Cristóvão Sousa

Supporting conceptualisation processes in collaborative networks: a case study on an R&D project

The development of new products or processes involves the creation, re-creation and integration of conceptual models from the related scientific and technical domains. Particularly, in the context of collaborative networks of organisations (CNO) (e.g. a multi-partner, international project) such developments can be seriously hindered by conceptual misunderstandings and misalignments, resulting from participants with different backgrounds or organisational cultures, for example. The research described in this article addresses this problem by proposing a method and the tools to support the collaborative development of shared conceptualisations in the context of a collaborative network of organisations. The theoretical model is based on a socio-semantic perspective, while the method is inspired by the conceptual integration theory from the cognitive semantics field. The modelling environment is built upon a semantic wiki platform. The majority of the article is devoted to developing an informal ontology in the context of a European R&D project, studied using action research. The case study results validated the logical structure of the method and showed the utility of the method.

A Socio-semantic Approach to Collaborative Domain Conceptualization

Current knowledge about the early phases of ontology construction is insufficient to support methods and techniques for a collaborative construction of a conceptualization. Following an approach inspired in cognitive semantics, the application and extension of the Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) to the realm of collaborative semantic tools is proposed. A formal framework is presented together with some examples in the collaborative networks context. A collaborative semantic architecture is presented. This architecture supports the two components of the proposed method: collective conceptualization and consensus reaching.

Using Concept Maps For Ontology Development: A Case In The Work Organization Domain

Ontologies are a technological key factor regarding the knowledge management domain. This paper presents a graphical-based knowledge representation approach using concept maps towards creating a formal work organization ontology, which was translated into a Content Management System in order to manage the work design information. Some aspects related with the advantages of visual approaches for collaborative development of ontologies are discussed.

Collaborative Elicitation of Conceptual Representations: A Corpus-Based Approach

Knowledge is an important resource for organisations, and being able to manage it is a key factor for success. New information management and knowledge sharing approaches should be able to cope not only with possible variations in business situations and contexts, but also with various and sometimes discordant viewpoints, which are inherent to collaborative environments. Developing, reusing and maintaining common interpretations of available information is crucial to support real-word organisational activities. The particularly challenging problem of knowledge elicitation is tackled here combining terminological and knowledge representation views. A corpus-based conceptual modelling architecture was designed and discussed together with the workflows for real-time context retrieval and lexical pattern discovery. The practical implementation and validation of this work are accomplished on the ConceptME system, a platform developed as part of this research line, providing knowledge and terminological tools and resources to support activities that involve collaborative conceptualisation processes according to the ColBlend method.

Short-Term Semantic Consensus: Towards Agile Ontology Specification for Collaborative Networks

This paper presents our method to support the collaborative conceptualisation process focusing our strategy for building consensus in the context of collaborative networks. This new strategy comes from the application of the results and recommendations obtained in an experimental evaluation performed in the scope of a large European project in the area of industrial engineering. The usage of our strategy and the collaborative platform supporting semantic consensus building in the scope of the European research project H-Know is described.

Building an Informal Ontology to Support Collaborative Network Operation: A Case Study

Looking at collaborative networks of organizations as social-technical systems, information and knowledge sharing implies sharing a set of common conceptual structures across organizations. Through this paper, we describe a case study on how to construct meaningful collective conceptualizations by means of a new approach based on conceptual blending theory.

Integration of domain and social ontologies in a CMS based collaborative platform

This paper describes an approach and an implementation for the semantic integration of social and domain ontologies in a collaborative platform. The platform, built based on the Drupal CMS framework, aims to offer SMEs possibilities to access specific knowledge by means of a collaborative community. A model to semantically express the socio-collaborative activities of the platform connected with the domain knowledge related to the project is presented. The model is based on existing W3C ontologies such as FOAF, SIOC and SIOC-types for the socio-collaborative semantics and SKOS to describe the domain knowledge. An architecture to support the model and related applications of the semantic metadata generated in the platform are also described.

A SOCIO-SEMANTIC APPROACH TO THE CONCEPTUALISATION OF DOMAINS, PROCESSES AND TASKS IN LARGE PROJECTS

A case study involving a new method to support the collaborative construction of semantic artefacts in an inter-organizational context is described. The method aims at being applied, in particular, in the early phases of ontology development. We share the view that the development of semantic artefacts in collaborative networks of organizations should be based on a continuous construction of meaning, rather than pursuing the delivery of highly formalized accounts of domains. For that, our research is directed to the application of cognitive semantics results, specifically by developing and extending the Conceptual Blending Theory to cope with the socio-cognitive aspects of inter-organizational ontology development. An evaluation experiment for this method is accomplished in the scope of a large European project in the area of industrial engineering. The method evaluation and its results are described.

Collaborative conceptualisation processes in the development of lightweight ontologies

Purpose In collaborative settings, such as research and development projects, obtaining the maximum benefit from knowledge management systems depends on the ability of the different partners to understand the conceptualisation underlying the system’s knowledge organisation. This paper aims to show how information/knowledge organisation in a multi-organisation project can be made more effective if the domain experts are involved in the specification of the systems semantic structure. A particular aspect is further studied: the role of conceptual relations in the process of collaborative development of such structures. Design/methodology/approach An action-research approach was adopted, framed by a socio-semantic stance. A collaborative conceptual modelling platform was used to support the members of a research and development project in the process of developing a lightweight ontology aiming at reorganising all the project information in a wiki system. Data collection was carried out by means of participant observation, interviews and a questionnaire. Findings The approach to solve the content organisation problem revealed to be effective both in the result and the process. It resulted in a better-organised system, enabling more efficient project information retrieval. The collaborative development of the lightweight ontology embodied, in fact, a learning process, leading to a shared conceptualisation. The research results point to the importance of the elicitation of conceptual relations for structuring the project’s knowledge. These results are important for the design of methods and tools to support the collaborative development of conceptual models. Originality/value This paper studies the social process leading to a shared conceptualisation, a subject that has not been sufficiently researched. This case study provides evidence about the importance of the early phases of the construction of ontologies, mainly if domain experts are deeply involved, supported by appropriated tools and guided by well-structured processes.

Semantic Integration of Conceptual Models

In a collaborative conceptualisation process, the existence of several solutions for a given domain is a very common problem. Given this, specialists must reach a consensus on the concepts that will encompass the final solution. Therefore, this work aims to provide a tool for the integration of conceptual models in order to help specialists during the negotiation phase of developing the final shared model. This approach analyses the concepts of two models and shows the similar concepts to the specialists. The semantic similarity is obtained after three stages, namely: normalization, syntax analysis and semantic analysis. To evaluate the proposed approach, the values of precision and recall measures were calculated in two practical application scenarios. The obtained results proved to be better when compared to the existing tools when applied to semi-formal models (conceptual maps), and very close to the best tools focused on formal models (ontologies) integration.