Applied Ontology

Practice-Based Ontologies: A New Approach to Address the Challenges of Ontology and Knowledge Representation in History and Archaeology

by Emad Khazraee

Co-authored with Khoo, M.
Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2011, Volume 240, Part 4, 375-386.

Data production in history and archaeology far outpaces data processing. In order to apply computers to this problem,... more Data production in history and archaeology far outpaces data processing. In order to apply computers to this problem, historical data must be converted to machine-readable forms. This process is easy for domains of
knowledge that have explicit terminology, but history and archaeology lack these characteristics. This study therefore proposes a phenomenological approach to requirements gathering for knowledge representation and ontology systems for historians and archaeologists. The approach utilizes qualitative and ethnographic research methods to gather data on practitioners’ reasoning and knowledge practices. The design requirements for ontology design can beextracted from the ‘thick description’ produced by this process, and used to build ‘practice-based ontologies.’ This paper presents the theoretical framework and early outcomes of ethnographic research with archaeologists in practice at the University of Pennsylvania.

Demystifying Ontology

by Emad Khazraee

Co-authored with Lin, X., (2011).
International UDC Seminar 2011: Classification and Ontology, Hague, Netherland, September 2010.

The term “ontology” is used in different communities multifariously, even in an anarchic way. Ironically, the major... more The term “ontology” is used in different communities multifariously, even in an anarchic way. Ironically, the major functions of ontology itself is to explicate the meaning of terms and concepts. Therefore, different conceptions of this term impede collaboration and exchange of expertise between different domains and communities. Thus, providing a clear image of different notions of ontology is a precondition of communication. This paper studies different notions of ontology and attempts to compare these different conceptions, and to organize them in a model to facilitate collaboration in this field. It is proposed to use ontology gamut model instead of one-dimensional ontology spectrums used in the past. This model can be used as a basis of agreement to clarify the term ontology among different communities by providing levels of formality, semantics and complexity. The coordinates of each ontology in this gamut help understanding the specific conception of that ontology.

ThinknLearn: An Ontology-Driven Mobile Web Application For Science Enquiry Based Learning

by David Parsons

Co-authored with Sohaib Ahmed. In proceedings of the ICITA 2011 conference, Sydney, Australia.

In recent years, there have been major advances in opportunities to learn with mobile devices. These devices provide... more In recent years, there have been major advances in opportunities to learn with mobile devices. These devices provide the possibility of extending the learning environment far beyond classroom walls. Enquiry-based learning, much of which also takes place outside the classroom, aims to provide educational activities and tools to help learn science by doing science. This way of learning can fosters learners’ motivation and interest. However, the educational advantages of this kind of learning are often challenged by the learners’ misunderstandings and incorrectly inferred hypotheses from collected data. Ontology-driven applications exhibit features such as expressiveness, extensibility, ease of sharing and reuse, and logic reasoning support, and thus may help us to more effectively guide enquiry based learning. In this paper, we use an example scenario to show how mobile ontology-driven applications can support learners during such enquiry investigations.

Agile software development methodology, an ontological analysis

by David Parsons

Written for the APIS 2010 conference

Agile methods have emerged in recent years as a new paradigm in software development, promising to free the process of... more Agile methods have emerged in recent years as a new paradigm in software development, promising to free the process of building software systems from some of the constraints of more traditional approaches. However the plethora of overlapping methods makes it
difficult to identify the core features of an agile approach that transcends any particular method and provide us with an overarching methodology. This paper takes an ontological approach to analyzing the core components of an agile methodology based on an analysis of existing literature related to agile ontology. The intent of this ontology is to assist our understanding of the kernel of software engineering theory that underlies agile methodology.

Supporting Adaptive Learning Interactions with Ontologies

by David Parsons

Co-authored with Sohaib Ahmed and Hokyoung Ryu. In proceedings of 11th Annual ACM SIGCHI NZ Conference on Computer-Human Interaction, 8-9 July 2010, Auckland, New Zealand

The concept of adaptive technologies is increasingly prevalent in many areas, particularly in learning. In this... more The concept of adaptive technologies is increasingly prevalent in many areas, particularly in learning. In this context we require quick and robust approaches for developing adaptive learning environments. In order to construct such environments, we need to enable reusability of learning contents according to the needs of learners, which is one of the challenges for current learning technologies. In this paper we show how an ontology-based approach can help us to reuse the same learning contents for different purposes.

Declerck, G., Charlet, J. (2011). Intelligence Artificielle, ontologies et connaissances en médecine. Les limites de la mécanisation de la pensée

by Gunnar Declerck

Prepublication version
Complete reference :
Declerck, G., Charlet, J. (2011). Intelligence Artificielle, ontologies et connaissances en médecine. Les limites de la mécanisation de la pensée. Revue d’Intelligence Artificielle (RIA), vol. 25, n°4, pp. 445-472, n° spécial « Intelligence artificielle et santé »

This theoretical article aims to draw up an inventory of the latest advances in medical knowledge engineering in the... more This theoretical article aims to draw up an inventory of the latest advances in medical knowledge engineering in the specific area of ontologies and knowledge based systems design. Echoing the debates that animated the landscape of Artificial Intelligence (AI) from the 1970s under the impetus of Dreyfus HL, it aims to show that most of the difficulties currently faced by medical knowledge engineering are inherent in the nature of AI, whose project is the mechanization of cognitive activity. As such it promotes the idea that only a fair understanding of what machines can do, given their machinic character itself, and remains, despite its cognitive finitude, a property of human being, may offer to balancing the scales between tasks that can be allocated to machines and those that have to be left in charge of humans.

The Ontological Level: Revisiting 30 Years of Knowledge Representation

by Nicola Guarino

in Alex Borgida, Vinay Chaudhri, Paolo Giorgini, Eric Yu (eds.), Conceptual Modelling: Foundations and Applications. Essays in Honor of John Mylopoulos, Springer Verlag 2009, pp. 52-67.

I revisit here the motivations and the main proposal of paper I published at the 1994 Wittgenstein Symposium, entitled... more I revisit here the motivations and the main proposal of paper I published at the 1994 Wittgenstein Symposium, entitled “The Ontological Level”, in the light of the main results achieved in the latest 30 years of Knowledge Representation, since the well known “What’s in a link?” paper by Bill Woods. I will argue that, despite the explosion of ontologies, many problems are still there, since there is no general agreement about having ontological distinctions built in the representation language, so that assumptions concerning the basic constructs of representation languages remain implicit in the mind of the knowledge engineer, and difficult to express and to share. I will recap the recent results concerning formal ontological distinctions among unary and binary relations, sketching a basic ontology of meta-level categories representation languages should be aware of, and I will discuss the role of such distinctions in the current practice of knowledge engineering.

Knowledge-Based System for Software Requirements Analysis and Management

by Maxim Bakaev

co-authored with Natalja Pustovalova,
Knowledge and Ontology Elsewhere, at Ershov Informatics Conference (PSI 11)

Ontology to Support Web Design Activities in E-Commerce Software Development Process

by Maxim Bakaev

Proc. IASTED ACIT'2010, p. 241-248

The paper suggests an application of knowledge engineering methods to support web design-related decisions and enhance... more The paper suggests an application of knowledge engineering methods to support web design-related decisions and enhance usability for e-commerce software products. A prototype of a frame-based ontology was designed with Protégé editor to integrate somehow scattered and discrepant knowledge in the fields of HCI, usability engineering, web design, etc. Knowledge discovery and information extraction are demonstrated for a sample target group of elder users, resulting in formal rules and text-based guidelines. The developed ontology could be used in an expert system or for training to improve e-commerce software quality. Considerations for online publishing of the ontology for further knowledge discovery, validation and formalization are provided.

Ontology to Support HCI Design for E-Commerce (in Russian)

by Maxim Bakaev

Разработка онтологии для поддержки проектирования человеко-компьютерного взаимодействия в сфере электронной коммерции,
журнал "Вестник компьютерных и
информационных технологий" (2011)

Ontology verification with repositories

by Torsten Hahmann

Cross-lingual Evaluation of Ontologies with Rudify

by Amanda Hicks

Rudify is a set of tools used for automatically annotating concepts in an ontology with the ontological... more Rudify is a set of tools used for automatically annotating concepts in an ontology with the ontological meta-properties employed by OntoClean [1]. While OntoClean provides a methodology for evaluating ontological hierarchies based on ontological meta-properties of the concepts in the hierarchy, it does not provide a method for determining the meta-properties of a given concept within an ontology. Rudify has been developed to help bridge this gap, and has been used in the KYOTO project to facilitate ontology development. The general idea behind Rudify is the assumption that a preferred set of linguistic expressions is used when talking about ontological meta-properties. Thus, one can deduce a concept’s meta-properties from the usage of the concept’s lexical representation (LR) in natural language. This paper describes the theory behind Rudify, the development of Rudify, and evaluates Rudify’s output for the rigidity of base concepts in English, Dutch, and Spanish. Our overall conclusion is that the decisive output for English is useable data, while the procedure currently exploited by Rudify does not easily carry over to Spanish and Dutch.

Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management: First International Joint Conference, IC3K 2009, Funchal, Madeira, Portugal, …

by Amanda Hicks

KYOTO: a wiki for establishing semantic interoperability for knowledge sharing across languages and cultures

by Amanda Hicks

Smith's Cognitive Geometry of War: A Non-Formal Ontological Critique from the Perspective of International Law by Juneko J. Robinson

by Juneko Robinson

From a Community of Practice to a Body of Knowledge: A Case Study of the Formal Methods Community

by Jonathan Bowen

By Jonathan P. Bowen and Steve Reeves. In Michael Butler and Wolfram Schulte (eds.), FM 2011: 17th International Symposium of Formal Methods. Springer-Verlag, LNCS, Volume 6664, pages 308-322, 2011. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-21437-0_24

See also http://issuu.com/jpbowen/docs/fm2011

A Body of Knowledge (BoK) is an ontology for a particular professional domain. A Community of Practice (CoP) is the... more A Body of Knowledge (BoK) is an ontology for a particular professional domain. A Community of Practice (CoP) is the collection of people developing such knowledge. In the paper we explore these concepts in the context of the formal methods community in general and the Z notation community, as has been supported by the Z User Group, in particular. The existing SWEBOK Software Engineering Body of Knowledge is considered with respect to formal methods and a high-level model for the possible structure of of a BoK is provided using the Z notation.

2009 - Un sistema Informativo per la gestione dello spazio urbano

by Vittorio Fronza

co-authored with A. Nardini; published in V Congresso Nazionale di Archeologia Medievale. Foggia-Manfredonia, 30 settembre - 3 ottobre 2009, a cura di P. Favia e G. Volpe, Firenze, 2009, pp. 68-72.

2009 - Verso OpenArcheo2. Idee e prototipi

by Vittorio Fronza

co-authored with L. Isabella: published in V Congresso Nazionale di Archeologia Medievale. Foggia-Manfredonia, 30 settembre - 3 ottobre 2009, a cura di P. Favia e G. Volpe, Firenze, 2009, pp. 48-52.

2007-A monte del software libero. Riflessioni sulla progettazione di architetture aperte per la gestione del dato archeologico

by Vittorio Fronza

published in: R. Bagnara and G. Macchi Janica (eds.), Open Source, Free Software e Open Format nei processi di ricerca archeologica. Atti del I Workshop (Grosseto, 8 maggio 2006), Firenze, 2007, pp. 33-45.

The recent interest of archaeologists in the world of open source software is definitely an important innovation. It... more The recent interest of archaeologists in the world of open source software is definitely an important innovation. It helps in making a better use of technology, to be intended as a mean to build and spread collective historical knowledge. As a result, the need of planning solutions to be shared and improved by the entire scientific community becomes the main issue, to be placed ahead of the simple use of OS/FS. Our proposal is to apply the key concepts of free software development to archaeological solutions, within the frame of a more general rethinking of the use of computers in our discipline.

Overcoming Interoperability Weaknesses in e-Government Processes: Organizing and Sharing Knowledge in Regional Development Programs Using Ontologies

by Beniamino Murgante

Scorza F., Las Casas G., Murgante B. (2010) “Overcoming Interoperability Weaknesses in e-Government Processes: Organizing and Sharing Knowledge in Regional Development Programs Using Ontologies” in Lytras M.D., Ordonez De Pablos P., Ziderman A., Roulstone A., Maurer H., Imber J. B. (Eds), Organizational, Business, and Technological Aspects of the Knowledge Society, Communications in Computer and Information Science,112, XXVII, pp. 243–253, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, ISBN 978-3-642-16323-4, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-16324-1_26

European Regional Policy produced several generations of programmes at both National and Regional levels. Such a... more European Regional Policy produced several generations of programmes at both National and Regional levels. Such a complex framework tends to increase multi-level governance in the period 2007-2013, promoting a wider participation of stakeholders (including Public Administration, Local Communities, Enterprises, etc). This process has been usually accompanied by e-tools for the management of bottom-up processes, with several instances related to common problems of participation processes. Communication between "programmer" and categories of beneficiaries always presented weakness due to the ineffective system of management knowledge within the process. Relevant issues in the framework of regional development programmes are: Do stakeholders understand the meaning of general and sectoral policies? Are citizens aware of technical instruments implementing such policies? Are they conscious of ex-ante comprehensive context analysis and/or can they share possible future scenarios? A way to tackle these problems is the use of ontologies. In this work we present the structural elements of the ontology of regional development programmes analyzing major steps of the ontology design and nodal phases of the ontology building (i.e. consensus on relations and restrictions, switch from glossary to taxonomy). The result of such an application is an ontology of regional development containing more than one hundred classes.