Infrastructure for the representation and electronic exchange of design knowledge

International audienceThis paper develops the concept of knowledge and its exchange using Semantic Web technologies. It points out that knowledge is more than information because it embodies the meaning, that is to say semantic and context. These characteristics will influence our approach to represent and to treat the knowledge. In order to be adopted, the developed system needs to be simple and to use standards. The goal of the paper is to find standards to model knowledge and exchange it with an other person. Therefore, we propose to model knowledge using UML models to show a graphical representation and to exchange it with XML to ensure the portability at low cost. We introduce the concept of ontology for organizing knowledge and for facilitating the knowledge exchange. Proposals have been tested by implementing an application on the design knowledge of a pen

MetaNet: a metadata term thesaurus to enable semantic interoperability between metadata domains

Metadata interoperability is a fundamental requirement for access to information within networked knowledge organization systems. The Harmony International Digital Library Project [1] has developed a common underlying data model (the ABC model) to enable the scalable mapping of metadata descriptions across domains and media types. The ABC model, described in [2], provides a set of basic building blocks for metadata modeling and recognizes the importance of 'events' to unambiguously describe metadata for objects with a complex history. In order to test and evaluate the interoperability capabilities of this model, we applied it to some real multimedia examples and analysed the results of mapping from the ABC model to various different metadata domains using XSLT [3]. This work revealed serious limitations in XSLT's ability to support flexible dynamic semantic mapping. In order to overcome this, we developed MetaNet [4], a metadata term thesaurus which provides the additional semantic knowledge which is non-existent within declarative XML-encoded metadata descriptions. This paper describes MetaNet, its RDF Schema [5] representation and a hybrid mapping approach which combines the structural and syntactic mapping capabilities of XSLT with the semantic knowledge of MetaNet, to enable flexible and dynamic mapping among metadata standards

Ontological Engineering: What are Ontologies and How Can We Build Them?

Ontologies are formal, explicit specifications of shared conceptualizations. There is much literature on what they are, how they can be engineered and where they can be used inside applications. All these literature can be grouped under the term “Ontological Engineering,” which is defined as the set of activities that concern the ontology development process, the ontology lifecycle, the principles, methods and methodologies for building ontologies, and the tool suites and languages that support them. In this chapter we provide an overview of Ontological Engineering, describing the current trends, issues and problem

Knowledge web: realising the semantic web... all the way to knowledge-enhanced multimedia documents

The semantic web and semantic web services are major efforts in order to spread and to integrate knowledge technology to the whole web. The Knowledge Web network of excellence aims at supporting their developments at the best and largest European level and supporting industry in adopting them. It especially investigates the solution of scalability, heterogeneity and dynamics obstacles to the full development of the semantic web. We explain how Knowledge Web results should benefit knowledge-enhanced multimedia applications