The relevance of perspectivism to the task of modularisation in ontology development

An ontology development methodology seeks to provide developers with established principles, processes, practices, methods and activities for developing ontologies (Gasevic et al., 2009). Diverse methodologies have been published for the development of ontologies, and have evolved, based on the diverse experiences of researchers and practitioners, and the development teams who surveyed the benefits and shortcomings of the available methodologies in order to determine the applicability of methodologies to particular contexts. An evaluation of existing ontology development methodologies has identified that the concept formulation process is not well defined, or based on rigorous processes (Castro et al., 2006; Winters &amp; Tolk, 2009). In order for the validity of the social realism of the actors in a social setting to be captured, the perspectives of each actor needs to be acknowledged and incorporated into the concept formulation process / framework. This paper demonstrates how consideration of perspectivism leads to a meaningful modularisation of the resultant ontology.<br /

Providing for Perspectives: The Role of Discourse Analysis in Ontology Concept Formulation and Development

Concept formulation and ontology development are problematic to achieve in complex social settings. Previously, we have proposed and illustrated a method to develop an ontology based on grounded theory, whereby the ontology is linked to the social processes involved. Further, distinct actors in the social setting assume perspectives that are often fundamentally different from each other. We have previously argued that perspectivism is a cogent theoretical explanation for the different emergent ontologies. However, a rigorous method for analysing the text, in order to identify these perspectives has been needed. In this paper we propose the identification of perspectives by using discourse analysis to bridge between term identification and clarification of perspectives. We have found that discourse analysis provides the structure and rigour required to establish the presence of perspectives, and that actors use metaphors and the genre of historical stories to bridge between, or link with, other perspectives. It is likely that identifying perspectives and the role of language in linking them will produce ontological modularity that is true to the social setting

Illustrating The Process Of Ontology Concept Formulation In A Multi-Perspective Social Setting

Developing an ontology for use in a social process requires conceptualisation of the domain, and the influence of skills and perspectives of actors in the processes to be considered. It is essential that methodologies have a rigorous concept formulation process that ensures abstraction from the domain narration and also disambiguates the terms in the narration. However, the abstraction needs to be a parsimonious representation of a community’s collaborative terminology and concept pluralism. This paper presents a method of ontological concept formulation, using an approach based on a rigorous grounded theory method, and illustrates the process using a fragment from a case study. We have found that the method has assisted in clarifying terms emerging from the text and in grounding the conceptual understanding of natural language fragments, by interpreting concepts at the phrase level with the support of a reference lexicon, and using a basis of perspectivism. The identification of semantic relationships between concepts is conducted within the multiple adopted perspectives and permits a pluralistic approach to ontological formulatio

Epistemologies in Use in Information Systems Research: Divergence or Change?

Researchers have referred to the dangers of widely diverse approaches for the future of Information Systems (IS) research and argued for ‘controlled diversity’, where some degree of consensus exists. The aim of this study was to test the degree of epistemological diversity found in a national IS research community and through this, to provide a verification and update of the results of a similar analysis in a North American context. The paper reports on an empirical study of the epistemology of Australian academic mainstream IS papers published in ten outlets between 1980 and 1996. Although increasing epistemological diversity was found it started from a homogeneous base and there were indications that it was controlled. The study tracked part of a longitudinal change process that may lead to consensus

Reflections on the Cross-cultural Delivery of an Information Systems Degree in China

The School of Information System at the University of Tasmania has been teaching a Bachelor of Information Systems degree at the Shanghai Fisheries University for the past three years. This article critically reflects on the nature of that teaching, the issues that have arisen and the methodology that was adopted to introduce this programme to a Chinese university. A framework for the analysis of international education has been adopted as a means through which to identify each of the issues that have arisen in the delivery and administration of this programme. The findings reflect on impact of the social and cultural contexts in which such international off- shore programmes are delivered

Understanding the Benefits of Ontology Use for Australian Industry: A Conceptual Study

In IT, rather than philosophy, an ontology makes explicit the meanings of terms used in domains, or concerning a specific reality, so that people and machines can precisely discuss the meaning of data. Specifically, ontology makes data sharing and analysis easier by making the meaning of data, and of the reality to which the database refers, explicit. Ontology has significant uptake in biomedicine but not yet in industry despite much technical development and reporting of specific successes. This research seeks to determine how and why organisations gain benefits from using ontology leading to a rigorously tested model of how business gains benefit from ontology use. This research in progress paper develops a model explaining the benefit of ontology use to firms and outlines our plans to test the model empirically. The outcome is significant for Australian industry because it will guide the efforts of organisations to use ontology effectively

Telecommunications in the IS Curriculum

A major shift away from centralized data processing to distributed system and an increasing emphasis on the use of IS technology to link individuals and entities inside and outside the orgaxiizatioit has created an imperative to integrate the study of telecoIninuiiicatioris networks into the IS curriculum. The subject of this tutorial is to exploie the appropriate dornain of telecommunications subjects to be included in the IS curriculum md to discuss various approaches to developicg arid teaching courses in telecoininunicatioiis

Twill: A hybrid microcontroller-FPGA framework for parallelizing single-threaded C programs

Increasingly System-On-A-Chip platforms which incorporate both microprocessors and re-programmable logic are being utilized across several fields ranging from the automotive industry to network infrastructure. Unfortunately, the development tools accompanying these products leave much to be desired, requiring knowledge of both traditional embedded systems languages like C and hardware description languages like Verilog. We propose to bridge this gap with Twill, a truly automatic hybrid compiler that can take advantage of the parallelism inherent in these platforms. Twill can extract long-running threads from single threaded C code and distribute these threads across the hardware and software domains to more fully utilize the asymmetric characteristics between processors and the embedded reconfigurable logic fabric. We show that Twill provides a significant performance increase on the CHStone benchmarks with an average 1.63 times increase over the pure hardware approach and an increase of 22.2 times on average over the pure software approach while in general decreasing the area required by the reconfigurable logic compared to the pure hardware approach