Die Qualität von Organisationen : ein kommunikationsbasierter Messansatz

The goal of this research is to develop an understanding of what causes organizations and information systems to be “good” with regard to communication and coordination. This study (1) gives a theoretical explanation of how the processes of organizational adaptation work and (2) what is required for establishing and measuring the goodness of an organization with regard to communication and coordination. By leveraging concepts from cybernetics and philosophy of language, particularly the theoretical conceptualization of information systems as social systems and language communities, this research arrives at new insights. After discussing related work from systems theory, organization theory, cybernetics, and philosophy of language, a theoretical conceptualization of information systems as language communities is adopted. This provides the foundation for two exploratory field studies. Then a formal theory for explaining the adaptation of organizations via language and communication is presented. This includes measures for the goodness of organizations with regard to communication and coordination. Finally, propositions stemming from the theoretical model are tested using multiple case studies in six information system development projects in the financial services industry.Zielsetzung der hier vorgestellten Forschung ist es, ein Verständnis für die Güte von Organisationen und Informationssystemen im Hinblick auf Kommunikation und Koordination zu entwickeln. Diese Studie gibt (1) eine theoretische Erklärung zur Funktionsweise organisatorischer Anpassungsprozesse und (2) Handlungsanleitungen zur Messung der Güte einer Organisation im Hinblick auf Kommunikation und Koordination. Dies geschieht durch die Nutzung von Konzepten der Kybernetik und der Sprachphilosophie, insbesondere der Formalisierung von Informationssystemen als soziale Systeme und Sprachgemeinschaften. Nach der Diskussion bestehender Ansätze in der Systemtheorie, der Organisationstheorie, der Kybernetik und der Sprachphilosophie wird die Konzeptualisierung von Informationssystemen als Sprachgemeinschaften übernommen. Diese bildet die Grundlage für zwei explorative Feldstudien. Im Anschluss wird eine Theorie zur Erklärung der Anpassung von Organisationen durch Sprache und Kommunikation vorgestellt. Dies beinhaltet Maße für die Güte von Organisationen im Hinblick auf Kommunikation und Koordination. Schließlich werden anhand dieses theoretischen Modells Hypothesen aufgestellt und in einer multiplen Fallstudie in sechs Informationssystementwicklungsprojekten in der Finanzdienstleistungsindustrie überprüft

Multidimensional models :A state of art

In the last four years, some multidimensional models were defined. Some of these models are focused on query specifications, but only a little has really a conceptual approach. The nex section is an attempt to present some fundamentals over some of "query models". These models are aummarized in [Car 97] and [Sap 99]. For such models, only some comparisions are made with a special emphasis on data structures. The following sections are dedicated to some relevant works on Multidimensional Conceptual and Logic Modeling ([Cab 97], [Gol 98], [Fra 99a], [Sap 99a]). Later, some conclusions, about the works are presented

Developing a compositional ontology alignment framework for unifying business and engineering domains

In the context of the Semantic Web, ontologies refer to the consensual and formal description of shared concepts in a domain. Ontologies are said to be a way to aid communication between humans and machines and also between machines for agent communication. The importance of ontologies for providing a shared understanding of common domains, and as a means for data exchange at the syntactic and semantic level has increased considerably in the last years. Therefore, ontology management becomes a significant task to make distributed and heterogeneous knowledge bases available to the end users. Ontology alignment is the process where ontology from different domains can be matched and processed further together, hence sharing a common understanding of the structure of information among different people. This research starts from a comprehensive review of the current development of ontology, the concepts of ontology alignments and relevant approaches. The first motivation of this work is trying to summarise the common features of ontology alignment and identify underdevelopment areas of ontology alignment. It then works on how complex businesses can be designed and managed by semantic modelling which can help define the data and the relationships between these entities, which provides the ability to abstract different kinds of data and provides an understanding of how the data elements relate. The main contributions of this work is to develop a framework of handling an important category of ontology alignment based on the logical composition of classes, especially under a case that one class from a certain domain becomes a logic prerequisites (assumption) of another class from a different domain (commitment) which only happens if the class from the first domain becomes valid. Under this logic, previously un-alignable classes or miss-aligned classes can be aligned in a significantly improved manner. A well-known rely/guarantee method has been adopted to clearly express such relationships between newly-alignable classes. The proposed methodology has be implemented and evaluated on a realistic case study.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

CMDM: un método conceptual para la especificación de bases multidimensionales

En los últimos años, el área de Data Warehouse y Aplicaciones OLAP ha tenido un desarrollo importante. En este tipo de aplicaciones, se construye una base de datos con visión multidimensional de la realidad. A pesar del amplio desarrollo del área, aún no hay mecanismos de especificación de este tipo de sistemas que permita tener en cuenta la mayor parte de los detalles relevantes de una determinada porción de la realidad. Las especificaciones relacionales [Kim 96] dejan de lado algunos aspectos multidimensionales tales como la dimensionalidad genérica [Cod 93]. Las especificaciones multidimensionales que manejan la dimensionalidad genérica, contemplan los aspectos de carga y/o limpieza de los datos desde datos de un nivel inferior de una forma externa al modelo o directamente, no los contemplan. Pocas propuestas son capaces de permitir la especificación de qué manipulaciones están autorizadas y cuales no, sobre determinado aspecto de la realidad. En este trabajo, se presenta un modelo que permite la especificación detallada de una base de datos multidimensional. Esta especificación se construye mediante un lenguaje gráfico que permite describir las estructuras de datos y algunas restricciones de integridad, y un lenguaje de restricciones de integridad que permite dar una descripción precisa de las relaciones entre los datos

Dotting the “i” of Interoperability in FAIR Cancer-Registry Data Sets

To conform to FAIR principles, data should be findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. Whereas tools exist for making data findable and accessible, interoperability is not straightforward and can limit data reusability. Most interoperability-based solutions address semantic description and metadata linkage, but these alone are not sufficient for the requirements of inter-comparison of population-based cancer data, where strict adherence to data-rules is of paramount importance. Ontologies, and more importantly their formalism in description logics, can play a key role in the automation of data-harmonization processes predominantly via the formalization of the data validation rules within the data-domain model. This in turn leads to a potential quality metric allowing users or agents to determine the limitations in the interpretation and comparability of the data. An approach is described for cancer-registry data with practical examples of how the validation rules can be modeled with description logic. Conformance of data to the rules can be quantified to provide metrics for several quality dimensions. Integrating these with metrics derived for other quality dimensions using tools such as data-shape languages and data-completion tests builds up a data-quality context to serve as an additional component in the FAIR digital object to support interoperability in the wider sense

Ontology Pattern-Based Data Integration

Data integration is concerned with providing a unified access to data residing at multiple sources. Such a unified access is realized by having a global schema and a set of mappings between the global schema and the local schemas of each data source, which specify how user queries at the global schema can be translated into queries at the local schemas. Data sources are typically developed and maintained independently, and thus, highly heterogeneous. This causes difficulties in integration because of the lack of interoperability in the aspect of architecture, data format, as well as syntax and semantics of the data. This dissertation represents a study on how small, self-contained ontologies, called ontology design patterns, can be employed to provide semantic interoperability in a cross-repository data integration system. The idea of this so-called ontology pattern- based data integration is that a collection of ontology design patterns can act as the global schema that still contains sufficient semantics, but is also flexible and simple enough to be used by linked data providers. On the one side, this differs from existing ontology-based solutions, which are based on large, monolithic ontologies that provide very rich semantics, but enforce too restrictive ontological choices, hence are shunned by many data providers. On the other side, this also differs from the purely linked data based solutions, which do offer simplicity and flexibility in data publishing, but too little in terms of semantic interoperability. We demonstrate the feasibility of this idea through the actual development of a large scale data integration project involving seven ocean science data repositories from five institutions in the U.S. In addition, we make two contributions as part of this dissertation work, which also play crucial roles in the aforementioned data integration project. First, we develop a collection of more than a dozen ontology design patterns that capture the key notions in the ocean science occurring in the participating data repositories. These patterns contain axiomatization of the key notions and were developed with an intensive involvement from the domain experts. Modeling of the patterns was done in a systematic workflow to ensure modularity, reusability, and flexibility of the whole pattern collection. Second, we propose the so-called pattern views that allow data providers to publish their data in very simple intermediate schema and show that they can greatly assist data providers to publish their data without requiring a thorough understanding of the axiomatization of the patterns