Ontology similarity in the alignment space

david2010bInternational audienceMeasuring similarity between ontologies can be very useful for different purposes, e.g., finding an ontology to replace another, or finding an ontology in which queries can be translated. Classical measures compute similarities or distances in an ontology space by directly comparing the content of ontologies. We introduce a new family of ontology measures computed in an alignment space: they evaluate the similarity between two ontologies with regard to the available alignments between them. We define two sets of such measures relying on the existence of a path between ontologies or on the ontology entities that are preserved by the alignments. The former accounts for known relations between ontologies, while the latter reflects the possibility to perform actions such as instance import or query translation. All these measures have been implemented in the OntoSim library, that has been used in experiments which showed that entity preserving measures are comparable to the best ontology space measures. Moreover, they showed a robust behaviour with respect to the alteration of the alignment space

Project management between will and representation

This article challenges some deep-rooted assumptions of project management. Inspired by the work of the German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, it calls for looking at projects through two complementary lenses: one that accounts for cognitive and representational aspects and one that accounts for material and volitional aspects. Understanding the many ways in which these aspects transpire and interact in projects sheds new light on project organizations, as imperfect and fragile representations that chase a shifting nexus of intractable human, social, technical, and material processes. This, in turn, can bring about a new grasp of notions such as value,\ud knowledge, complexity, and risk

Increasing altruistic and cooperative behaviour with simple moral nudges

The conflict between pro-self and pro-social behaviour is at the core of many key problems of our time, as, for example, the reduction of air pollution and the redistribution of scarce resources. For the well-being of our societies, it is thus crucial to find mechanisms to promote pro-social choices over egoistic ones. Particularly important, because cheap and easy to implement, are those mechanisms that can change people's behaviour without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives, the so-called "nudges". Previous research has found that moral nudges (e.g., making norms salient) can promote pro-social behaviour. However, little is known about whether their effect persists over time and spills across context. This question is key in light of research showing that pro-social actions are often followed by selfish actions, thus suggesting that some moral manipulations may backfire. Here we present a class of simple moral nudges that have a great positive impact on pro-sociality. In Studies 1-4 (total N = 1,400), we use economic games to demonstrate that asking subjects to self-report "what they think is the morally right thing to do" does not only increase pro-sociality in the choice immediately after, but also in subsequent choices, and even when the social context changes. In Study 5, we explore whether moral nudges promote charity donations to humanitarian organisations in a large (N = 1,800) crowdfunding campaign. We find that, in this context, moral nudges increase donations by about 44 percent

A Semantic Service Matching Middleware for Mobile Devices Discovering Grid Services

The combination of mobile and Grid computing enables high performance Grid access through resource-limited mobile devices. Many challenges require to be addressed before vision of building the bridge between Grid and mobile computing field is realized. One of the essential challenges is that mobile devices need to locate and select appropriate Grid services in an automatic and flexible way. However, at the current stage, both Grid service description and discovery mechanisms are still at an immature stage. This paper presents research into building a service matching middleware with Semantic Web technologies. Semantic Web technologies permit an efficient discovery of various Grid services for mobile devices by adding the machine-processable explicit knowledge into the interaction between mobile devices and Grid services. The middleware has been implemented successfully and interacts correctly with other service-oriented mobile Grid middleware, thus facilitating an enhanced Grid access for mobile devices. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

Comparison between ontology distances (preliminary results)

david2008aInternational audienceThere are many reasons for measuring a distance between ontologies. In particular, it is useful to know quickly if two ontologies are close or remote before deciding to match them. To that extent, a distance between ontologies must be quickly computable. We present constraints applying to such measures and several possible ontology distances. Then we evaluate experimentally some of them in order to assess their accuracy and speed

Nonstandard Concepts of Similarity in Case-Based Reasoning

Introduction The present paper is aimed at propagating new concepts of similarity more flexible and expressive than those underlying most case-based reasoning approaches today. So, it mainly deals with criticizing approaches in use, with motivating and introducing new notions and notations, and with first steps towards future applications. The investigations at hand originate from the author's work in learning theory. In exploring the relationship between inductive learning and case-based learning within a quite formal setting (cf. [Jan92b]), it turned out that both areas almost coincide, if sufficiently flexible similarity concepts are taken into acount. This provides some formal arguments for the necessity of non-symmetric similarity measures. Encouraged by these first results, the author tried to investigate more structured learning problems from the view point of case-based reasoning. It turned out that an appropriate handling requires formalisms allowing similarity conce