With the industrial success of knowledge-based systems new requirements with respect to Knowledge Engineering pro-cesses arise. Besides advanced knowledge acquisition tools, novel techniques for the quality assurance need to be established in order to maintain a safe development process. In Software Engineering, the application of continuous integration as a collection of practices has proved to be suitable for this task. In this paper, we transfer the general ideas of continuous integration from Software Engineering to knowledge Engineering, and we demonstrate the implementation of a continuous integration tool into a state-of-the-art Knowl-edge Engineering workbench.
We present iMapping, a diagrammatic zooming and nesting based approach for visually structuring information objects on the desktop with a special focus on personal knowledge management. It was designed based on a set of requirements gathered from the analysis of existing knowledge mapping techniques from a cognitive science point of view. We also briefly introduce a prototypical implementation.
Explanations of modeling errors in ontologies are of crucial importance both when creating and maintaining the ontology. This work presents two novel incremental methods for error explanations in semantic web ontologies and shows that they have significantly better performance than the state of the art black-box techniques. Both promising techniques together with our implementation of a tableau reasoner for an important OWL-DL subset SHIN are used in our semantic annotation tool prototype to explain modeling errors.
In knowledge intensive companies intellectual capital assumes a crucial role in the organizational strategy and, as any other strategical asset, it needs to be scheduled to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. When the required knowledge is a resource available inside the company, its assignment represents a key success factor, which many research efforts are devoted to. On the other side, when the needed competence is unavailable within the company, training programs may be seen as methods to strengthen such a strategic asset. In this paper we show a semantic-based integrated system aimed at supporting both the assignment of available intellectual resources in three different multiplicity scenarios and the search for training programs ad-hoc composed to fill possible knowledge gaps.
The innovation process is a rhythm of search and selection, exploration and exploitation, cycles of perspectives encountering which allow people to analyze problems from new points of view. In order to enable innovation, a lot of instruments have been developed connecting heterogeneous individuals thinking (e.g. social networks, web portals, wiki systems, organizational yellow-pages, etc.). In this paper we focus on web portals, and how these tools assist the users connections and the innovation processes among them. In particular, we analyze some services implemented in the Innovation Portal of the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology geared to stimulating the establishment of strategic partnerships and cooperation projects involving national firms and science institutions. These services are mainly based on social network analysis in order to manage connections (i.e. coordination) and innovation processes among users.
Defining e-services with the help of a Co-Design Platform (CDP) offers the possibility for designers to co-construct services with users that better respond to their real needs. A physical or virtual agora, the CDP offers a way to guide the analysis and conception of new services by taking advantage of the convergence between content production, editing and distribution on the Internet. By anticipating the expectations of users, we describe a methodology that aims to correlate designers’ models, consisting of domain objects, and users’ conceptual models, composed of usage objects.
The development of new ontologies does not tap the full potential of existing knowledge sources and ongoing ontology engineering methodologies do not address ontology reuse to a satisfactory extent yet. In this paper we analyze the challenges related to the reuse process on the basis of two scenarios in the domains of eRecruitment and medicine, which aim at building domain ontologies by reusing existing knowledge sources.
The effective use, preservation and creation of knowledge in design-type work processes is of vital interest for an enterprise. We present the CLOCKWORK approach to organizational learning which comprises a web-based toolset to structure, store and retrieve knowledge elements created during all phases of the product development. The examination and re-use of this knowledge base across different design processes as well as the consideration of earlier aftersales experiences during product design are key steps towards systematic organizational learning. The solution is presented using an example from the speciality engineering domain.
How to design effective learning opportunities? Why is learning by experience often more efficient than learning by studying? How to provide the learning experiences needed to respond to current challenges? Using computer games and games in general for educational purposes offers a variety of knowledge presentations and creates opportunities to apply the knowledge within a virtual world, thus supporting and facilitating the learning process. An innovative education paradigm like game-based learning suitable for this purpose is described in this article. The connection of the collaborative social context of education with game-based learning is discussed.
Contemporary knowledge management activities in an enterprise suffer from the discrepancy between the global benefit for the organization and the personal benefit for the individual knowledge worker. To ameliorate this divergence we investigate an evolutionary approach which automatically integrates the structures of individual knowledge workspaces into comprehensive organizational knowledge structures. To enable the individual user to keep an overview over both the personal information space and the various views and structures in the organization, we present a concept for dynamically-configured visualization of multi-layered concept spaces and information structures. This approach will be realized in the newly-started research project EPOS.