Meeting the IT Skills Crisis: An Interdisciplinary Response

The pervasiveness of computers in modern life has created a need for greater diversity in the knowledge and skills of information/technology professionals. We, as well as others, have identified an IT education gap between the technical focus of computer science degrees and the business focus of MIS concentrations. We describe a new interdisciplinary curriculum (a Bachelor of Science in Information Science) that Northeastern University has developed to fill the IT education gap. The new degree draws from computer science, business, and behavioral science, offering a balance between the technical, functional, and human dimensions of information/system analysis and design not found in other undergraduate programs. It encompasses three broad content areas: computer technology, information systems and human/organizational context. In addition, students acquire the analytical models and tools needed to approach the content areas from a conceptual perspective. An experiential learning requirement enables students to apply their classroom knowledge and skills in relevant productive work. In the future, academics and practitioners need to work together to better articulate new career paths for information/technology professionals and the appropriate educational programs to serve their needs

Representing Scientific Experiments: Implications for Ontology Design and Knowledge Sharing

As part of the development of knowledge sharing technology, it is necessary to consider a variety of domains and tasks in order to ensure that the shared framework is widely applicable. This paper describes an ontology design project in experimental molecular biology, focusing on extensions to previous ontological models and frame-based formalisms that allow us to handle problems in the representation of experimental science knowledge. We define object histories, which are used to track substances through a series of experimental processes, including those which transform their participants from one category to another. We define object and process complexes - temporary configurations with features of their own. We present extensions to a frame-based formalism to support these features. Additional features of our frame formalism include slot groups for identifying sets of relations with common properties, and partial filler restrictions that combine knowledge of the most likely slot v..

Ontological Foundations for Biology Knowledge Models

This paper analyzes the ontological requirements for representing biology knowledge, and identifies several areas where current knowledge representation (KR) paradigms need to be extended. We focus on the representation of experimental materials and methods, and the reasoning task of intelligent information retrieval; however, the ontological issues we raise apply to biology (and experimental sciences) in general. We have identified two important concept types in molecular biology that cause problems for standard knowledge models: 1) complex substances such as mixtures and nucleic acid sequences; 2) transformations (such as biochemical reactions) that convert one substance into another. We describe these problems, propose solutions for some of them, and give examples of the need for such knowledge representations in intelligent information retrieval. 1. Introduction Current research aimed at the development of knowledge sharing technology [Gruber 1993, Lehman 1995] is based on the fo..

Improving Dictionary-Based Disambiguation Text Entry Method Accuracy

Text entry on mobile devices is problematic because of ever-decreasing device sizes. Dictionary-based keypad text entry methods are relatively effective, but still run into problems of word ambiguity, especially when used with small numbers of keys. Common text entry disambiguation methods only use word frequency information to resolve conflicts. This paper proposes a new method that also looks at semantic information (distances between word meanings). Simulations show encouraging results, suggesting potential practical applications of this method to mobile devices

Creating a knowledge base of biological research papers

oriented databases. Abstract develop will be applicable to other branches of molecular Intelligent text-oriented tools for representing and searching the biological research literature are being developed, which combine object-oriented databases with artificial intelligence techniques to create a richly structured knowledge base of Materials and Methods sections of biological research papers. A knowledge model of experimental processes, biological and chemical substances, and analytical techniques is described, based on the representation techniques of taxonomic semantic nets and knowledge frames. Two approaches to populating the knowledge base with the contents of biological research papers are described: natural language processing and an interactive knowledge definition tool. 1