In this paper we consider OntoBox, an implementation of a simple de-scription logic called the oo-projection, as a persistent knowledge storage. OntoBox is a mediator between the knowledge management systems and conventional information techniques (like OOP languages and data bases). The abstract interface of OntoBox and its basic implementation (OntoBox Storage) are considered. Some implementation issues are discussed, and the potential of the approach is overviewed.
One of the core challenges for current landscape of ontology based research is to develop efficient ontology merging algorithms which can resolve the mismatches with no or minimum human intervention, and generate automatic global merged ontology on-the-fly to fulfil the needs of automated enterprise business applications and mediation based data warehousing. This paper presents our approach of ontology merging in context of data warehousing by mediation that aims at building analysis contexts on-the-fly. Our methodology is based on the combination of the statistical aspect represented by the hierarchical clustering technique and the inference mechanism. It generates the global ontology automatically by four steps. First, it builds classes of equivalent entities of different categories (concepts, properties, instances) by applying a hierarchical clustering algorithm. Secondly, it makes inference on detected classes to find new axioms, and solves synonymy and homonymy conflicts. This step also consists of generating sets of concept pairs from ontology hierarchies, such as the first component subsumes the second one. Third, it merges different sets together, and uses classes of synonyms and sets of concept pairs to solve semantic conflicts in the global set of concept pairs. Finally, it transforms this set to a new hierarchy, which represents the global ontology.
Semantic web provides virtual communities that enable intelligent interaction between software agents and people due to availability of standard open ontologies. But, as the semantic web is gaining much popularity, there is a massive growth seen in the ontology development which poses new research challenges such as ontology classification, ranking, searching, retrieval, etc. This results many recent developments, like OntoKhoj, Swoogle, OntoSearch, that facilitate user for such tasks. These semantic web portals mainly treat ontologies as plain texts and use traditional classification algorithms of plain text for classifying ontologies in directories and assigning predefined labels rather than using semantic knowledge hidden within the ontologies. These approaches suffer with many types of classification problems and lack of accuracy, especially in the case of overlapping ontologies that share common vocabularies. In this paper, we define ontology classification problem and categorized it into many sub-problems. We present a new methodology for ontology classification that is based on ontology approach for ontology classification and retrieval. The proposed framework, ONTCLASSIFIRE, benefit construction, maintenance or expansion of ontologies directories on the semantic web, and helps in ontology management and retrieval for software agents and people. We conclude that the use of context specific knowledge hidden in ontologies gives more accurate results of ontology classification and retrieval.
There are plenty of projects aimed at incorporating semantic information into present day document processing. The main problem is their real-world usability. E-learning is one of the areas which can take advantage of the semantically described documents. In this paper we would like to introduce a framework of cooperating tools which can help extract, store, visualize semantics in this area.
Finding expertise is an important task required in all organisations and institutions. In looking for expertise, one typically relies on the compilation of information from multiple sources such as organisational directories and social networks. This approach has been applied to enhance the Journal of Universal Computer Science to enable it to become a still more valuable scholarly resource. This paper describes a multi-faceted representation of expertise, by consolidating human specified expert profile with systemic assessment of expertise. The multifaceted approach is an important in the consolidation of information from multiple sources, in an effort to expand on the characterisation of expertise. The strength of this approach is drawn from the incorporation of intangible metrics for expertise assessment. This paper has revealed interesting directions for the automatic discovery of expertise in scholarly communities.
One of the most popular and trend-setting Internet applications is People Search on the World Wide Web. In its most general form, information extraction for persons from unstructured data is extremely challenging, and, we are pretty far away from satisfying solutions. However, current retrieval technology is able to cope with restricted variants of the problem, and this paper deals with such a variant, the so-called multi document person resolution. Given is a set of Web documents, and the task is to state for each document pair whether the two documents are talking about the same person or not.
For this problem Spock Inc., Silicon Valley, launched in 2007 a competition offering a grand prize of $50 000. Task was the person-specific classification of 100 000 Web pages within 4 hours on a standard PC, striving for a maximum F-Measure. The paper in hand describes the challenge and introduces the technology of the winning team from the Bauhaus University Weimar [see 1].
In today’s information environments, tagging is widely used to provide informationabout arbitrary types of digital resources. This information is created by end users with different motivations and for different kinds of purposes. When aiming to support users in the tagging process, these differences play an important role. This paper discusses several approaches to generate tag recommendations, and a prototypical recommender system for the social resource sharing platform ALOE will be presented.
This interactive system allows users to control the generation of the recommendations by selecting the sources to be used as well as their impact. The component was introduced at DFKI, and a first evaluation showed that the recommender component was considered as helpful by a majority of users.
Nowadays, on the basis of a common standard for metadata representation and interchange mechanism in data warehouse environments, Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM) – based ETL processes still has to face significant challenges in semantically and systematically integrating heterogeneous sources to data warehouse. In this context, we focus on proposing an ontology-based ETL framework for covering schema integration as well as semantic integration. In our approach, beside the schema-based semantics in CWM-compliant metamodels, semantic interoperability in ETL processes can be improved by means of an ontology-based foundation to better representation, and management of the underlying domain semantics. Furthermore, within the scope of this paper, a set of CWM-based modelling constructs driven by ontology for the definition of metadata required for ETL processes is defined, facilitating the extraction, transformation and loading of useful data from distributed and heterogeneous sources. Thus, the role of interconnecting CWM and semantic technologies in populating data warehousing systems with quality data and providing data warehouse an integrated and reconciled view of data is highlighted.
Due to a shift in the marketing focus from mass to micro markets, the importance of one-to-one communication in advertising has increased. Interactive media provide possible answers to this shift. However, missing standards in payment models for interactive media are a hurdle in the further development. The paper reviews interactive advertising payment models. Furthermore, it adapts the popular FCB grid as a tool for both advertisers and publishers or broadcasters to examine effective interactive payment models.
This paper evaluates methods that can be used for effectively generating und utilizing intellectual capital reports (ICRs) for external and internal reporting as well as for internal knowledge-sensitive management decisions. Research is accompanied by a case study in a high-tech enterprise (Infineon Technologies Austria AG). An intellectual capital report controlling process has been developed. The findings of this research will be of use to all knowledge-based companies and institutions as they demonstrate how and why to measure intellectual capital. The paper discusses the proposed controlling system and the most important findings. An ICR is a multi-indicator system used to depict the development of intangible assets. As there are currently only unsatisfactory accounting guidelines for the reporting of intellectual capital available, an emphasis on techniques for selecting indicators for the report has been made. As a result, convincing reports for external addressees can be generated. Furthermore, methods for using this information as a foundation for knowledge-sensitive management decisions are drafted. The ideas presented in this paper are based on a master’s thesis written at Infineon Technologies Austria AG.
In this paper, we introduce a so-called DyVT tool (Dynamic social network Visualization Tool) to support spatiotemporal knowledge visualization and discovery in dynamic social networks. The dynamic aspects of social networks refer to contextualized information such as spatial, temporal as well as users’ personalized information. We also define an XML-based target language incorporating emerging formats like DyNetML, KML, and GraphML. It also provides means to express, store and interchange the dynamic aspects of complex dynamic social network data. Based on this language, users can animate and personalize spatiotemporal knowledge extracted from social network data like email threads or blogs. In addition, a Java based graphical user interface is also available to enable nonexperienced users to customize knowledge visualization easily. A mashup with Google maps for spatiotemporal visualization is provided. With this tool spatiotemporal knowledge on an IBM DB2 Mailing list database containing 69 mailing lists and 56389 mails altogether is well explored.
Explicit knowledge is often stored in various repositories within a company. As APOSDLE aims at considering the whole intellectual capital of companies, we are coping with the task to integrate the content of several and different repositories within the APOSDLE platform. Further, other modules in the APOSDLE system also require functionality to semantically enrich knowledge artefacts like documents or multimedia objects. In this paper, we present our approach to these challenges, namely the “Multimedia, Multi-source, Metadatabased Knowledge Artefact Repository”. After presenting the basic idea and critical issues of this solution, we point out related technological approaches as well as their limitations. Finally, we report about a first prototype realising this idea and our experiences gained so far.
Classical approaches to document management do not cope with the demands knowledge documents make. Knowledge documents or so-called “living documents” have a far more complex lifecycle than general documents. They are usually used, edited und utilized by several people and many different versions, revisions and variants exist. Today the multitude of information that these processes generate are not captured or used to provide a better management or retrieval for this kind of documents. Our approach shows that the capturing of this lifecycle information can help in the retrieval as well as usage and management of those documents.
The evolution of our society to the knowledge based society has raised new challenges for most of the scientific domains that exist. The higher importance given to knowledge extraction instead of getting just information (i.e. data included in a context) hast led to the development of several intelligent techniques for knowledge discovery. This paper shows some examples of using the techniques of case-based reasoning and data-mining for knowledge discovery in the knowledge management system of an university. We have taken as example, the educational domain with the particular case of universities as they represent good examples of organizations that acquire, generate, store and use knowledge for various purposes, teaching, learning and research.
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.
Biobanks store alive cell samples to provide them for a later use in many biomedical applications. Amongst many others, cord blood samples are cryopreserved (longterm stored between -130°C and -196°C) today for future stem cell therapy or tissue engineering. Different cell types need to be treated differently. Therefore, biomedical laboratories and biobanks have to cope with a variety of specialized knowledge for sample preparation, analysis or storage while they may lack appropriate techniques for reliably managing this specific knowledge or for executing preparations reproducibly. Especially in scenarios which require sample exchange or comparing of results (as for example collaborative vaccine studies do), problems can arise. This paper outlines the evolution of a local infrastructure for long-term management of sample preparation knowledge to a system for globally managing preparation protocols and their reproducible execution within a network of collaborating laboratories and biobanks, aiming at the collective process of knowledgebuilding. The system enhancements are inspired by the requirements of collaborative research and complex sample preparation protocols, derived from the exemplary needs of the GHRC biobank (Global HIV Vaccine Research Cryorepository), being part of the Collaboration for
AIDS Vaccine Discovery.
This paper discusses the requirements of a framework for sharing digital resources and metadata to meet the needs of open, flexible Knowledge Management solutions. The changing nature of the Web and its users as observed in recent years clearly establishes the need for new approaches and technologies to fully exploit the potential for working with existing digital resources. Formal metadata about the resources can be combined with information created in lightweight and user-centric approachesin order to significantly enhance resource descriptions and enable more efficient access to existing knowledge. The ALOE system, currently in development at DFKI, is one such solution and it is used here as the basis for a sample realization of an appropriate framework.
Process management is an important task in many companies. However, most of the literature on process management focuses on aspects like execution and monitoring and does neither deal with knowledge management support for the maintenance and contextualization of process models nor with the integration of such tasks into work procedures and corresponding tools. An effective knowledge management for business processes needs meta-data describing not only the processes but also their parts and details. This paper proposes a knowledge infrastructure for process modelling, usage and maintenance, which is based on a social tagging approach derived from popular social bookmarking tools. The concept of a tag-based prototype is described, which enables knowledge management support for complex sets of processes.
European mobility initiatives encourage students to study abroad, but experiences of intercultural and professional learning during the stay abroad do not flow back and the direct exchange between these students is not supported. In this article we want to present our concept and experiences with the tool weblog supporting students of Social Work during their placements abroad.
Information Realisation is the process of presenting data as Textual, Graphical or Audial information to a human user. In this paper, we discuss the importance of this concept with respect to the accessibility of Semantic Web data to a diverse target audience. We provide an ontological point of view, defining the expressive characteristics and application domain of representation formats, thus presenting a system which produces representations customised to the user environment and the nature of the source data. Our approach considers the semantics of the data, not just the structure, and aims to present the information in the most semantically appropriate manner for the given target environment. We provide examples of a simple data set being realised as popular target representation formats: textual (XHTML, RSS); graphical (SVG, X3D); and audial (SoundML, VoiceXML).
Digital media are used to facilitate social structures thus building digital social networks. Disturbances in such networks occur on different levels (egocentric level, subgroup level, network) and have to be analyzed in the multidimensional context of reference disciplines like sociology and knowledge management. This paper presents a first repository of disturbance patterns for the analysis of digital social networks. Based on the Actor-Network Theory and the Social Network Analysis, new socio-theoretical models for handling complex media settings were developed. On these models a pattern language is defined to describe multidimensional disturbance patterns and to store them in a newly developed pattern repository. The core of the pattern language is the formal expression language for pattern (FELP) which used to specify the structural and the content-specific properties of digital social networks. Results can be visualized with open source graph visualization software. To evaluate the approach a case study has been performed in a repository containing 118 mailing lists and 17.359 individuals. Patterns like troll, spammer and burst have been applied successfully.
Effectively managing organizational knowledge is a key in today’s knowledge intensive businesses to evolve a company’s future development. This essential task is supported by software systems, providing means to share, structure and work on knowledge items. In a case study at the Innovation Center Hamburg of Philips Semiconductors, different views on organizational knowledge determined by functional working contexts are elaborated. Considering these contexts, providing dynamic but also concise and recognizable structures to knowledge items as well as enabling cooperative work on them describe the main challenges of a supporting infrastructure. As a promising concept, the metaphor of virtual knowledge rooms is introduced. Based on a technical framework supporting this metaphor natively, a knowledge management system was developed, meeting all requirements and providing an extremely flexible and easy to maintain solution to the initial problem.
Because of the costly production of Learning Resources the Re-Use of existing Learning Resources becomes more and more important. But reusing Learning Resources in a new context makes it necessary to adapt them. We have developed a framework as base of a Re-Purposing Tool to support users to perform adaptations of Learning Resources in different dimensions which are crucial when using existing Learning Resources in a new context. The adaptation of Learning Resources is not easy to perform and comprises challenges like to deal with multiple files in multiple formats. To hide this from the user there is need for an abstraction of the underlying details. With a model which is including only the information the user needs and which is abstracting from the obstacles an adaptation of Learning Resources becomes a possible task even for novice users. This paper points out the content representation which is used in the framework to abstract from the given Learning Resources as well as the content ontology which the content representation is based on.
This paper describes an ontology supported software prototype that combines the advantages of existing Internet search engines with modern text analysis functionalities and an intelligent storage system for documents and knowledge items. The ontology assists the user in query definition and structures the storage of documents as well as knowledge items. The system is implemented and tested for the business case of SMEs that want to internationalise. It can easily be transferred to other domains just by changing the ontology.
The existing semantic gaps in ontologies are the reason why the challenges in interoperability and integrations tasks within the Semantic Web are often missed. It is due to the fact, that each ontology inherently implies a set of different model types. We argue that an ontology has to disclose the modelling method which intentionally defines the model type used in an application. This paper proposes a solution based on a generic, workflow-based description of the modelling method: the Modelling Workflow Patterns (MWP). Based on Petri nets as information model, MWPs can be processed by generic interpreters to create valid instances of the specified model type. This paper presents an implemented architecture consuming workflow modelling patterns for Topic Maps and OWL ontologies.
In companies, competence management involves several heavy processes that we have categorised in four classes: competence identification, competence assessment, competence acquisition, competence usage. Competence management, being the management of knowledge about competence, can also take advantage from the knowledge engineering techniques to support the mentioned processes. The paper classifies the knowledge engineering techniques proposed in the existing literature to support the competence management according to its processes. According to the performed classification and based on the authors’ previous work on competence management information systems (CRAI approach), the paper provides a critical discussion of the mentioned knowledge engineering techniques: their strengths and benefits in the context of the processes carried out.
In the digital planning process of a manufacturing plant, several partners like OEM, prime contractor and its subcontractors are involved. Since the partners have partially overlapping views (electricity, mechanical structure, plant controlling) on the plant to be designed, they have to exchange data during their collaboration. Due to syntactical, structural and semantical differences, data integration is necessary but also complicated. Our method of resolution comprises an ontology-based reference model, which all partners map to as well as an underlying technical infrastructure. This paper focuses on the methodology for constructing an ontology-based reference model in digital production engineering.
A formal product model contains all the information (structured and formalized) to systematically reproduce a specific product (as economic asset). There are several approaches for formalizing product model information in the old economy (for example CAD/CAM-based product models in discrete parts manufacturing). The service sector evolved to the most important sector in all developed economies. Knowledge plays a crucial role for delivering many services. For complex, IT-based service products high in variants (such as insurances, IT outsourcing or public administration services) existing approaches are not suitable but formalization is desired (e.g. it allows easier rendering, export or trade of such products). This paper elicits a possible strategy for defining formal product models for knowledge-based services using knowledge representation and semantic web technologies.