5,539 research outputs found
Using ontology engineering for understanding needs and allocating resources in web-based industrial virtual collaboration systems
In many interactions in cross-industrial and inter-industrial collaboration, analysis and understanding of relative specialist and non-specialist language is one of the most pressing challenges when trying to build multi-party, multi-disciplinary collaboration system. Hence, identifying the scope of the language used and then understanding the relationships between the language entities are key problems. In computer science, ontologies are used to provide a common vocabulary for a domain of interest together with descriptions of the meaning of terms and relationships between them, like in an encyclopedia. These, however, often lack the fuzziness required for human orientated systems. This paper uses an engineering sector business collaboration system (www.wmccm.co.uk) as a case study to illustrate the issues. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a novel ontology engineering methodology, which generates structurally enriched cross domain ontologies economically, quickly and reliably. A semantic relationship analysis of the Google Search Engine Index was devised and evaluated. Using Semantic analysis seems to generate a viable list of subject terms. A social network analysis of the semantically derived terms was conducted to generate a decision support network with rich relationships between terms. The derived ontology was quicker to generate, provided richer internal relationships and relied far less on expert contribution. More importantly, it improved the collaboration matching capability of WMCCM
Value-driven partner search for <i>Energy from Waste</i> projects
Energy from Waste (EfW) projects require complex value chains to operate effectively. To identify business partners, plant operators need to network with organisations whose strategic objectives are aligned with their own. Supplier organisations need to work out where they fit in the value chain. Our aim is to support people in identifying potential business partners, based on their organisation’s interpretation of value. Value for an organisation should reflect its strategy and may be interpreted using key priorities and KPIs (key performance indicators). KPIs may comprise any or all of knowledge, operational, economic, social and convenience indicators. This paper presents an ontology for modelling and prioritising connections within the business environment, and in the process provides means for defining value and mapping these to corresponding KPIs. The ontology is used to guide the design of a visual representation of the environment to aid partner search
Cities Made of Boundaries: Mapping Social Life in Urban Form
Cities Made of Boundaries presents the theoretical foundation and concepts for a new social scientific urban morphological mapping method, Boundary Line Type (BLT) Mapping. Its vantage is a plea to establish a frame of reference for radically comparative urban studies positioned between geography and archaeology. Based in multidisciplinary social and spatial theory, a critical realist understanding of the boundaries that compose built space is operationalised by a mapping practice utilising Geographical Information Systems (GIS).
Benjamin N. Vis gives a precise account of how BLT Mapping can be applied to detailed historical, reconstructed, contemporary, and archaeological urban plans, exemplified by sixteenth to twenty-first century Winchester (UK) and Classic Maya Chunchucmil (Mexico). This account demonstrates how the functional and experiential difference between compact western and tropical dispersed cities can be explored.
The methodological development of Cities Made of Boundaries will appeal to readers interested in the comparative social analysis of built environments, and those seeking to expand the evidence-base of design options to structure urban life and development
Cities Made of Boundaries
Cities Made of Boundaries presents the theoretical foundation and concepts for a new social scientific urban morphological mapping method, Boundary Line Type (BLT) Mapping. Its vantage is a plea to establish a frame of reference for radically comparative urban studies positioned between geography and archaeology. Based in multidisciplinary social and spatial theory, a critical realist understanding of the boundaries that compose built space is operationalised by a mapping practice utilising Geographical Information Systems (GIS).
Benjamin N. Vis gives a precise account of how BLT Mapping can be applied to detailed historical, reconstructed, contemporary, and archaeological urban plans, exemplified by sixteenth- to twenty-first century Winchester (UK) and Classic Maya Chunchucmil (Mexico). This account demonstrates how the functional and experiential difference between compact western and tropical dispersed cities can be explored.
The methodological development of Cities Made of Boundaries will appeal to readers interested in the comparative social analysis of built environments, and those seeking to expand the evidence-base of design options to structure urban life and development
Collaborative Knowledge Visualisation for Cross-Community Knowledge Exchange
The notion of communities as informal social networks based on shared interests or common practices has been increasingly used as an important unit of analysis when considering the processes of cooperative creation and sharing of knowledge. While knowledge exchange within communities has been extensively researched, different studies observed the importance of cross-community knowledge exchange for the creation of new knowledge and innovation in knowledge-intensive organizations. Especially in knowledge management a critical problem has become the need to support the cooperation and exchange of knowledge between different communities with highly specialized expertise and activities. Though several studies discuss the importance and difficulties of knowledge sharing across community boundaries, the development of technological support incorporating these findings has been little addressed.
This work presents an approach to supporting cross-community knowledge exchange based on using knowledge visualisation for facilitating information access in unfamiliar community domains. The theoretical grounding and practical relevance of the proposed approach are ensured by defining a requirements model that integrates theoretical frameworks for cross-community knowledge exchange with practical needs of typical knowledge management processes and sensemaking tasks in information access in unfamiliar domains. This synthesis suggests that visualising knowledge structures of communities and supporting the discovery of relationships between them during access to community spaces, could provide valuable support for cross-community discovery and sharing of knowledge. This is the main hypothesis investigated in this thesis.
Accordingly, a novel method is developed for eliciting and visualising implicit knowledge structures of individuals and communities in form of dynamic knowledge maps that make the elicited knowledge usable for semantic exploration and navigation of community spaces. The method allows unobtrusive construction of personal and community knowledge maps based on user interaction with information and their use for dynamic classification of information from a specific point of view. The visualisation model combines Document Maps presenting main topics, document clusters and relationships between knowledge reflected in community spaces with Concept Maps visualising personal and shared conceptual structures of community members. The technical realization integrates Kohonen’s self-organizing maps with extraction of word categories from texts, collaborative indexing and personalised classification based on user-induced templates. This is accompanied by intuitive visualisation and interaction with complex information spaces based on multi-view navigation of document landscapes and concept networks.
The developed method is prototypically implemented in form of an application framework, a concrete system and a visual information interface for multi-perspective access to community information spaces, the Knowledge Explorer. The application framework implements services for generating and using personal and community knowledge maps to support explicit and implicit knowledge exchange between members of different communities. The Knowledge Explorer allows simultaneous visualisation of different personal and community knowledge structures and enables their use for structuring, exploring and navigating community information spaces from different points of view.
The empirical evaluation in a comparative laboratory study confirms the adequacy of the developed solutions with respect to specific requirements of the cross-community problem and demonstrates much better quality of knowledge access compared to a standard information seeking reference system. The developed evaluation framework and operative measures for quality of knowledge access in cross-community contexts also provide a theoretically grounded and practically feasible method for further developing and evaluating new solutions addressing this important but little investigated problem
Spatial ontologies for architectural heritage
Informatics and artificial intelligence have generated new requirements for digital archiving, information, and documentation. Semantic interoperability has become fundamental for the management and sharing of information. The constraints to data interpretation enable both database interoperability, for data and schemas sharing and reuse, and information retrieval in large datasets. Another challenging issue is the exploitation of automated reasoning possibilities. The solution is the use of domain ontologies as a reference for data modelling in information systems. The architectural heritage (AH) domain is considered in this thesis. The documentation in this field, particularly complex and multifaceted, is well-known to be critical for the preservation, knowledge, and promotion of the monuments. For these reasons, digital inventories, also exploiting standards and new semantic technologies, are developed by international organisations (Getty Institute, ONU, European Union). Geometric and geographic information is essential part of a monument. It is composed by a number of aspects (spatial, topological, and mereological relations; accuracy; multi-scale representation; time; etc.). Currently, geomatics permits the obtaining of very accurate and dense 3D models (possibly enriched with textures) and derived products, in both raster and vector format. Many standards were published for the geographic field or in the cultural heritage domain. However, the first ones are limited in the foreseen representation scales (the maximum is achieved by OGC CityGML), and the semantic values do not consider the full semantic richness of AH. The second ones (especially the core ontology CIDOC – CRM, the Conceptual Reference Model of the Documentation Commettee of the International Council of Museums) were employed to document museums’ objects. Even if it was recently extended to standing buildings and a spatial extension was included, the integration of complex 3D models has not yet been achieved. In this thesis, the aspects (especially spatial issues) to consider in the documentation of monuments are analysed. In the light of them, the OGC CityGML is extended for the management of AH complexity. An approach ‘from the landscape to the detail’ is used, for considering the monument in a wider system, which is essential for analysis and reasoning about such complex objects. An implementation test is conducted on a case study, preferring open source applications
Light-weight ontologies for scrutable user modelling
This thesis is concerned with the ways light-weight ontologies can support scrutability for large user models and the user modelling process. It explores the role that light-weight ontologies can play, and how they can be exploited, for the purpose of creating and maintaining large, scrutable user models consisting of hundreds of components. We address problems in four key areas: ontology creation, metadata annotation, creation and maintenance of large user models, and user model visualisation, with a goal to provide a simple and adaptable approach that maintains scrutability. Each of these key areas presents a number of challenges that we address. Our solution is the development of a toolkit, LOSUM, which consists of a number of tools to support the user modelling process. It incorporates light-weight ontologies to fulfill a number of roles: aiding in metadata creation, providing structure for large user model visualisation, and as a means to reason across granularities in the user model. In conjunction with this, LOSUM also features a novel visualisation tool, SIV, which performs a dual role of ontology and user model visualisation, supporting the process of ontology creation, metadata annotation, and user model visualisation. We evaluated our approach at each stage with small user studies, and conducted a large scale integrative evaluation of these approaches together in an authentic learning context with 114 students, of whom 77 had exposure to their learner models through SIV. The results showed that students could use the interface and understand the process of user model construction. The flexibility and adaptability of the toolkit has also been demonstrated in its deployment in several other application areas
Cities Made of Boundaries
Cities Made of Boundaries presents the theoretical foundation and concepts for a new social scientific urban morphological mapping method, Boundary Line Type (BLT) Mapping. Its vantage is a plea to establish a frame of reference for radically comparative urban studies positioned between geography and archaeology. Based in multidisciplinary social and spatial theory, a critical realist understanding of the boundaries that compose built space is operationalised by a mapping practice utilising Geographical Information Systems (GIS).
Benjamin N. Vis gives a precise account of how BLT Mapping can be applied to detailed historical, reconstructed, contemporary, and archaeological urban plans, exemplified by sixteenth- to twenty-first century Winchester (UK) and Classic Maya Chunchucmil (Mexico). This account demonstrates how the functional and experiential difference between compact western and tropical dispersed cities can be explored.
The methodological development of Cities Made of Boundaries will appeal to readers interested in the comparative social analysis of built environments, and those seeking to expand the evidence-base of design options to structure urban life and development
Cognition-based approaches for high-precision text mining
This research improves the precision of information extraction from free-form text via the use of cognitive-based approaches to natural language processing (NLP). Cognitive-based approaches are an important, and relatively new, area of research in NLP and search, as well as linguistics. Cognitive approaches enable significant improvements in both the breadth and depth of knowledge extracted from text. This research has made contributions in the areas of a cognitive approach to automated concept recognition in.
Cognitive approaches to search, also called concept-based search, have been shown to improve search precision. Given the tremendous amount of electronic text generated in our digital and connected world, cognitive approaches enable substantial opportunities in knowledge discovery. The generation and storage of electronic text is ubiquitous, hence opportunities for improved knowledge discovery span virtually all knowledge domains.
While cognition-based search offers superior approaches, challenges exist due to the need to mimic, even in the most rudimentary way, the extraordinary powers of human cognition. This research addresses these challenges in the key area of a cognition-based approach to automated concept recognition. In addition it resulted in a semantic processing system framework for use in applications in any knowledge domain.
Confabulation theory was applied to the problem of automated concept recognition. This is a relatively new theory of cognition using a non-Bayesian measure, called cogency, for predicting the results of human cognition. An innovative distance measure derived from cogent confabulation and called inverse cogency, to rank order candidate concepts during the recognition process. When used with a multilayer perceptron, it improved the precision of concept recognition by 5% over published benchmarks. Additional precision improvements are anticipated.
These research steps build a foundation for cognition-based, high-precision text mining. Long-term it is anticipated that this foundation enables a cognitive-based approach to automated ontology learning. Such automated ontology learning will mimic human language cognition, and will, in turn, enable the practical use of cognitive-based approaches in virtually any knowledge domain --Abstract, page iii
Making Sense of Document Collections with Map-Based Visualizations
As map-based visualizations of documents become more ubiquitous, there is a greater need for them to support intellectual and creative high-level cognitive activities with collections of non-cartographic materials -- documents. This dissertation concerns the conceptualization of map-based visualizations as tools for sensemaking and collection understanding. As such, map-based visualizations would help people use georeferenced documents to develop understanding, gain insight, discover knowledge, and construct meaning. This dissertation explores the role of graphical representations (such as maps, Kohonen maps, pie charts, and other) and interactions with them for developing map-based visualizations capable of facilitating sensemaking activities such as collection understanding. While graphical representations make document collections more perceptually and cognitively accessible, interactions allow users to adapt representations to users’ contextual needs. By interacting with representations of documents or collections and being able to construct representations of their own, people are better able to make sense of information, comprehend complex structures, and integrate new information into their existing mental models. In sum, representations and interactions may reduce cognitive load and consequently expedite the overall time necessary for completion of sensemaking activities, which typically take much time to accomplish. The dissertation proceeds in three phases. The first phase develops a conceptual framework for translating ontological properties of collections to representations and for supporting visual tasks by means of graphical representations. The second phase concerns the cognitive benefits of interaction. It conceptualizes how interactions can help people during complex sensemaking activities. Although the interactions are explained on the example of a prototype built with Google Maps, they are independent iv of Google Maps and can be applicable to various other technologies. The third phase evaluates the utility, analytical capabilities and usability of the additional representations when users interact with a visualization prototype – VIsual COLlection EXplorer. The findings suggest that additional representations can enhance understanding of map-based visualizations of library collections: specifically, they can allow users to see trends, gaps, and patterns in ontological properties of collections
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