Knowledge formalization in experience feedback processes : an ontology-based approach

Because of the current trend of integration and interoperability of industrial systems, their size and complexity continue to grow making it more difficult to analyze, to understand and to solve the problems that happen in their organizations. Continuous improvement methodologies are powerful tools in order to understand and to solve problems, to control the effects of changes and finally to capitalize knowledge about changes and improvements. These tools involve suitably represent knowledge relating to the concerned system. Consequently, knowledge management (KM) is an increasingly important source of competitive advantage for organizations. Particularly, the capitalization and sharing of knowledge resulting from experience feedback are elements which play an essential role in the continuous improvement of industrial activities. In this paper, the contribution deals with semantic interoperability and relates to the structuring and the formalization of an experience feedback (EF) process aiming at transforming information or understanding gained by experience into explicit knowledge. The reuse of such knowledge has proved to have significant impact on achieving themissions of companies. However, the means of describing the knowledge objects of an experience generally remain informal. Based on an experience feedback process model and conceptual graphs, this paper takes domain ontology as a framework for the clarification of explicit knowledge and know-how, the aim of which is to get lessons learned descriptions that are significant, correct and applicable

Review of Content Languages Suitable for Agent-Agent Communication

This technical report provides an evaluation of several possible languages and semantic formalisms that could be used in agent communication to play the role of a content language in the EU Agentcities.RTD project. The conclusions and background information may however be useful for agent developers more generally. This document includes a description of candidate languages, a list of criteria applied, evaluations of the five candidate languages and a final evaluation. The five candidate languages were DAML+OIL, ebXML, FIPA-SL, KIF and Prolog and the choice made for the EU Agentcities.RTD project was to develop services in KIF, FIPA-SL or both. Furthermore it is expected that the number and type of content language used in the EU Agentcities.RTD project will evolve over time as tests are carried out. The review process which led to the authoring of this document was carried out in the context of the Agentcities.RTD IST funded project (IST-2000-28385) and we would like to thank all project partners who contributed to it. The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the EU Agentcities.RTD partners

Verification of knowledge shared across design and manufacture using a foundation ontology

Seamless computer-based knowledge sharing between departments of a manufacturing enterprise is useful in preventing unnecessary design revisions. A lack of interoperability between independently developed knowledge bases, however, is a major impediment in the development of a seamless knowledge sharing system. Interoperability, being an ability to overcome semantic and syntactic differences during computer-based knowledge sharing can be enhanced through the use of ontologies. Ontologies in computer science terms are hierarchical structures of knowledge stored in a computer-based knowledge base. Ontologies have been accepted by all as an interoperable medium to provide a non-subjective way of storing and sharing knowledge across diverse domains. Some semantic and syntactic differences, however, still crop up when these ontological knowledge bases are developed independently. A case study in an aerospace components manufacturing company suggests that shape features of a component are perceived differently by the designing and manufacturing departments. These differences cause further misunderstanding and misinterpretation when computer-based knowledge sharing systems are used across the two domains. Foundation or core ontologies can be used to overcome these differences and to ensure a seamless sharing of knowledge. This is because these ontologies provide a common grounding for domain ontologies to be used by individual domains or department. This common grounding can be used by the mediation and knowledge verification systems to authenticate the meaning of knowledge understood across different domains. For this reason, this research proposes a knowledge verification framework for developing a system capable of verifying knowledge between those domain ontologies which are developed out of a common core or foundation ontology. This framework makes use of ontology logic to standardize the way concepts from a foundation and core-concepts ontology are used in domain ontologies and then by using the same principles the knowledge being shared is verified. The Knowledge Frame Language which is based on Common Logic is used for formalizing example ontologies. The ontology editor used for browsing and querying ontologies is the Integrated Ontology Development Environment (IODE) by Highfleet Inc. An ontological product modelling technique is also developed in this research, to test the proposed framework in the scenario of manufacturability analysis. The proposed framework is then validated through a Java API specially developed for this purpose. Real industrial examples experienced during the case study are used for validation

Ontology-based Approximate Query Processing for Searching the Semantic Web with Corese

The semantic web relies on ontologies representing domains through their main concepts and the relations between them. Such a domain knowledge is the keystone to represent the semantic contents of web resources and services in metadata associated to them. These metadata then enable us to search for information based on the semantics of web resources rather than their syntactic forms. However, in the context of the semantic web there are many possibilities of executing queries that would not retrieve any resource. The viewpoints of the designers of ontologies, of the designers of annotations and of the users performing a Web search may not completely match. The user may not completely share or understand the viewpoints of the designers and this mismatch may lead to missed answers. Approximate query processing is then of prime importance for efficiently searching the Semantic Web. In this paper we present the Corese ontology-based search engine we have developped to handle RDF(S) and OWL Lite metadata. We present its theoretical foundation, its query language, and we stress its ability to process approximate queries

Ontological View-driven Semantic Integration in Open Environments

In an open computing environment, such as the World Wide Web or an enterprise Intranet, various information systems are expected to work together to support information exchange, processing, and integration. However, information systems are usually built by different people, at different times, to fulfil different requirements and goals. Consequently, in the absence of an architectural framework for information integration geared toward semantic integration, there are widely varying viewpoints and assumptions regarding what is essentially the same subject. Therefore, communication among the components supporting various applications is not possible without at least some translation. This problem, however, is much more than a simple agreement on tags or mappings between roughly equivalent sets of tags in related standards. Industry-wide initiatives and academic studies have shown that complex representation issues can arise. To deal with these issues, a deep understanding and appropriate treatment of semantic integration is needed. Ontology is an important and widely accepted approach for semantic integration. However, usually there are no explicit ontologies with information systems. Rather, the associated semantics are implied within the supporting information model. It reflects a specific view of the conceptualization that is implicitly defining an ontological view. This research proposes to adopt ontological views to facilitate semantic integration for information systems in open environments. It proposes a theoretical foundation of ontological views, practical assumptions, and related solutions for research issues. The proposed solutions mainly focus on three aspects: the architecture of a semantic integration enabled environment, ontological view modeling and representation, and semantic equivalence relationship discovery. The solutions are applied to the collaborative intelligence project for the collaborative promotion / advertisement domain. Various quality aspects of the solutions are evaluated and future directions of the research are discussed

Specification of knowledge acquisition and modeling of the process of the consensus

zhdanova2004aIn this deliverable, specification of knowledge acquisition and modeling of the process of consensus is provided

Ontology Engineering: a Survey and a Return on Experience

Ontology is a new object of IA that recently came to maturity and a powerful conceptual tool of Knowledge Modeling. It provides a coherent base to build on, and a shared reference to align with, in the form of a consensual conceptual vocabulary, on which one can build descriptions and communication acts. This report presents the object that is called "an ontology" and a state of the art of engineering techniques for ontologies. Then it describes a project for which we developed an ontology and used it to improve knowledge management. Finally it describes the design process and discuss the resulting ontology

Examining the Application of Modular and Contextualised Ontology in Query Expansions for Information Retrieval

This research considers the ongoing challenge of semantics-based search from the perspective of how to exploit Semantic Web languages for search in the current Web environment. The purpose of the PhD was to use ontology-based query expansion (OQE) to improve search effectiveness by increasing search precision, i.e. retrieving relevant documents in the topmost ranked positions in a returned document list. Query experiments have required a novel search tool that can combine Semantic Web technologies in an otherwise traditional IR process using a Web document collection