Christophe Roche

Corporate ontologies and concurrent engineering

Abstract Concurrent engineering is based on the co-operation and collaboration of multi-disciplinary people who need to communicate and exchange information. Communication, as well as knowledge sharing and exchanging, are the corner stones of concurrent engineering. But each enterprise’s actor speaks his own language, with his own terms and meanings: the enterprise, and especially the virtual enterprise, is a Tower of Babel. Although the communication problem can be reduced, from a syntactic point of view, by using a single communication language, the semantics problem remains to be addressed. It means that two entities can communicate only if they agree upon on the meaning of the terms they use. Ontology, understood as an agreed vocabulary of common terms and meanings shared by a group of people, is a solution to that problem. This article will present our approach illustrated by the Ontological Knowledge Station (OK Station ® ). The OK Station is a software environment for defining and using ontologies. It relies on sound principles taking into account epistemological and linguistic notions. The semantics of term is based on elementary units of meaning and binary concept trees. Due to such features, obtaining real agreement about the meaning of terms is a reasonable and reachable goal.

Formal specification of a multi-agent system architecture for manufacture: the contribution of the π-calculus

Abstract We first recall the interest of multi-agent systems (MAS) in computer-aided production engineering. We argue that the notion of agent needs to be clarified and that MAS architectures must consequently be subject to formal descriptions. Concurrent specification languages, such as process calculi, can be regarded as suitable models for this purpose. The π-calculus is therefore introduced through its syntax and an informal description of its semantic. We then support the idea that this calculus fulfils the requirements for MAS architecture description, especially the aspects related to the interactions between agents. Then, we focus on the Supply Chain Management problem: two agents and their sub-components are specified using the π-calculus. After a short evaluation of the proposed method, we end by pointing out the potential applications and some areas of research related to our approach.

Ontology for long-term knowledge

This article presents experience feedback regarding one of the methods EDF uses for the reappropriation of ontological concepts in the field of control and instrumentation. The final approach used here has enabled us to check out these problems in a satisfactory manner. It has enabled us to obtain consistent and consensual ontology capitalizing on the knowledge involving the concepts impacting the field of production plant instrumentation and control.

How to Structure Data: The Object Oriented Approach (A Survey)

The complexity of some problems increasingly requires explicit representation of knowledge, as well as of its links and processing. This kind of approach corresponds to a desire to formalize and organize data in order to better control them, and to move from data to knowledge. The purpose of this article is to review the problems raised by this kind of effort. In particular we will look at the problem of choosing a suitable representation formalism, especially object-oriented representations, as wellas at the problems of storage in data bases and of sharing those knowledge bases.

Improved hybrid semantic similarity algorithm for terminology application

With the development of science, peoples demand for the technique of query is gradually increased. Especially, the emergency of new terms proposed more demand for query techniques. Therefore, the accuracy of semantic similarity calculation is more important in searching of terms. Now, the hybrid semantic similarity calculation method has been more popular. However, when the expert calculates the semantic similarity, weight values determined are based on experts experience which has a certain degree of subjectivity and affect the accuracy and objectivity of the semantic similarity calculation. Therefore, this paper proposed an improved hybrid semantic similarity algorithm based on the fuzzy optimization methods. This algorithm could avoid subjectivity for the determined weights and make weights more scientific. In this paper, an example is given for demonstrate how this algorithm can be used for calculating the semantic similarity of volcano terms. Comparing with the old methods, this algorithm can improve query accuracy.

Lexical and conceptual structures in ontology

From a stricto sensu point of view, there is no direct relationship between ontology and text. The former is interesting in conceptualization – as an extra linguistic representation of conceptual knowledge –, when the latter is a matter for linguistics. Nevertheless, ontology and text are more and more connected in particular for ontology acquisition from texts. The main goal of this article, viewed as an introduction for the special session on “Ontology and Text” of the IEA/AIE 06 Conference, is to claim that: “the lexical structure and the conceptual structure in general do not fit”. As a matter of fact, writing technical documents remains a linguistic activity which belongs to rhetoric and one of the linguistics’ principles is the incompleteness of texts. Even if we can learn a lot of useful information from texts for building conceptual systems, we can not directly consider a word as a lexicalized concept nor the hyponymy relationship as a linguistic translation of the subclass relationship.

From Information Society to Knowledge Society: The Ontology Issue

Information society, virtual enterprise, e‐business rely more and more on communication and knowledge sharing between heterogeneous actors. But, no communication is possible, and all the more so no co‐operation or collaboration, if those actors do not share the same or at least a compatible meaning for the terms they use. Ontology, understood as an agreed vocabulary of common terms and meanings, is a solution to that problem. Nevertheless, although there is quite a lot of experience in using ontologies, several barriers remain which stand against a real use of ontology. As a matter of fact, it is very difficult to build, reuse and share ontologies. We claim that the ontology problem requires a multidisciplinary approach based on sound epistemological, logical and linguistic principles. This article presents the Ontological Knowledge Station (OK Station©), a software environment for building and using ontologies which relies on such principles. The OK Station is currently being used in several industrial a...