Developing Domain Ontology for Nigerian History

Background: Nigeria, which is the most populous country in Africa, located in the West of Africa has a rich political and cultural history. Although, Nigeria has a valid history, the documentation of a significant portion of the historical information is vague and anecdotal because a lot of it is oral, which makes it susceptible to distortion. There is also poor electronic documentation, with a large chunk of history captured in print - history books, media report and museum artifacts. Objective: To develop a domain ontology for Nigerian history which is intended to provide viable support for sundry automation needs that require historical knowledge. Results: The NHO (Nigerian History Ontology) has been developed using a semi- automated approach that involved extraction of terms from textual sources and eventual conceptualization, modeling, and development using the Protégé Ontology Editor. The NHO (Nigerian History Ontology) developed ontology reveals a potential to competently support knowledge-based software endeavor. Also compared with Gold Standard ontology, it was found to be rich in content. Conclusion: We have presented the details of the process of developing a domain ontology for Nigeria history, which is the first of its kind in terms of focus (Nigeria), and perspectives (political, cultural). The NHO is a documentation of Nigerian historical knowledge for meaningful use, which makes the knowledge useful by both humans and software agents. It also provides an electronic archive of Nigerian history in a compact and easily accessible way

Developing Domain Ontology for Nigerian History

Background: Nigeria, which is the most populous country in Africa, located in the West of Africa has a rich political and cultural history. Although, Nigeria has a valid history, the documentation of a significant portion of the historical information is vague and anecdotal because a lot of it is oral, which makes it susceptible to distortion. There is also poor electronic documentation, with a large chunk of history captured in printhistory books, media report and museum artifacts. Objective: To develop a domain ontology for Nigerian history which is intended to provide viable support for sundry automation needs that require historical knowledge. Results: The NHO (Nigerian History Ontology) has been developed using a semi-automated approach that involved extraction of terms from textual sources and eventual conceptualization, modeling, and development using the Protégé Ontology Editor. The NHO (Nigerian History Ontology) developed ontology reveals a potential to competently support knowledgebased software endeavor. Also compared with Gold Standard ontology, it was found to be rich in content. Conclusion: We have presented the details of the process of developing a domain ontology for Nigeria history, which is the first of its kind in terms of focus (Nigeria), and perspectives (political, cultural). The NHO is a documentation of Nigerian historical knowledge for meaningful use, which makes the knowledge useful by both humans and software agents. It also provides an electronic archive of Nigerian history in a compact and easily accessible way

La gestión de la documentación multilingüe en entornos profesionales

Specialized multilingual communication in professional environments requires the establishment of document management systems, through the use of new technologies, to enable the systematization and easy retrieval of large volumes of data and particularly of texts generated in these domains. To design a management system of this type requires research combining both quantitative aspects (through the compilation and analysis of corpus-ad-hoc) and qualitative aspects (by means of a needs analysis of writers, translators, etc., of multilingual specialized texts). This paper presents a proposal for the systematization of document management, to be implemented by members of the GENTT research team. Setting out from the concept of text genre as a polyhedral tool (which combines formal, communicative and cognitive aspects), the authors propose an experimental design using surveys to obtain the data required to enhance the Gentt Corpus Management Tool, 3.0 as a knowledge management system (Borja, 2005).La comunicación especializada multilingüe en entornos profesionales demanda el establecimiento de sistemas de gestión, mediante el uso de las nuevas tecnologías, que permitan sistematizar y recuperar con facilidad la gran cantidad de datos y, sobre todo, de textos que se generan en estos ámbitos. Para diseñar un sistema de gestión de este tipo se impone realizar una investigación que combine los aspectos cuantitativos (mediante la compilación y análisis de corpus ad-hoc) con los cualitativos (a través del análisis de las necesidades de los redactores, traductores, etc. de textos de especialidad en varias lenguas). En el presente trabajo se presenta una propuesta de formalización de la gestión documental, llevada a cabo en el seno del equipo de investigación GENTT. Partiendo del concepto de género textual, como herramienta poliédrica (que combina aspectos formales, comunicativos y cognitivos), se propone un diseño experimental mediante encuestas, que nos permitirá obtener los datos necesarios para el perfeccionamiento del Corpus Management Tool Gentt, 3.0, como sistema de gestión de conocimientos (Borja, 2005)

Vers une approche web sémantique dans les applications de gestion de conférences

Depuis sa création, il y a plusieurs années, par Tim Berners-Lee, le World Wide Web a révolutionné considérablement plusieurs domaines, notamment la société, l'économie et surtout la recherche et la manière dont celle-ci est conduite. Cependant, la majeure partie du Contenu du Web actuel a été conçue pour être lue et comprise par les êtres humains. Les applications et les agents logiciels n'avaient alors aucunes idées sur son sens réel. Le web sémantique, comme extension du Web actuel, vise à structurer son sens et permettre une meilleure collaboration homme-machine. On s'ouvre ainsi à de nouvelles possibilités d'automatisation sur le web et une gestion plus intelligente du contenu. Dans cette optique, plusieurs technologies clés comme XML, RDF et OWL ont été développées, puis standardisées par le World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Nous nous proposons d'étudier, dans le cadre de notre projet de maîtrise, l'approche Web sémantique dans les applications de gestion de conférences. Le projet SWOC (Semantic Web Open Conference) fait partie de cette réflexion. Il s'agit d'effectuer la ré-ingénierie d'une application en ligne de gestion des conférences, dans le but de la faire migrer vers la technologie du Web sémantique. Les ateliers de travail et les séminaires constituent, en effet, un partage de connaissances et d'idées entre des personnes d'une même communauté intellectuelle. Mettre leur gestion au c?ur des innovations technologiques doit tenir compte de nombreuses contraintes. Or, au cours de notre recherche, nous avons relevé plusieurs limites dans les applications en ligne les plus utilisées, liées principalement à l'assignation des articles aux évaluateurs, l'aide à la saisie des données et la description des ressources. L'idée qui se profile derrière ce projet est de cerner les plus-values du nouveau système et à en dégager les résultats d'assignation, afin de les comparer à ceux d'un système de base. Ce travail de recherche vise ainsi à analyser de plus près l'approche Web sémantique et son apport dans les applications de gestion de conférences, et d'en tirer des conclusions

Technologies to enhance self-directed learning from hypertext

With the growing popularity of the World Wide Web, materials presented to learners in the form of hypertext have become a major instructional resource. Despite the potential of hypertext to facilitate access to learning materials, self-directed learning from hypertext is often associated with many concerns. Self-directed learners, due to their different viewpoints, may follow different navigation paths, and thus they will have different interactions with knowledge. Therefore, learners can end up being disoriented or cognitively-overloaded due to the potential gap between what they need and what actually exists on the Web. In addition, while a lot of research has gone into supporting the task of finding web resources, less attention has been paid to the task of supporting the interpretation of Web pages. The inability to interpret the content of pages leads learners to interrupt their current browsing activities to seek help from other human resources or explanatory learning materials. Such activity can weaken learner engagement and lower their motivation to learn. This thesis aims to promote self-directed learning from hypertext resources by proposing solutions to the above problems. It first presents Knowledge Puzzle, a tool that proposes a constructivist approach to learn from the Web. Its main contribution to Web-based learning is that self-directed learners will be able to adapt the path of instruction and the structure of hypertext to their way of thinking, regardless of how the Web content is delivered. This can effectively reduce the gap between what they need and what exists on the Web. SWLinker is another system proposed in this thesis with the aim of supporting the interpretation of Web pages using ontology based semantic annotation. It is an extension to the Internet Explorer Web browser that automatically creates a semantic layer of explanatory information and instructional guidance over Web pages. It also aims to break the conventional view of Web browsing as an individual activity by leveraging the notion of ontology-based collaborative browsing. Both of the tools presented in this thesis were evaluated by students within the context of particular learning tasks. The results show that they effectively fulfilled the intended goals by facilitating learning from hypertext without introducing high overheads in terms of usability or browsing efforts

Um Modelo baseado em contexto para expansão de consultas semânticas em redes colaborativas de organizações

Tese(doutorado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia Elétrica.As novas tendências do mundo globalizado levaram organizações e profissionais a focarem em estratégias baseadas em trabalho colaborativo. Tais estratégias têm sido enquadradas no conceito mais geral de Rede Colaborativa (RC), onde organizações e indivíduos trabalham juntos para aumentar o acesso a novas oportunidades de negócio, compartilhar riscos, reduzir custos e atingir metas que seriam inalcançáveis individualmente. A implantação de RCs depende da existência de infraestruturas computacionais que provejam funcionalidades de suporte à colaboração, incluindo compartilhamento e busca de informações, integração de sistemas, gestão de segurança, entre outros. O foco desta tese está na funcionalidade relacionada à busca de informação, requisito fundamental considerando-se o fato de que os parceiros de tal rede compartilham informações que precisam ser recuperadas. Além disso, a busca de informação se justifica pelo seu uso potencial em diversas outras aplicações necessárias a RCs, tais como: suporte à gestão de conhecimento, seleção de indicadores, busca de parceiros, auxílio no suporte à decisão, entre outras. Nesse sentido, este trabalho propõe um arcabouço que define uma infraestrutura de serviços de suporte à busca de informação em RCs. A estratégia adotada neste trabalho foi dividida em dois passos: em primeiro lugar utilizou-se ontologias para o enriquecimento das fontes de informação, com base na definição de anotações semânticas. Ontologias foram também usadas como base para a definição de consultas semânticas. O segundo passo envolveu a utilização do contexto do usuário visando a melhoria dos resultados da busca. No âmbito de uma RC, o contexto pode ser definido por diversos elementos, incluindo processo, tarefa e papel desempenhado pelo usuário. A abordagem utilizada nessa etapa consistiu na definição de um modelo do contexto, que é associado à ontologia da RC, e de um conjunto de regras que, com base no contexto atual do usuário, efetuam uma expansão na consulta original. Em suma, a abordagem proposta usa o contexto do usuário para sugerir novos tópicos a serem buscados aplicando-se restrições à consulta definida pelo usuário. A avaliação deu-se a partir de experimentos com coleções de teste, onde medidas baseadas em precisão e cobertura foram utilizadas na comparação do modelo proposto com um sistema baseado em palavras-chave e com outro baseado em ontologias