Annamaria Goy

A core reference ontology for the customer relationship domain

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has emerged as an important strategy that companies should implement in order to build profitable and stable relationships with their customer. The domain of CRM has peculiar characteristics: a CRM strategy is largely independent from the specific market sector, it requires multiple units cooperation, it implies the management of a huge amount of knowledge, it is fruitfully supported by software solutions, and finally it implies the integration of human and machine activities. These characteristics suggest that both companies aiming at implementing an efficient CRM strategy, and software houses offering ICT solutions supporting CRM would take great advantage from a common semantic model of CRM. The main contribution of this paper is thus the proposal of O-CREAM-v2, a core reference ontology lbr the CRM domain, specifically targeted to Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SME). The design of O-CREAM-v2 has been based on requirements mainly elicited from a domain analysis, which considered the way the involved actors talk about CRM within their business, by analyzing documents and interviews with representatives of SME and ICT companies. Moreover, in order to guarantee accuracy in the definition of the basic concepts and to support interoperability within/between companies, O-CREAM-v2 has been developed within the framework provided by the well-known DOLCE foundational ontology, together with three DOLCE extensions, i.e. the ontology of Descriptions and Situations, the Ontology of Intbrmation Objects and the Ontology of Plans. O-CREAM-v2 is composed by two layers: an upper core, which models more general concepts and relations, and can be useful also in business domains other than CRM, and a lower core, representing concepts and relations specific to the CRM domain. The content requirements defined by the domain analysis pointed out that an ontology for the CRM domain has to account for both particulars (such as activities, otters, sales, etc.) and information about them (customer records, reports about sales, etc.). Moreover, since CRM is typically supported by software tools, O-CREAM-v2 includes the formal characterization of software applications. Thus, O-CREAM-v2 is structured into five modules: Relationships, Knowledge, Activities (all three spanning both the upper and the lower core), Software and Miscellaneous (both limited to the upper core). The five ()-CREAM modules arc described in details in the paper. The discussion is concluded by mentioning two possible exploitation perspectives for O-CREAM-v2, which could be the basis for building: (a) Web-based repositories supporting the mediation between supply and demand of CRM-related tools; (b) tools supporting users in building the formal representations of resources in ontology-based IR systems and in the semantic search engines application field.

The context aware workflow execution framework

The development of self-adapting web applications based on composite architectures, such as service-oriented architectures (SOA), is challenged by the lack of support to the specification of explicit adaptation policies for the context aware management of the business, interaction and presentation logics. To address this limitation, we propose a vertical architecture extending SOA with advanced adaptation features. This paper presents the Context Aware Workflow Execution framework (CAWE), which enriches SOA with (1) context-aware workflow management; (2) dialogue management capabilities supporting the adaptation of the interaction with the user and (3) context-dependent user interface generation. This paper also briefly presents a prototype application developed by exploiting the CAWE framework.

Ontology-driven collaborative annotation in shared workspaces

In the last decade, collaboration and sharing on the Web have become mainstream. Digital, remote interaction happens on a daily basis, not only to share digital resources, but also to create, manage and discuss them, in every possible situation where collaboration is required: from work teams to groups of friends, from community committees to no-profit organizations. In this paper we address the task of collaborative management of digital resources within a team, with a special focus on the task of semantic annotation, where team members, possibly supported by automated reasoning, enrich resources with properties that help in organizing, retrieving and creating connections between contents of different types. We focus in particular on the problem of reaching an agreement on the annotation itself among the participants. The paper presents a qualitative user study aimed at observing users behavior when faced with this task. The results of the study are then analyzed in order to draw guidelines, which are then implemented in a tool for collaborative annotation. This study is carried out in the context of the Semantic Table Plus Plus (Sem T++) Project, a framework supporting collaboration over thematic workspaces, whose goal is to enhance cooperation through awareness, enhanced communication and easy sharing of digital content. Display Omitted Sem T++ is a framework for the collaborative management of shared online resources.Sem T++ supports collaborative semantic annotation, thanks to a formal semantic model.Implementation of collaborative annotation is based on results of a user study.User study analyzes three collaboration policies: consensual, authored, supervised.

A Cloud-Based Environment for Collaborative Resources Management

The interaction between users and digital devices has deeply changed in the last decades. In particular, the so called desktop metaphor relied on assumptions which have been modified by the rise of new paradigms, such as Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing. This paper discusses the limits of the desktop metaphor and proposes a new interaction model, TablePlusPlus (T++), aimed at providing Web and Cloud users with interaction mechanisms fulfilling their needs, i.e., the possibility of handling activity contexts, collaborating with other users, and homogeneously managing heterogeneous objects. T++ tables provide a context-based environment which enables a homogeneous treatment of heterogeneous content items, enhanced by a table-level annotation mechanism supporting an abstract view over resources, which is missing in standard current desktop and collaborative environments. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed model, this work developed a prototype and tested it in two controlled experiments, whose results are definitely encouraging.

An Ontological Perspective on Thematic Roles

We face the issue of formally modeling roles in the semantic representation of events: we propose a distinction between thematic roles and social roles, and we show that they have important ontological differences, suggesting distinct formal representations. We apply our approach in the context of the Harlock’900 project, including the definition of thematic roles as binary properties in the HERO ontology.

An Integrated Support to Collaborative Semantic Annotation

Everybody experiences every day the need to manage a huge amount of heterogeneous shared resources, causing information overload and fragmentation problems. Collaborative annotation tools are the most common way to address these issues, but collaboratively tagging resources is usually perceived as a boring and time consuming activity and a possible source of conflicts. To face this challenge, collaborative systems should effectively support users in the resource annotation activity and in the definition of a shared view. The main contribution of this paper is the presentation and the evaluation of a set of mechanisms (personal annotations over shared resources and tag suggestions) that provide users with the mentioned support. The goal of the evaluation was to (1) assess the improvement with respect to the situation without support; (2) evaluate the satisfaction of the users, with respect to both the final choice of annotations and possible conflicts; (3) evaluate the usefulness of the support mechanisms in terms of actual usage and user perception. The experiment consisted in a simulated collaborative work scenario, where small groups of users annotated a few resources and then answered a questionnaire. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed support mechanisms can reduce both overload and possible disagreement.

Software architecture of SETA, an adaptive Web store shell

Personalization has become a key point in several applications. In particular, electronic commerce imposes strong adaptation requirements to personalize business to business, as well as business to customer interactions. This paper describes the software architecture of SETA, a prototype toolkit for the development of adaptive Web stores which tailor the suggestion of items and their presentation to the customers characteristics. See [2] and [3] for a detailed description of the personalization techniques we exploited. Our system is based on the exploitation of knowledge representation and MAS technologies, which are essential to enhance the systems con gurability on di erentiated domains. An on-line demo of a prototype store created using SETA is available at the URL: http://www.di.unito.it/~ seta; this store presents telecommunication products, like phones and switchboards.

Personal and shared perspectives on knowledge maps in learning environments

Knowledge maps are a powerful means to represent and share knowledge in both communication and learning. Collaborative knowledge mapping, in particular, enables comparing, discussing and bridging different perspectives on a topic. In this paper, we propose that it can be supported by providing users with multi-perspective maps, including one shared perspective and several individual ones. Building on our previous work about collaborative annotation of resources, we provide a formalization for multi-perspective concept maps, which we implemented in a proof-of-concept prototype. We then present the results of a formative qualitative evaluation performed on the prototype, where 12 participants, divided into 4 groups, performed a collaborative mapping task with two different versions of the tool: one in which only the shared perspective was available, and another in which the shared perspective was paired with a personal one. From the analysis of the observations gathered in the evaluation, as well as the subjective impressions of the participants collected by means of an electronic questionnaire, we draw requirements for an interaction model supporting multi-perspective concept maps. Such requirements can be summarized as follows: (1) the UI should overlay the personal and the shared perspective, to stress that they concern the same object (the map) and to enable comparison; (2) “shared” and “personal” should be supported by different work modalities, which should be explicitly enabled in the UI; (3) the UI should include a “revision of changes” mode to support users in evaluating changes by others, and relating their perspective to the work of others.

Supporting Semantic Annotation in Collaborative Workspaces with Knowledge based on Linked Open Data

The management of shared resources on the Web has become one of the most pervasive activities in everyday life, but the heterogeneity of tools and resource types (documents, emails, Web sites, etc.) usually causes users to be lost and to spend a lot of time in organizing resources and tasks. Structured semantic annotation can provide a smart support to collaborative resource organization, but, as demonstrated by our user studies, users have often to deal with ambiguous or unknown expressions, suggested by the system or by other users. As a consequence, it is important to provide them with an “explanation” of unclear annotations, which can be based on formally encoded domain knowledge, retrieved from the LOD Cloud. We chose commonsense geospatial knowledge to implement a proof-of-concept prototype providing such “explanations”. After a brief presentation of the background, represented by the SemT++ project, we describe the approach and present a user evaluation of it.