An ontology to model the research process in information systems

The IS community has relied mostly on two main paradigms to undertake IS research: positivist and interpretivist. This paper argues that the ongoing debate around which of these paradigms is better suited to undertake IS research has created confusion amongst IS researchers, particularly between those who are relatively inexperienced (e.g. PhD researchers). Inexperienced researchers tend to place emphasis on the justification of their research approaches in the context of existing paradigms without offering a clear description of how the chosen methods and paradigms are applied in the context of their own research, a key issue to assess and understand any research output. This paper does not attempt to give any suggestions as to which research methods/paradigms should be used for IS research, but to raise the awareness that the way we currently communicate our thoughts in the research methods domain may not be very effective. We argue that an initial step to undertake this challenge could be to take a more “practical” approach by focusing on the process of thinking and planning the research activity rather than focusing on the justification of the use of one or many research methods usually “loaned” from other discipline

Past, present and future of information and knowledge sharing in the construction industry: Towards semantic service-based e-construction

The paper reviews product data technology initiatives in the construction sector and provides a synthesis of related ICT industry needs. A comparison between (a) the data centric characteristics of Product Data Technology (PDT) and (b) ontology with a focus on semantics, is given, highlighting the pros and cons of each approach. The paper advocates the migration from data-centric application integration to ontology-based business process support, and proposes inter-enterprise collaboration architectures and frameworks based on semantic services, underpinned by ontology-based knowledge structures. The paper discusses the main reasons behind the low industry take up of product data technology, and proposes a preliminary roadmap for the wide industry diffusion of the proposed approach. In this respect, the paper stresses the value of adopting alliance-based modes of operation

An Ontology for Product-Service Systems

Industries are transforming their business strategy from a product-centric to a more service-centric nature by bundling products and services into integrated solutions to enhance the relationship between their customers. Since Product- Service Systems design research is currently at a rudimentary stage, the development of a robust ontology for this area would be helpful. The advantages of a standardized ontology are that it could help researchers and practitioners to communicate their views without ambiguity and thus encourage the conception and implementation of useful methods and tools. In this paper, an initial structure of a PSS ontology from the design perspective is proposed and evaluated

Contested modelling

We suggest that the role and function of expert computational modelling in real-world decision-making needs scrutiny and practices need to change. We discuss some empirical and theory-based improvements to the coupling of the modelling process and the real world, including social and behavioural processes, which we have expressed as a set of questions that we believe need to be answered by all projects engaged in such modelling.  These are based on a systems analysis of four research initiatives, covering different scales and timeframes, and addressing the complexity of intervention in a sustainability context. Our proposed improvements require new approaches for analysing the relationship between a project’s models and its publics.  They reflect what we believe is a necessary and beneficial dialogue between the realms of expert scientific modelling and systems thinking.  This paper is an attempt to start that process, itself reflecting a robust dialogue between two practitioners sat within differing traditions, puzzling how to integrate perspectives and achieve wider participation in researching this problem space.&nbsp

Surfacing ERP exploitation risks through a risk ontology

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a risk identification checklist for facilitating user companies to surface, organise and manage potential risks associated with the post-adoption of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. Design/methodology/approach – A desktop study, based on the process of a critical literature review, was conducted by the researchers. The critical review focused on IS and business research papers, books, case studies and theoretical articles, etc. Findings – By systematically and critically analysing and synthesising the literature reviewed, the researchers identified and proposed a total of 40 ERP post-implementation risks related to diverse operational, analytical, organisation-wide and technical aspects. A risk ontology was subsequently established to highlight these ERP risks, as well as to present their potential causal relationships. Research limitations/implications – For researchers, the established ERP risk ontology represents a starting point for further research, and provides early insights into a research field that will become increasingly important as more and more companies progress from implementation to exploitation of ERPs. Practical implications – For practitioners, the risk ontology is an important tool and checklist to support risk identification, prevention, management and control, as well as to facilitate strategic planning and decision making. Originality/value – There is a scarcity of studies focusing on ERP post-implementation in contrast with an over abundance of studies focusing on system implementation and project management aspects. This paper aims to fill this significant research gap by presenting a risk ontology of ERP post-adoption. It represents a first attempt in producing a comprehensive model in its area. No other such models could be found from the literature reviewed

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

Run-time risk management in adaptive ICT systems

We will present results of the SERSCIS project related to risk management and mitigation strategies in adaptive multi-stakeholder ICT systems. The SERSCIS approach involves using semantic threat models to support automated design-time threat identification and mitigation analysis. The focus of this paper is the use of these models at run-time for automated threat detection and diagnosis. This is based on a combination of semantic reasoning and Bayesian inference applied to run-time system monitoring data. The resulting dynamic risk management approach is compared to a conventional ISO 27000 type approach, and validation test results presented from an Airport Collaborative Decision Making (A-CDM) scenario involving data exchange between multiple airport service providers