Jennifer Sampson

AlViz - A Tool for Visual Ontology Alignment

We introduce a multiple-view tool called AlViz, which supports the alignment of ontologies visually. Ontologies play an important role for interoperability between organizations and for the semantic Web because they aim at capturing domain knowledge in a generic way and provide a consensual understanding of a domain. Alignment is the process where for each entity in first ontology we try to find a corresponding entity in the second ontology with the same or the closest meaning. Existing ontology alignment tools do not adequately provide a way for users to analyze the results. While many alignment tools generate lists of mappings it is difficult to analyze these alignments without examining every pairwise correspondence in the output files and even then it is an overwhelming task. We propose the use of visualization techniques to facilitate user understanding of the ontology alignment results. AlViz is implemented as a tab plug-in for Protege

What factors lead to software project failure

It has been suggested that there is more than one reason for a software development project to fail. However, most of the literature that discusses project failure tends to be rather general, supplying us with lists of risk and failure factors, and focusing on the negative business effects of the failure. Very little research has attempted an in-depth investigation of a number of failed projects to identify exactly what are the factors behind the failure. In this research we analyze data from 70 failed projects. This data provides us with practitionerspsila perspectives on 57 development and management factors for projects they considered were failures. Our results show that all projects we investigated suffered from numerous failure factors. For a single project the number of such factors ranges from 5 to 47. While there does not appear to be any overarching set of failure factors we discovered that all of the projects suffered from poor project management. Most projects additionally suffered from organizational factors outside the project managerpsilas control. We conclude with suggestions for minimizing the four most common failure factors.

Visualization in Ontology Tools

With a literature study we found an enormous number of ontology visualization tools. Many of them apply graph visualization but there are other approaches as well. We have identified interesting solutions for dealing with the complexity of large ontologies. Ontology engineering, ontology mapping and alignment can benefit from Information Visualization. Our collection is a starting point to demonstrate the usefulness of Information Visualization techniques, however, a detailed evaluation would be the next step to consolidate this research area and help to boost the adoption of ontologies in common Web applications.

Visual ontology alignment for knowledge sharing and reuse

Purpose – By providing interoperability users can be supported in sharing and reusing vocabularies and knowledge. Ontology alignment plays an important role in the context of semantic interoperability. Usually ontology alignment tools generate results that are difficult to understand or assess. In order to enable users to check and improve alignment results and to understand their consequences information visualization techniques are used. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the relevant quality aspects in ontology alignment as well as current activities and available tools. Design/methodology/approach – Based on a literature study quality measures for ontology alignment identified and requirements for visual ontology alignment are defined. As a proof of concepts a prototype called AlViz was developed. Findings – Information visualization offers appropriate methods for the assessment of ontology alignment results. Different levels of detail and overview help users to navigate and understand the alignments. The assessment of semi-structured resources by users involves learning activities. The neighborhood of the entity under investigation bears relevant semantic information. Therefore, assessment may include crisscrossing acquisition of knowledge representations and their semantics. Originality/value – Along a comprehensive framework alignment assessment tasks are identified and visualization tool is introduced and applied which aims at making ontology alignment results manageable and comprehensible.

Using Semantic Technologies to Enhance a Requirements Engineering Approach for Alignment of IT with Business Strategy

B-SCP is a promising framework addressing alignment of IT with business strategy from a requirements engineering persective. A problem with the B-SCP framework is that it is extremely difficult to track dependencies between requirements in a project of realistic complexity. We discuss how the RDF data model with OWL semantics, will greatly benefit an implementation using B-SCP. Our contribution is to extend B-SCP by describing an ontology data structure for representing the requirements and the complex rules which map them together. Seven Eleven-Japan is used as an exemplar to demonstrate improved productivity and consistency of B-SCP.

An Ontology-Based Approach for Supporting Business-IT Alignment

B-SCP (Business Strategy, Context, and Process) is a promising framework addressing alignment of IT with business strategy from a requirements engineering perspective. The B-SCP approach combines goal and context modeling, and business processes, into a generic modeling framework that deconstructs these to IT requirements and context. However, a problem with the B-SCP framework is that it is difficult to track dependencies between requirements in a project of realistic complexity. To address this we discuss how the RDF (Resource Description Framework) data model with OWL (Web Ontology Language) semantics will greatly benefit an implementation using B-SCP. Our contribution is to extend B-SCP by describing an ontology data structure for representing the requirements and the complex rules which map them together. The benefit in our approach is that it provides a comprehensive way to validate the decomposition of the requirements. Seven–Eleven Japan is used as an exemplar to demonstrate improved productivity and consistency of B-SCP.

Ontology Alignment in Agent Systems: Current and future challenges

Solving heterogeneity problems on the semantic Web using ontologies is important for communicating agents requiring a shared understanding of common domains. Ontology alignment is one prerequisite towards enabling interoperability between agents or services that use different ontologies. It is necessary that these agents align their ontologies to enable data exchange at the syntactic and semantic level. This paper conducts a review of research in ontology alignment in an agent context and identifies the major theoretical and practical issues which need to be addressed. We also provide directions for future research in the area of ontology alignment in general

Ontology Alignment Quality: A Framework and Tool for Validation

Recently semantic web technologies, such as ontologies, have been proposed as key enablers for integrating heterogeneous data schemas in business and governmental systems. Algorithms designed to align different but related ontologies have become necessary as differing ontologies proliferate. The process of ontology alignment seeks to find corresponding entities in a second ontology with the same or the closest meaning for each entity in a single ontology. This research is motivated by the need to provide tools and techniques to support the task of validating ontology alignment statements, since it cannot be guaranteed that the results from automated tools are accurate. The authors present a framework for understanding ontology alignment quality and describe how AlViz, a tool for visual ontology alignment, may be used to improve the quality of alignment results. An experiment was undertaken to test the claim that AlViz supports the task of validating ontology alignments. A promising result found that the tool has potential for identifying missing alignments and for rejecting false alignments.

Aligning Environment Web Data to the ISO 15926 Oil and Gas Ontology

The Environment Web (EW) is the official database for emissions and discharges from the offshore oil and gas industry in Norway. Currently we are working on a project to describe and align terms in the EW application according to the ISO 15926 Reference Data Library (RDL). One of our goals is to ensure that the EW terms in the RDL can be used as a reference point for all systems using EW terms. Therefore the definitions of the EW constructs in the RDL need to be unambiguous. Moreover, another goal is to enrich the ISO 15926 ontology by adding terms from the EW domain.We briefly describe our experiences and challenges faced so far when mapping terms from the EW database to the ISO15926 Ontology.

Facilitating Interoperability in Semantic Web Applications Using Ontologies

Semantic Web applications often rely on the reuse of underlying data from legacy information systems. The motivation for our research is how to make this data accessible for use in such applications. We propose the use of ontologies and conceptual modelling in an overall approach for data interoperability. The approach incorporates a process for ontology alignment using our tool for visual ontology alignment. First results from our tool evaluation were promising and show that visualization is useful for locating additional candidate alignments by an end user.