Ahmad Kayed

Extracting ontological concepts for tendering conceptual structures

It has been argued that beyond software engineering and process engineering, ontological engineering is the third capability needed if successful e-commerce is to be realized. In our experience of building an ontological-based tendering system, we face the problem of building an ontology. In this paper, we demonstrate how to build ontologies in the tendering domain. The ontology life cycle is identified. Extracting concepts from existing resources like on-line catalogs is described. We have reused electronic data interchange (EDI) to build conceptual structures in the tendering domain. An algorithm to extract abstract ontological concepts from these structures is proposed.

Towards an Ontology for Software Product Quality Attributes

Recently, Quality Assurance concept has been developed increasingly to be included in many of our life existing fields; financial, industrial, trading, computing, etc. Software Quality Product Attributes (SWQAs) have been created as a matter of applying the QA concept on the results of web or desktop application development process, to fit the products with the organizational and global market standards and goals, and to provide it with a competitive advantage value. Web application or software product quality is composed of many attributes such as portability, usability, reliability, modularity. During the recent years, many researchers discussed and presented software attributes in their works which showed that till now there is a lack of consensus on the semantic of many of concepts and terminologies used in this field. Our work is focusing on studying Software Product Quality Attributes concepts and terminologies. We conduct several experiments to extract the main concepts for SWQAs. The results show that there is a number of concepts that are frequently used to describe these attributes. Summarizing and formalizing the semantic of the attributes into these concepts presents a common understanding and agreement on the semantic of SWQPAs which can be used by software engineers, researchers, practitioners, and stakeholders.

Using BWW model to evaluate building ontologies in CGs formalism

The Bunge-Wand-Weber (BWW) representation model defines ontological constructs for information systems. According to these constructs the completeness and efficiency of a modeling technique can be defined. Ontology plays an essential role in e-commerce. Using or updating an existing ontology and providing tools to solve any semantic conflicts become essential steps before putting a system online. We use conceptual graphs (CGs) to implement ontologies. This paper evaluates CG capabilities using the BWW representation model. It finds out that CGs are ontologically complete according to Wand and Weber definition. Also it finds out that CGs have construct overload and construct redundancy which can undermine the ontological clarity of CGs. This leads us to build a meta-model to avoid some ontological-unclarity problems. We use some of the BWW constructs to build the meta-model.

Using ontologies to index conceptual structures for tendering automation

Using natural language to model the tendering makes any process associated with tendering automation extremely difficult. Conceptual Graph is a well-known mechanism for knowledge representation. We implemented our ontologies using CGs. In tendering domain, we define two ontologies: The Tendering Structure and the Abstract Domain Ontology. In this paper we survey the indexing and retrieving techniques in CG literatures. Then we build a slight modification of these techniques to build our own indexing technique using these ontologies. Using this technique enables us to define different type of match-making. Also to define finding policies to direct software agents in retrieving process.

Ontology Concepts for Requirements Engineering Process in E-Government Applications

The main challenge for governments worldwide is to transform their systems to deliver efficient and cost effective services through information and communication technologies. Requirements engineering is a crucial activity in system development process, especially in the development of large scale systems such as E-gov applications. Inconsistencies and terminology conflicts are hindering many E-gov applications. This paper develops ontology (mainly concepts) in the domain of requirements engineering process for E-gov applications. This contributes in enabling software engineers to find out shared-understandable and common concepts to describe requirements for different domain models used in developing E-gov applications. Several documents related to E-gov requirement are collected; the main concepts and relationships are extracted and refined. The main theme of this paper is to provide common concepts and understanding of the requirements for many E-gov applications.

An ontology for software requirements modelling

Ontology provides means to describe concepts effectively. It has become an increasingly useful tool in understanding concepts in various fields of Information Systems and Technology. The aim of this paper is to build and evaluate an ontology that standardizes concepts and semantics of requirements modelling notations, in order to provide a common understanding of those concepts among software engineers. This ontology will lead to easy learning of modelling diagram concepts for new system developers. It will also allow software engineers to move from one modelling notation to another easily.

Building e-laws ontology: new approach

Semantic Web provides tools for expressing information in a machine accessible form where agents (human or software) can understand it. Ontology is required to describe the semantics of concepts and properties used in web documents. Ontology is needed to describe products, services, processes and practices in any e-commerce application. Ontology plays an essential role in recognizing the meaning of the information in Web documents. This paper attempts to deploy these concepts in an e-law application. E-laws ontology has been built using existing resources. It has been shown that extracting concepts is less hard than building relationships among them. A new algorithm has been proposed to reduce the number of relationships, so the domain knowledge expert (i.e. lawyer) can refine these relationships.

New method for ranking arabic web sites using ontology concepts

Recently the numbers of Arabic web sites are rapidly increasing in the World Wide Web. Existing search engines retrieve information based on keywords, so huge number of irrelevant information is retrieved for users. By the appearing of the second generation of the World Wide Web the semantic web, many suitable approaches to retrieve information that depends on semantic can be built. Semantic web provides data models and languages such as Resource Description Framework (RDF), and Web Ontology Language (WOL) that facilitate building ontology within a specific domain. Ontology can capture concepts for specific domain. In addition, it can capture properties of these concepts, and their relationships. Therefore, they help machines to deal with data domain semantically. This paper proposes a new approach to measure the relevancy of Arabic documents to the user query using ontology concepts. In this paper we built Arabic ontology concepts for the electronic commerce domain in Arabic language. Ontology concepts are used to find new approach for ranking Arabic documents, and show the effectiveness of ontology in retrieving relevant documents.

Conceptual Structures for Tendering Ontology

The aim of method presented in this paper is to define the role of conceptual structures in building tendering ontology. More precise, how to use Conceptual Graph to build tendering ontology. We construct our ontologies based on three components: the concepts, the structures, and the contexts. This decomposition facilitates the process of ontology building and reusing. It also helps us to define different types of matching.

Re-engineering Approach to Build Domain Ontologies

Building ontology is changing from being an art to be a science. There are many attempts to re-engineer the process of building ontology [4], to categorize the applications that use ontology for better understanding [23], to study the common features of well-known existing ontologies [18], to provide environment and tools for ontology development [5], and to provide theoretical foundations for ontology [10]. In our experience of building ontological-base tendering system [15], we face the problem of building ontology. From these efforts and from our experience we demonstrate how to build ontologies for tendering process domain using conceptual graphs. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we reverse engineer EDI structures to build abstract ontology for tendering structures. Also, we use data-mining techniques to build abstract domain ontology from existing on-line catalogs.