Francesco Taglino

SymOntoX: a Web-ontology tool for ebusiness domains

Ontologies are emerging as a key solution to allow different applications to exchange information in a cooperative business environment. From the technology point of view, the growth of the Internet and the Web has favoured the exchange of information and documents among people, but unfortunately the same is not true when information is exchanged among software applications. To tackle the latter problem, ontology-based approaches are among the most promising ones. This is one of the reasons of the momentum that ontologies, and consequently ontology management systems (OMSs), are witnessing. An OMS represents a powerful tool to create common and shareable knowledge repositories concerning a given application domain. The goal of this work is to present SymOntoX, a Web-based OMS conceived for the ebusiness domain. It is an open source software system supporting collaborative and distributed ontology authoring activities.

Semantic mediation for standard-based B2B interoperability

A semantic-mediation architecture advances traditional approaches for standard-based business-to-business interoperability. The architecture formally models a business domain in a reference ontology and annotates domain message schemas to define public and proprietary reconciliation rule sets. Enterprises can use the rule sets to implement standard-based message interfaces and to translate message content between their proprietary message forms. An implementation of the semantic-mediation architecture augments a general applications-integration toolset developed for the Athena European FP 6 project. The implementation demonstrates the architectures feasibility and suggests directions for future tool enhancements.

An Ontology-based Platform for Semantic Interoperability

In this chapter the main issues of an Ontology-based platform for semantic interoperability, with particular attention to the underlying methodology, are illustrated. The solutions presented here have been developed in the context of Harmonise, an IST project aimed at developing an interoperability platform for SMEs in the tourism sector. The illustrated platform is an advanced software solution, based on the use of computational ontologies, aiming at the reconciliation of conceptual, structural, and formatting differences that hamper information exchange. The proposed approach relies on the availability of a domain ontology, used as a semantic reference for cooperating systems. Then we elaborate on semantic clashes, arising when a conceptual local schema is contrasted with the ontology. Semantic clashes are taken into account when the elements of a conceptual local schema are semantically annotated. Semantic annotation is requested to reconcile existing differences of cooperating information systems. Having illustrated the underlying approach, we briefly report on the main phases required to an information system to enter in the Harmonise space (i.e., to acquire interoperability capability) and, finally, on the overall Harmonise platform.

Semantic search for matching user requests with profiled enterprises

Semantic search is an important approach that promises significant improvements for customers to identify products of their interest. To perform semantic search, enterprises need to publish semantically enriched descriptions of their offered goods and services; then a customer expresses his/her request, in an easy Google like fashion, by providing a list of desired features. If enterprise offerings and customer requests are based on the same vocabulary (i.e., ontology), they can be semantically matched by using advanced semantic methods. In this paper, we propose an ontology-based method aimed at finding the best matches between a user request and the services offered by different enterprises. We assume that in a given business ecosystem (in the paper, as an example, the tourism sector) a group of SMEs agree on the adoption of a reference ontology, used to build the company profiles on the basis of the offered services. Accordingly, a user request, represented by a set of desired features, is expressed in terms of the reference ontology terminology (i.e., concepts). In this paper, we illustrate SemSim, a method used to collectively search the SME profiles to identify the services that match at best the user request. SemSim is based on the well-known information content approach used to evaluate the semantic similarity between concepts. The experimental results show that our proposal performs better than some of the most representative similarity search methods proposed in the literature.

A Semantic Framework for Knowledge Management in Virtual Innovation Factories

Knowledge management is a crucial aspect for enterprises that want to effectively cope with business innovation. However, the full control of the knowledge asset is often missing due to the lack of precise organizational models, policies, and proper technologies, especially in Virtual Enterprises VEs, which are characterized by heterogeneous partners with different policies, skills and know-how. For such reasons, the need for technologies that enable knowledge sharing, efficient access to knowledge resources, and interoperability is felt as primary. This work proposes a semantics-based infrastructure aimed at supporting effective knowledge management for business innovation in VEs. Knowledge resources are formally represented and stored in a semantic layer, which is exploited by a set of semantic services for enabling efficient retrieval and reasoning capabilities to derive additional knowledge.

A semantic-mediation architecture for interoperable supply-chain applications

This paper presents a semantic-mediation architecture that enables standards-based interoperability between heterogeneous supply-chain applications. The architecture was implemented using a state-of-the-art semantic-mediation toolset for design-time and run-time integration tasks. The design-time tools supported a domain ontology definition, message annotations, message schema transformations and reconciliation rules specifications. The run-time tools performed exchanges, transformations, and reconciliations of the messages. The architecture supports a supply-chain integration scenario where heterogeneous automotive manufacturing supply-chain applications exchange inventory information.

Business and Enterprise Ontology Management with SymOntoX

Ontologies are emerging as a key solution for knowledge sharing in co-operative business environment. From the technology point of view, the growth of Internet use has favoured the development of environments devoted to collaborative and distributed work, allowing different communities to increase flexibility and effectiveness in their work. From the representation point of view, an ontology management system represents a powerful tool to create common and shareable knowledge repositories. The goal of this work is to present SymOntoX, a web-based ontology management system. It is an open source environment supporting collaborative and distributed ontology construction and maintenance.

Semantic Lifting of Business Process Models

Business Process (BP) modeling is constantly acquiring attention in modern enterprises. Today, BP editor tools support modelers in building correct diagrams only from the syntactic point of view. Enriching them with ontologies can bring many advantages as the possibility of applying advanced reasoning techniques, aimed at the identification of contradictions and mistakes in the model specification, and the possibility of organizing BP models repositories, with advanced search and retrieval facilities. Furthermore, semantic technologies can substantially support business/IT alignment. Semantic enrichment of BPs can be achieved by representing a BP, or part of it, with an ontology-oriented formalism (semantic lifting) and mapping it to a reference ontology. In this paper, we present the basic elements of a business process ontology framework (OPAL+BPAL) and its concrete representation according to OWL syntax. Finally, we show how it is possible to generate an OWL representation of a BPMN diagram.

Weighted Ontology for Semantic Search

This paper presents a method, SemSim , for the semantic search and retrieval of digital resources (DRs) that have been previously annotated. The annotation is performed by using a set of characterizing concepts, referred to as features , selected from a reference ontology. The proposed semantic search method requires that the features in the ontology are weighted. The weight represents the probability that a resource is annotated with the associated feature. The SemSim method operates in three stages. In the first stage, the similarity between concepts (consim ) is computed by using their weights. In the second stage, the concept weights are used to derive the semantic similarity (semsim ) between a user request and the DRs. In the last stage, the answer is returned in the form of a ranked list. An experiment aimed at assessing the proposed method and a comparison against a few among the most popular competing solutions is given.

Integration of Ontologies and Bayesian Networks for Maritime Situation Awareness

This paper describes the main lines of the Intelligent Maritime Awareness Situation System (IMASS) developed to support an Electronic Surveillance platform conceived to contrast pirates activities in the Aden Gulf. The proposal is based on a solution that integrates an ontological approach in the description of the observed reality and a Bayesian approach to represent the experience and the knowledge of the domain experts. The intelligent system has been developed at a prototypical stage and tested with a complex scenario created with a simulator. The results are encouraging and indicate that this is a promising direction to go.