Henry M. Kim

Predicting how ontologies for the semantic web will evolve

The first phase in the evolution of the semantic Web may be the development of decentralized, adaptive ontologies for software specification.

Towards a Framework for Evaluating Immersive Business Models: Evaluating Service Innovations in Second Life

Virtual worlds may be enabling technologies for the next generation of business models, practices and innovations in service. We situate our research within the field of service science and aim to evaluate service innovations. Because of Second Lifes visibility as the de facto virtual world for commerce, we apply an immersive business evaluation framework against existing and hypothetical Second Life innovations. We then develop a framework based on Media Richness and Task Closure Theories to evaluate these cases. We thus progress toward theories of immersive business and concomitant evaluative frameworks for immersive business models. We posit the following characteristics of potential Second Life innovations based on our analysis: 1) feedback and interactions between users are not dissipated; 2) tasks that are profitable enough to support can be started and closed by users within Second Life; and 3) users are compelled to form a social presence, which is then leveraged.

A Measurement Ontology Generalizable for Emerging Domain Applications on the Semantic Web

This article introduces a measurement ontology for applications to Semantic Web applications, specifically for emerging domains such as microarray analysis. The Semantic Web is the next generation Web of structured data that are automatically shared by software agents, which apply definitions and constraints organized in ontologies to correctly process data from disparate sources. One facet needed to develop Semantic Web ontologies of emerging domains is creating ontologies of concepts that are common to these domains. These general “common-sense†ontologies can be used as building blocks to develop more domain-specific ontologies. However most measurement ontologies concentrate on representing units of measurement and quantities, and not on other measurement concepts such as sampling, mean values, and evaluations of quality based on measurements. In this article, we elaborate on a measurement ontology that represents all these concepts. We present the generality of the ontology, and describe how it is developed, used for analysis and validated.

Towards a Data Model for Quality Management Web Services: An Ontology of Measurement for Enterprise Modeling

Though the WWW is used for business process automation to lower costs and shorten leadtimes, arguably its use has been limited for another metric of business success: Improving quality. A promising advancement to the WWW is the development of the Semantic Web, which relies upon using machine process-able domain knowledge represented in ontologies. Therefore, one promising area of research and application is the development of ontologies used as data models to provide quality management services on the Semantic Web. In this paper, the TOVE Measurement Ontology is presented as a formal model of a fundamental domain, which needs to be represented to provide these services. Measurement is fundamental for representing quality because before quality is evaluated and managed, it must first be measured. An assessment system for measuring attributes of an entity, activities for measurement, and quality as conformance to requirements are the core concepts represented in the ontology. The formal representation of measurement is emphasized over detailing context of ontology use, since this is an issue not heavily examined by the ontology community and one that needs to be detailed in order develop data models to provide Semantic Web based quality management services.

From Recreational Applications to Workplace Technologies: An Empirical Study of Cross-Context is Continuance in the Case of Virtual Worlds

Although three-dimensional, immersive virtual worlds, such as Active Worlds, Second Life, and Teleplace have been in existence for several years, their organizational use is rather limited. This paper posits, perhaps counter intuitively, that the diffusion of virtual worlds within organizations could be enhanced by their recreational usage. This argument is motivated by the notion developed in this paper that the use of technologies need not remain within a single context, but instead can cross-contexts, for example from recreational to vocational. We term such shift cross-context IS continuance. This paper proposes that workers using virtual worlds for recreational (i.e., hedonic and social) use are suitably positioned to discover those technologies’ workplace applicability, thereby assisting in their diffusion within the organization. Building on the supporting results of an empirical study, this paper recommends that managers consider allowing for ‘playtime’ with virtual worlds as a mechanism for enhancing their adoption and subsequent diffusion in the workplace. From an information systems (IS)-research perspective, this paper makes several important contributions. First, it contributes to the IS continuance literature by arguing for, and providing evidence in support of, the existence of cross-context continuance. To date, this literature stream has examined only one aspect of continuance – for example, within-context. Second, this paper identifies recreational and work as distinct dimensions of technology usage, and hedonic and social usage as sub-dimensions of the former, thereby contributing to the contextualization of this core IS construct. Third, it is one of the early field studies dedicated to the empirical examination of virtual worlds.

Exploiting the Small-Worlds of the Semantic Web to Connect Heterogeneous, Local Ontologies

Abstract In this paper, a parallel is drawn between the semantic Web search problem of software agents finding the right ontology definition to how people are able to find strangers using a surprisingly short chain of acquaintances – a result from the “six degrees of separation” experiment. The experiment relied on shared understanding of the phrase, “someone you know on a first name basis” to define an acquaintance relationship. Web searching relies on standardized use of the hyperlink relationship. Hyperlinks are constituted from universally accepted meta-data: Anchor and bookmark HTML markups. Say that heterogeneous local ontologies are all marked-up using standard meta-data. Then, the meta-data and some universally accepted semantics constitute a shared ontology, which can be used to bridge local ontologies, much as highly connected people who belonged to many cliques (small-worlds) were used disproportionately often in the search for strangers. This paper outlines the framework for approaching the semantic Web search problem using meta-data based shared ontologies inspired from small-worlds theory of sociology. This approach is exciting because it (1) enables data sharing over the semantic Web without post hoc modifications to local ontologies, and (2) uses meta-data, which in many situations are already commonly available and implemented in XML.

Enabling Integrated Decision Making for Electronic-Commerce by Modelling an Enterprise's Sharable Knowledge.

A key benefit of advances in information technology has been the increased ability to make decisions that integrate different perspectives. Enterprise resource planning software integrates information from traditionally disparate parts of the same organization. Search engines and Internet services allow a user to integrate information from sources all over the world. So what kind of integrated decisions can the e‐commerce supplier or customer make? From a technological perspective, the answer to this question depends on the following: how a given organization presents its information to others, and how it finds the right information from others. A useful tool for e‐commerce suppliers and customers to make integrated decisions is an enterprise model, a computational model of the knowledge about an enterprise – its products, processes, organizational structures, resources, goals, and constraints. Sharable knowledge, once organized and represented in an enterprise model, can then be integrated by the modelle...

Extracting knowledge from XML document repository: a semantic Web-based approach

XML plays an important role as the standard language for representing structured data for the traditional Web, and hence many Web-based knowledge management repositories store data and documents in XML. If semantics about the data are formally represented in an ontology, then it is possible to extract knowledge: This is done as ontology definitions and axioms are applied to XML data to automatically infer knowledge that is not explicitly represented in the repository. Ontologies also play a central role in realizing the burgeoning vision of the semantic Web, wherein data will be more sharable because their semantics will be represented in Web-accessible ontologies. In this paper, we demonstrate how an ontology can be used to extract knowledge from an exemplar XML repository of Shakespeare’s plays. We then implement an architecture for this ontology using de facto languages of the semantic Web including OWL and RuleML, thus preparing the ontology for use in data sharing. It has been predicted that the early adopters of the semantic Web will develop ontologies that leverage XML, provide intra-organizational value such as knowledge extraction capabilities that are irrespective of the semantic Web, and have the potential for inter-organizational data sharing over the semantic Web. The contribution of our proof-of-concept application, KROX, is that it serves as a blueprint for other ontology developers who believe that the growth of the semantic Web will unfold in this manner.

Development and application of a framework for evaluating multi‐mode voting risks

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the risks associated with online voting and to compare them with more traditional voting modes.Design/methodology/approach – A modified version of the Operationally Critical Threat, Asset, and Vulnerability Evaluation (OCTAVE) approach from the CERT Coordination Center® at Carnegie‐Mellon University is used for developing a framework for comparing threats for different stakeholders. In addition, these risks and threats are quantified, offering an opportunity to conduct a multi‐mode risk analysis in a manner independent of the underlying voting modes. The framework is exemplified using data from officials who had been involved in an actual municipal election, in which registered voters were given the option of voting through the Internet.Findings – What is instructive in the context of this study is that the “low‐tech” threats such as large‐scale mail theft of election notifications and family member coercion may in fact be significant for Internet voti...

Electronic marketplaces versus enterprise resource planning: a comparison and decision methodology for supply chain management

This paper addresses a firms decision of whether to rely on the supply chain capabilities of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems or to make use of electronic marketplaces (EMPs). The functionalities provided by the technologies, their costs and benefits, and strategic considerations are discussed as variables relevant to this decision. The tradeoff also depends on the firms current level of capabilities and the processes that ensure its competitive advantage. Upon the analysis of these decision factors, the paper develops a decision methodology for the selection of these information technologies. The qualitative and quantitative decision models that are developed can together be used to make the decision between ERP systems and EMPs and the mix of internal and external supply chain capabilities. The qualitative model aids in the choice between an ERP system and an EMP and is based on a lifecycle approach. The quantitative model, a nonlinear mixed integer programme, can be used to mix and match di...