) to organize and describe knowledge and to support management, acquisition and sharing of knowledge regarding some domain. However, ontology construction is not a simple task. Thus, it is necessary to provide tools that support ontology development. This paper discusses the use of ontologies to support domain-oriented software development in ODE, an Ontology-based software Development Environment, and presents ODEd, an ontology editor developed to satisfy the requirements for an ontology editor in a DOSEE. These requirements include the definition of concepts and relations using graphic representations, automatic generation of some classes of axioms, derivation of object frameworks from ontologies, and ontology instantiation and browsing.Eje: Ingeniería de Software y Bases de Datos (ISBD)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

CONGAS: a collaborative ontology development framework based on Named GrAphS

The process of ontology development involves a range of skills and know-how often requiring team work of different people, each of them with his own way of contributing to the definition and formalization of the domain representation. For this reason, collaborative development is an important feature for ontology editing tools, and should take into account the different characteristics of team participants, provide them with a dedicated working environment allowing to express their ideas and creativity, still protecting integrity of the shared work. In this paper we present CONGAS, a collaborative version of the Knowledge Management and Acquisition platform Semantic Turkey which, exploiting the potentialities brought by recent introduction of context management into RDF triple graphs, offers a collaborative environment where proposals for ontology evolution can emerge and coexist, be evaluated by team users, trusted across different perspectives and eventually converged into the main development stream

TOWARDS FORMATIVE E-ASSESSMENT IN PROJECT MANAGEMENT THROUGH PERSONALIZED AUTOMATED FEEDBACK

Formative e-assessment is a complex process, in which learners can build their knowledge, fill up their knowledge gaps or increase their learning abilities. The feedback mechanism is considered to be highly important for the formative dimension of e-assessment. Current paper proposes a model for automated feedback in a project management e-assessment environment: the model blends a built-in feedback sheet (a document containing the correct answers) with a recommender engine, which searches the web for references related to the incorrectly answered questions. The feedback model is personalized, because the web search is made taking into account the user profile: the list of concepts which weren’t correctly understood. This list of concepts is mapped on project management domain ontology.e-assessment, project management, automated feedback, ontology, knowledge system

A generic framework for the development of standardised learning objects within the discipline of construction management

E-learning has occurred in the academic world in different forms since the early 1990s. Its use varies from interactive multimedia tools and simulation environments to static resources within learning management systems. E-learning tools and environments are no longer criticised for their lack of use in higher education in general and within the construction domain in particular. The main criticism, however, is that of reinventing the wheel in order to create new learning environments that cater for different educational needs. Therefore, sharing educational content has become the focus of current research, taking e-learning into a whole new era of developments. This era is enabled by the emergence of new technologies (online and wireless) and the development of educational standards, such as SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) and LOM (Learning Object Metadata) for example. Accordingly, the broad definition of the construction domain and the interlocking nature of subjects taught within this domain, makes the concept of sharing content most appealing. This paper proposes a framework developed to describe the various steps required in order to enable the application of e-learning metadata standards and ontology for sharable learning objects to serve the construction discipline. The paper further describes the application of the proposed framework to a case study for developing an online environment for learning objects that are standardised, sharable, transparent and that cater for the needs of learners, educators and curricula developers in Construction Management. Based on the framework, a learning objects repository is developed incorporating educational and web standards. The repository manages objects as well as metadata using ontology and offers a set of services such as storing, retrieving and searching of learning objects using Semantic Web technologies. Thus, it increases the reusability, sharability and interoperability of learning objects

An Ontology-centered Approach for Designing an Interactive Competence Management System for IT Companies

The paper presents a generic framework for an intelligent information system of competence management based on ontologies for information technology companies. In a first step it will be applied in an information technology (IT) small enterprise and then its applicability will be verified for other organizations of the same type. The work presented in the paper is performed under the project "CONTO – Ontology-based Competencies Management in Information Technology" funded by the Romanian Ministry of Education and Research, involving two universities, a research institute and an IT private company. A competence management system (CMS), in our vision has to achieve three functions: (a) to support the complete and systematic acquisition of knowledge about the competence of the members of an enterprise; (b) to provide the knowledge about competences and their owners; (c) to apply the available knowledge to serve a purpose. The core of the competence management information system is an ontology that plays the role of the declarative knowledge repository containing the basic concepts (such as: company-job, competence, domain, group, person etc.) and their relationships with other concepts, instances and properties. The Protégé environment was used for the development of this ontology. The structure of the ontology is conceived so that description logics can be used to represent the concept definitions of the application domain in a structured and formally well-understood way. Knowledge acquisition is performed in our approach by enriching the ontology, according to the requirements of the IT company. An advantage of using an ontology-based system is the possibility of the identification of new relations among concepts based on inferences starting from the existing knowledge. The user can choose to query instances of one type of concept. The paper also presents some use-cases

Improving knowledge management in construction industry by combining ontology with collaborative technologies

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building.The concept of knowledge management has been introduced to the construction industry for many years. Recently, its importance is more recognized as modern construction projects are more complex and globalized. Managing knowledge assets is a challenge, especially in the construction industry, as it is characterized as a project-based business which delivers one-of-a-kind product, and it has a highly fragmented working environment. While explicit knowledge has been handled by many existing commercial project information management systems, tacit knowledge is more difficult to handle because of its intangible nature, and so far very few computer systems have attempted to handle tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is usually created and transferred in a social environment, and maintained mainly in human's head. Therefore a combination of a group of advanced IT technologies should be adopted for efficient knowledge manipulating. In this research, web-based collaborative system, blogging technology, domain ontology and semantic web environment are used together to provide technology support for knowledge management. The original contribution of this research is that it demonstrates the effectiveness of using construction domain ontology in semantic blogging to promote knowledge sharing. While focusing on technology support, this research also investigates appropriate KM framework and system architecture for small and medium sized construction organizations. A prototype knowledge management system is proposed and implemented; some knowledge management cases are presented to demonstrate how the proposed KM framework and advanced IT tools could help the KM process in the construction industry

An Integrated Approach for Automatic\ud Aggregation of Learning Knowledge Objects

This paper presents the Knowledge Puzzle, an ontology-based platform designed to facilitate domain\ud knowledge acquisition from textual documents for knowledge-based systems. First, the\ud Knowledge Puzzle Platform performs an automatic generation of a domain ontology from documents’\ud content through natural language processing and machine learning technologies. Second,\ud it employs a new content model, the Knowledge Puzzle Content Model, which aims to model\ud learning material from annotated content. Annotations are performed semi-automatically based\ud on IBM’s Unstructured Information Management Architecture and are stored in an Organizational\ud memory (OM) as knowledge fragments. The organizational memory is used as a knowledge\ud base for a training environment (an Intelligent Tutoring System or an e-Learning environment).\ud The main objective of these annotations is to enable the automatic aggregation of Learning\ud Knowledge Objects (LKOs) guided by instructional strategies, which are provided through\ud SWRL rules. Finally, a methodology is proposed to generate SCORM-compliant learning objects\ud from these LKOs