Towards an ontology modeling tool. A validation in software engineering scenarios.

Ontology creation and management related processes are very important to define and develop semantic services. Ontology Engineering is the research field that provides the mechanisms to manage the life cycle of the ontologies. However, the process of building ontologies can be tedious and sometimes exhaustive. OWL VisMod is a tool designed for developing ontological engineering based on visual analytics concep tual modeling for OWL ontologies life cycle management, supporting both creation and understanding tasks. This paper is devoted to evaluate OWL VisMod through a set of defined tasks. The same tasks also will be done with the most known tool in Ontology Engineering, Protégé, in order to compare the obtained results and be able to know how is OWL VisMod perceived for the expert users. The comparison shows that both tools have similar acceptation scores, but OWL VisMod presents better feelings regard ing user’s perception tasks due to the visual analytics influence

Issue on Visual Analytics

Journal of Information Technology Research (JITR) has a long tradition in publishing research papers devoted to develop new automatic and intelligent data analysis, for example this feature is pretty present in the four papers that compose current JITR issue. Artificial intelligent techniques, new algorithms, data mining approaches, agent-based solutions, etc. are usually used to do that. Also, it is very common that the performed analysis techniques are complemented with data visualization for presenting the results to the analyst in order to proceed with the decision-making processes

Presentation of the GRIAL research group and its main research lines and projects on March 2016

[EN]Presentation of the GRIAL research group and its main research lines and projects in the Intelligent System Master Degree of University of Salamanca on March 7th, 2016

Knowledge Spirals in Higher Education Teaching Innovation

[EN]A R&I&i process for a knowledge management system development is presented. It transforms different institutions experiences into organisational knowledge applicable to an entire sector, the higher education one specifically. The knowledge management system allows classifying, organising, distributing and facilitating the application of the knowledge generated by the faculty. A study, with more than 1000 system users, reflects that the system helps to the faculty in the way they perform educational innovation activities. The supported model integrates both Nonaka’s epistemological and ontological spirals. This allows defining ontologies and used them in order to transform the individual knowledge into organisational one. The knowledge management system encapsulates complex logic expressions and ontologies management, making easy for the users obtaining successful results that may organise in their own way, becoming a powerful knowledge management process that combines epistemological and ontological knowledge spirals to convert individual experiences in educational innovation into organisational knowledge in the higher education sector

The Role of Application Domain Knowledge in Using OWL DL Diagrams: A Study of Inference and Problem-Solving Tasks

Diagrammatic conceptual schemas are an important part of information systems analysis and design. For effectively communicating domain semantics, modeling grammars have been proposed to create highly expressive conceptual schemas. One such grammar is the Web Ontology Language (OWL), which relies upon description logics (DL) as a knowledge representation mechanism. While an OWL DL diagram can be useful for representing domain semantics in great detail, the formal semantics of OWL DL places a burden on diagram users. This research investigates how user’s prior knowledge of the application domain impacts solving inference tasks as well as schema-based problem-solving tasks using OWL DL diagrams. Our empirical validation shows that application domain knowledge has no effect on inference performance but enhances schema-based problem-solving performance. We contribute to the conceptual modeling literature by studying task performance for a highly expressive modeling grammar and introducing inference tasks as a new task type

An ontology-based multi-domain model in social network analysis: Experimental validation and case study

Benítez-Andrades, J. A., García-Rodríguez, I., Benavides, C., Alaiz-Moretón, H., & Labra Gayo, J. E. (2020). An ontology-based multi-domain model in social network analysis: Experimental validation and case study. Information Sciences, 540, 390-413. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ins.2020.06.008[EN] The use of social network theory and methods of analysis have been applied to different domains in recent years, including public health. The complete procedure for carrying out a social network analysis (SNA) is a time-consuming task that entails a series of steps in which the expert in social network analysis could make mistakes. This research presents a multi-domain knowledge model capable of automatically gathering data and carrying out different social network analyses in different domains, without errors and obtaining the same conclusions that an expert in SNA would obtain. The model is represented in an ontology called OntoSNAQA, which is made up of classes, properties and rules representing the domains of People, Questionnaires and Social Network Analysis. Besides the ontology itself, different rules are represented by SWRL and SPARQL queries. A Knowledge Based System was created using OntoSNAQA and applied to a real case study in order to show the advantages of the approach. Finally, the results of an SNA analysis obtained through the model were compared to those obtained from some of the most widely used SNA applications: UCINET, Pajek, Cytoscape and Gephi, to test and confirm the validity of the model.SIJunta de Castilla y Leó

An Ontology-Based multi-domain model in Social Network Analysis: Experimental validation and case study

The use of social network theory and methods of analysis have been applied to different domains in recent years, including public health. The complete procedure for carrying out a social network analysis (SNA) is a time-consuming task that entails a series of steps in which the expert in social network analysis could make mistakes. This research presents a multi-domain knowledge model capable of automatically gathering data and carrying out different social network analyses in different domains, without errors and obtaining the same conclusions that an expert in SNA would obtain. The model is represented in an ontology called OntoSNAQA, which is made up of classes, properties and rules representing the domains of People, Questionnaires and Social Network Analysis. Besides the ontology itself, different rules are represented by SWRL and SPARQL queries. A Knowledge Based System was created using OntoSNAQA and applied to a real case study in order to show the advantages of the approach. Finally, the results of an SNA analysis obtained through the model were compared to those obtained from some of the most widely used SNA applications: UCINET, Pajek, Cytoscape and Gephi, to test and confirm the validity of the model

VOWL 2: User-Oriented Visualization of Ontologies

Abstract. Ontologies become increasingly important as a means to structure and organize information. This requires methods and tools that enable not only ontol-ogy experts but also other user groups to work with ontologies and related data. We have developed VOWL, a comprehensive and well-specified visual language for the user-oriented representation of ontologies, and conducted a comparative study on an initial version of VOWL. Based upon results from that study, as well as an extensive review of other ontology visualizations, we have reworked many parts of VOWL. In this paper, we present the new version VOWL 2 and describe how the initial definitions were used to systematically redefine the visual notation. Besides the novelties of the visual language, which is based on a well-defined set of graphical primitives and an abstract color scheme, we briefly describe two im-plementations of VOWL 2. To gather some insight into the user experience with the new version of VOWL, we have conducted a qualitative user study. We report on the study and its results, which confirmed that not only the general ideas of VOWL but also most of our enhancements for VOWL 2 can be well understood by casual ontology users