The modular logistic transport of goods on streets, railroads, inland water and sea is a complex and versatile process. It requires exact knowledge of geographic information, available logistical service providers and communication channels. This application paper describes IMOTRIS, an automated Intermodal Transport Routing Information System which is developed as a state-aided collaborative project that benefits from practical experience by contributions from different ports and transport service providers. We present a novel approach which combines service-oriented multi-modal route planning with semantic web technologies for the selection and ranking of transport and turnover services to create suitable and optimized complex logistic service chains. We utilize committed semantic descriptions of logistic services and their relationships with regard to the application context.
In this paper we describe the Multimedia Documentation Lab (MDL1), a system which is capable of processing vast amounts of data typically gathered from open sources in instructured form and in diverse formats. A sequence of processing steps analyzing the audio, video and textual content of the input is carried out. The resulting output is made available for search and retrieval, analysis and visualization on a next generation media server. The system can serve as a search platform across open, closed or secured networks. MDL can be used as a tool for situational awareness, information sharing or risk assessment, allowing the integration of multimedia content into the analysis process of security relevant affairs.
Students and workers mobility in the European scenario represents today a big challenge. During the last years, several initiatives have been carried out to deal with the above picture, being the European Quali cation Framework (EQF), a common architecture for describing quali cations, one of the most signi cant. In parallel, several research activities were established with the aim of exploiting semantic technologies for quali cation comparison in the context of human resources acquisition. In this paper, the EQF speci cations are applied in a practical scenario to develop a ranking algorithm allowing for quali cation comparison on the basis of knowledge, skill and competence concepts, potentially aimed at supporting European employers during the recruitment phases.
The digital media and games industry is one of the biggest IT based industries worldwide. Recent observations therein showed that current production workflows may be potentially improved as multimedia objects are mostly created from scratch due to insufficient reusability capacities of existing tools. In this paper we provide reasons for that, provide a potential solution based on semantic technologies, show the potential of ontologies, and provide scenarios for the application of semantic technologies in the digital media and games industry.
Classical knowledge representation methods traditionally work with established relations such as synonymy, hierarchy and unspecified associations. Recent developments like ontologies and folksonomies show new forms of collaboration, indexing and knowledge representation and encourage the reconsideration of standard knowledge relationships. In a summarizing overview we show which relations are currently utilized in elaborated knowledge representation methods and which may be inherently hidden in folksonomies and ontologies.
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.
Requirements Engineering is recognized as a crucial part of project and software development processes. This is due to the fact that the different stakeholders involved in a development project have to establish common terminologies as well as goals, scenarios and requirements expressed using these terminologies. Within the Semantic Web initiative various standards emerged for the creation and use of terminologies, expressed in the shape of semantic networks, taxonomies and ontologies. We develop an approach for semantic based Requirements Engineering. We present an ontology for capturing requirements relevant information. Furthermore, we report about a tool for semantic based Requirements Engineering and its application in a real-world development project scenario from the E-Government domain.
We believe there is great learning potential in education involving shared, studentgenerated knowledge bases. However, it is not yet clear what architectures are most appropriate for such shared knowledge bases in order to facilitate an effective exchange, collection, organization, and sharing of knowledge. In this paper, we discuss the concepts of “liquid ontologies,” to describe novel, dynamic structures for organizing, sharing and browsing knowledge. Liquid ontologies are flexible knowledge structures that are created by, evolve around and adapt to the learners’ interests and allow for a tighter coupling between the learners’ interests and the viewing and browsing structure of a knowledge sharing system. We present the key ideas behind liquid ontologies, and discuss these characteristics within the context of OpenD, a knowledge sharing environment we developed and its application in graduate courses at a design school.
Today, most computer users work with traditional hierarchical file systems for organizing large amounts of personal files. Recently, tagging has grown popular as
an alternative means of organizing information resources. We argue that tagging is a powerful paradigm for efficient information access which overcomes many deficiencies of hierarchical file systems, especially in the context of the organization of large quantities of personal files. In this paper we present TagFS, a filesystem with tagging support which aims at a seamless integration of the tagging paradigm with local applications. While retaining the notions of directories and files and providing all standard filesystem operations, the semantics of these primitives are changed to modifications of the tag annotations.
Knowledge sharing in communities has attracted much attention in the field of knowledge management in research and practice. In this paper we outline a view where the community lifecycle is supported at different stages. The central component of our framework is the community ontology SWRC+COIN that describes the typical structure of communities. We exemplarily show how communities in the academic domain can be detected automatically by means of analyzing information flow in a bibliographic Peer-to-Peer system and how the instantiated community knowledge base can be exploited to support cooperative work in the communities.
Knowledge-based organizations such as universities have realized that effective development and management of their organizational knowledge base is critical to survival in today’s competitive business environment. The knowledge and expertise of a university’ staff who teach and research in different areas is the major asset that a university holds. In order to make use of this asset, there is a need to share expertise between staff as well as transfer expertise to industry. The need to be able to quickly locate experts with the specific expertise has been recognized by many universities. Traditional approach is to build an expertise database. However this approach heavily depends on individual expert and has problems in maintaining the up-to-date information. In this paper we discuss the development of an RDFbased Expertise Matcher suitable for use within an academic research environment. A key feature of this work is that the expertise profile is created based on the integration of multiple expertise indications stored in an organizational memory. In addition our approach combines the advantage of flexibility of keyword search and accuracy of concept search. An evaluation of the RDF-based Expertise Matcher has been conducted through an experiment and the key results are presented.
We present a novel approach of extracting a domain ontology from large-scale thesauri. Concepts are identified to be relevant for a domain based on their frequent occurrence in domain texts. The approach allows to bootstrap the ontology engineering process from given legacy thesauri and identifies an initial domain ontology that may easily be refined by experts in a later stage. We present a thorough evaluation of the results obtained in building a biosecurity ontology for the UN FAO AOS project.
Current E-Learning solutions are not sufficiently aware of the context of the learner, i.e. the individual characteristics, the organization and the work processes and tasks. This can be achieved by modular learning objects and semantical metadata for their contextualization. This allows to deliver learning material that is relevant to the current situation of the learner. This paper presents the general approach and the architecture.
An Example of a Group Memory System for the Management of Group Competencies
Knowledge Intensive Organisations (KIOs), that is organisations built on their use intellectual capital, need to create an environment that facilitates the effective deployment and reuse of existing organisational knowledge. As people transform data, information and experiences into shared knowledge, the management of individual competencies has become increasingly important to these organisations. Knowledge gained during the normal execution of daily tasks is easily lost in the dynamic environment of modern business. The ability to find versatile employees and to be able to leverage their knowledge to meet differing corporate needs, is a matter of vital importance for KIOs. This paper describes an ontological framework focused on competence elements that are modelled as knowledge assets in a group memory. A group memory is taken to be a specific example of an organisational memory. The dynamics of group competencies as a key organisational resource is emphasised and a model for a group memory system to manage corporate competencies in a KIO is presented.
Establishing electronically accessible repositories of people’s capabilities, experiences, and key knowledge areas is key in setting up Enterprise Knowledge Management. A skills repository can be used for e.g. finding people, staffing, skills gap analysis, and professional development. The ontology based skills management system developed at Swiss Life uses RDF schema for storing ontologies. Its query interface is based on a combined RQL and HTML query engine.