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

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

Rationales and practices for dynamic stakeholder engagement and disengagement. Evidence from dementia-friendly health and social care environments

Latest developments in stakeholder management literature focus on dynamic stakeholder engagement and disengagement practices, and how these are facilitated towards reaching systemic outcomes. However, limited evidence support that this network-level approach can positively influence project success. The paper analyses this issue by considering the practices (how and when), rationales (why) and outcomes (so what) that evolve in the dynamic management of external stakeholders in dementia-friendly environments. This is a crucial area to explore as the ageing population and rising dementia prevalence has increased the need to engage external stakeholders, such as people living with dementia, to develop dementia-friendly health and social environments. The empirical study of the 2013/2014 Department of Health National Dementia Capital Investment Programme involved a statistical and qualitative analysis of 98 pilot projects’ final lessons learnt reports. The analysis advances the dynamic process of timely engaging and disengaging external stakeholders in a context not previously explored in the literature related to dementia-friendly environments. Eight recurring practices and six rationales, the latter characterized by their temporal dimension, are presented in a processual model of stakeholder management

concept paper

In this concept paper, we outline our working plan for the next phase of the Corporate Semantic Web project. The plan covers the period from March 2009 to March 2010. Corporate ontology engineering will improve the facilitation of agile ontology engineering to lessen the costs of ontology development and, especially, maintenance. Corporate semantic collaboration focuses the human- centered aspects of knowledge management in corporate contexts. Corporate semantic search is settled on the highest application level of the three research areas and at that point it is a representative for applications working on and with the appropriately represented and delivered background knowledge. Each of these pillars will yield innovative methods and tools during the project runtime until 2013. We propose a concept draft and a working plan covering the next twelve months for an integrative architecture of a Corporate Semantic Web provided by these three core pillars

requirements and use cases

In this report, we introduce our initial vision of the Corporate Semantic Web as the next step in the broad field of Semantic Web research. We identify requirements of the corporate environment and gaps between current approaches to tackle problems facing ontology engineering, semantic collaboration, and semantic search. Each of these pillars will yield innovative methods and tools during the project runtime until 2013. Corporate ontology engineering will improve the facilitation of agile ontology engineering to lessen the costs of ontology development and, especially, maintenance. Corporate semantic collaboration focuses the human-centered aspects of knowledge management in corporate contexts. Corporate semantic search is settled on the highest application level of the three research areas and at that point it is a representative for applications working on and with the appropriately represented and delivered background knowledge. We propose an initial layout for an integrative architecture of a Corporate Semantic Web provided by these three core pillars

Managing knowledge for capability engineering

The enterprises that deliver capability are trying to evolve into through-life businesses by shifting away from the traditional pattern of designing and manufacturing successive generations of products, towards a new paradigm centred on support, sustainability and the incremental enhancements of existing capabilities from technology insertions and changes to process. The provision of seamless through-life customer solutions depends heavily on management of information and knowledge between, and within the different parts of the supply chain enterprise. This research characterised and described Capability Engineering (CE) as applied in the defence enterprise and identified to BAE Systems important considerations for managing knowledge within that context. The terms Capability Engineering and Through Life Capability Management (TLCM), used synonymously in this thesis, denote a complex evolving domain that requires new approaches to better understand the different viewpoints, models and practices. The findings and novelty of this research is demonstrated through the following achievements: Defined the problem space that Requirements Engineers can use in through-life management projects. Made a contribution to the development of models for Systems Architects to enable them to incorporate ‘soft’ systems within their consideration. Independently developed a TLCM activity model against which BAE Systems validated the BAE Systems TLCM activity model, which is now used by UK Ministry of Defence (MoD). Developed, and published within INCOSE1, the INCOSE Capability Engineering ontology. Through the novel analysis of a directly applicable case study, highlighted to Functional Delivery Managers the significance of avoiding the decoupling of information and knowledge in the context of TLCM. Through experimentation and knowledge gained within this research, identified inadequacies in the TechniCall (rapid access to experts) service which led to the generation of requirements for an improved service which is now being implemented by BAE Systems. The results showed that managing knowledge is distinct when compared to information management. Over-reliance on information management in the absence of tacit knowledge can lead to a loss in the value of the information, which can result in unintended consequences. Capability is realised through a combination of component systems and Capability Engineering is equivalent to a holistic perspective of Systems Engineering. A sector-independent Capability Engineering ontology is developed to enable semantic interoperability between different domains i.e. defence, rail and information technology. This helped to better understand the dependencies of contributing component systems within defence, and supported collaboration across different domains. Although the evaluation of the ontology through expert review has been accomplished; the ontology, KM analysis framework and soft systems transitioning approach developed still need to undergo independent verification and validation. This requires application to other case studies to check and exploit their suitability. This Engineering Doctorate research has been disseminated through a number of peer reviewed publications

Information and data quality in business networking: a key concept for enterprises in its early stages of development

Information and data of high quality are critical for successful business performance in general and Business Networking in particular. As the trend toward sharing information between business partners and value networks is still increasing, the position paper aims at providing a comprehensive perspective on the state of research with regard to information and data quality in Business Networking. The paper shows that much has been achieved, but that fundamental aspects still remain unaddressed. Based on the results of a literature review, the paper identifies consequential areas of research and makes six propositions for future research. In doing so, the position paper aims at offering novel perspectives and at introducing new areas of research in a field of particularly high relevance in the networked business and electronic markets domai

Understanding the Footprint of the RBV in International Business Studies: the Last Twenty Years of Research

International business (IB) research has evolved substantially over the past four decades incorporating new concerns and theoretical contributions. During the past two decades, the Resource-Based View (RBV) has gained the preference of many IB scholars and has gradually become one of the dominant theoretical perspectives for studying IB decisions and operations. The 1991 article “Firm resources and sustained competitive advantage” by Jay Barney is recognized as a fundamental contribution to the Resource-Based View (RBV). In this paper we assess the influence of the RBV, proxied by Jay Barney’s (1991) article, on IB research over the twenty years period, from 1991 to 2010. In this bibliometric study of the articles published in the leading journal for IB research – Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS) – we conduct citation and co-citation analyses, the networks of co-authorship, and delve into the analysis of the key research topics. Beyond understanding the extant research we also contribute to i identifying future research avenues.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio