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

Visual support for ontology learning: an experience report

Ontology learning methods aim to automate ontology construction. They are complex methods involving several elements such as documents, terms and concepts. During the development of an ontology learning method, as well as during its deployment, several situations occur where understanding the relations between these elements is crucial. Our hypothesis is that visual techniques can be used to aid this understanding. To support this claim, we present a set of such complex situations and describe the visual solutions that we developed to support them

From software APIs to web service ontologies: a semi-automatic extraction method

Successful employment of semantic web services depends on the availability of high quality ontologies to describe the domains of these services. As always, building such ontologies is difficult and costly, thus hampering web service deployment. Our hypothesis is that since the functionality offered by a web service is reflected by the underlying software, domain ontologies could be built by analyzing the documentation of that software. We verify this hypothesis in the domain of RDF ontology storage tools.We implemented and fine-tuned a semi-automatic method to extract domain ontologies from software documentation. The quality of the extracted ontologies was verified against a high quality hand-built ontology of the same domain. Despite the low linguistic quality of the corpus, our method allows extracting a considerable amount of information for a domain ontology

Agile elicitation of semantic goals by wiki

Formal goal and service descriptions are the shibboleth of the semantic web services approach, yet the people responsible for creating them are neither machines nor logicians, and rarely even knowledge engineers: the people who need and specify functionality are not those who provide it, and both may be distinct from the semantic annotators. The gap between users' informal conceptualisations of problems and formal descriptions is one which must be effectively bridged for semantic web services to be widely adopted. We show how a simple technique–using a wiki to collect user requirements and mediate a progressive, iterative refinement and formalisation of user goals by domain experts and their knowledge engineer colleagues–can achieve this. Further, we suggest how the process could be extended, so as to itself benefit from semantic technologies

User driven modelling: Visualisation and systematic interaction for end-user programming with tree-based structures

This thesis addresses certain problems encountered by teams of engineers when modelling complex structures and processes subject to cost and other resource constraints. The cost of a structure or process may be ‘read off’ its specifying model, but the language in which the model is expressed (e.g. CAD) and the language in which resources may be modelled (e.g. spreadsheets) are not naturally compatible. This thesis demonstrates that a number of intermediate steps may be introduced which enable both meaningful translation from one conceptual view to another as well as meaningful collaboration between team members. The work adopts a diagrammatic modelling approach as a natural one in an engineering context when seeking to establish a shared understanding of problems.Thus, the research question to be answered in this thesis is: ‘To what extent is it possible to improve user-driven software development through interaction with diagrams and without requiring users to learn particular computer languages?’ The goal of the research is to improve collaborative software development through interaction with diagrams, thereby minimising the need for end-users to code directly. To achieve this aim a combination of the paradigms of End-User Programming, Process and Product Modelling and Decision Support, and Semantic Web are exploited and a methodology of User Driven Modelling and Programming (UDM/P) is developed, implemented, and tested as a means of demonstrating the efficacy of diagrammatic modelling.In greater detail, the research seeks to show that diagrammatic modelling eases problems of maintenance, extensibility, ease of use, and sharing of information. The methodology presented here to achieve this involves a three step translation from a visualised ontology, through a modelling tool, to output to interactive visualisations. An analysis of users groups them into categories of system creator, model builder, and model user. This categorisation corresponds well with the three-step translation process where users develop the ontology, modelling tool, and visualisations for their problem.This research establishes and exemplifies a novel paradigm of collaborative end-user programming by domain experts. The end-user programmers can use a visual interface where the visualisation of the software exactly matches the structure of the software itself, making translation between user and computer, and vice versa, much more direct and practical. The visualisation is based on an ontology that provides a representation of the software as a tree. The solution is based on translation from a source tree to a result tree, and visualisation of both. The result tree shows a structured representation of the model with a full visualisation of all parts that leads to the computed result.In conclusion, it is claimed that this direct representation of the structure enables an understanding of the program as an ontology and model that is then visualised, resulting in a more transparent shared understanding by all users. It is further argued that our diagrammatic modelling paradigm consequently eases problems of maintenance, extensibility, ease of use, and sharing of information. This method is applicable to any problem that lends itself to representation as a tree. This is considered a limitation of the method to be addressed in a future project

Training of Crisis Mappers and Map Production from Multi-sensor Data: Vernazza Case Study (Cinque Terre National Park, Italy)

This aim of paper is to presents the development of a multidisciplinary project carried out by the cooperation between Politecnico di Torino and ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action). The goal of the project was the training in geospatial data acquiring and processing for students attending Architecture and Engineering Courses, in order to start up a team of "volunteer mappers". Indeed, the project is aimed to document the environmental and built heritage subject to disaster; the purpose is to improve the capabilities of the actors involved in the activities connected in geospatial data collection, integration and sharing. The proposed area for testing the training activities is the Cinque Terre National Park, registered in the World Heritage List since 1997. The area was affected by flood on the 25th of October 2011. According to other international experiences, the group is expected to be active after emergencies in order to upgrade maps, using data acquired by typical geomatic methods and techniques such as terrestrial and aerial Lidar, close-range and aerial photogrammetry, topographic and GNSS instruments etc.; or by non conventional systems and instruments such us UAV, mobile mapping etc. The ultimate goal is to implement a WebGIS platform to share all the data collected with local authorities and the Civil Protectio

A Study on the Use of Ontologies to Represent Collective Knowledge

The development of ontologies has become an area of considerable research interest over the past number of years. Domain ontologies are often developed to represent a shared understanding that in turn indicates cooperative effort by a user community. However, the structure and form that an ontology takes is predicated both on the approach of the developer and the cooperation of the user community. A shift has taken place in recent years from the use of highly specialised and expressive ontologies to simpler knowledge models, progressively developed by community contribution. It is within this context that this thesis investigates the use of ontologies as a means to representing collective knowledge. It investigates the impact of the community on the approach to and outcome of knowledge representation and compares the use of simple terminological ontologies with highly structured expressive ontologies in community-based narrative environments

Reducing information overload by optimising information retrieval approaches

The information within an organisation forms a fundamental part of its success. In recent years the volume of information housed and processed by organisations has increased exponentially and grown to such a rate that it can be difficult to harness and make successful use of that information. This growth of information has led to the increasing prevalence of the concept of information overload. Although information overload is not a new concept, it is still considered a large-scale problem, with its effect upon the workplace and employees becoming increasingly detrimental. With the increase in available information comes the potential for increased overload. This research addresses some of the potential barriers that may exist preventing effective discovery, storage and sharing of information and thus increasing the information overload problem. [Continues.