Per Myrseth

Idea: a feasibility study in model based prediction of impact of changes on system quality

We propose a method, called PREDIQT, for model based prediction of impact of architecture design changes on system quality. PREDIQT supports simultaneous analysis of several quality attributes and their trade-offs. This paper argues for the feasibility of the PREDIQT method based on a comprehensive industrial case study targeting a system for managing validation of electronic certificates and signatures worldwide. We give an overview of the PREDIQT method, and present an evaluation of the method in terms of a feasibility study.

Editorial: Quality of hierarchies in ontologies and folksonomies

Ontologies have been a hot research topic for the recent decade and have been used for many applications such as information integration, semantic search, knowledge management, etc. Manual engineering of ontologies is a costly process and automatic ontology engineering lacks in precision. Folksonomies have recently emerged as another hot research topic and several research efforts have been made to extract (lightweight) ontologies automatically from folksonomy data. Due to the high cost of manual ontology engineering and the lack of precision in automatic ontology engineering it is important that we are able to evaluate the structure of the ontology. Detection of problems with the suggested ontology at an early stage can, especially for manually engineered ontologies, be cost saving. In this paper we present an approach to evaluate the quality of hierarchical relations in ontologies and folksonomy based structures. The approach is based on constructing shallow semantic representations of the ontology concepts and folksonomy tags. We specify four hypotheses regarding the semantic representations and different quality aspects of the hierarchical relations and perform an evaluation on two different data sets. The results of the evaluation confirm our hypotheses.

Unveiling Barriers and Enablers of Risk Management in Interoperability Efforts

eGovernment efforts are, as general IS efforts, associated with considerable risk. As eGovernment matures and interoperability becomes more ingrained in eGovernment efforts, it will be interesting to explore how the increased complexity affects risk. Still, research on risk management in the context of eGovernment is sparse and our understanding of the phenomenon equally so. This qualitative study investigates risk management in the Norwegian public sector. Based on 11 interviews with experts from nine public organizations, we identified six barriers and eight enablers to risk management in eGovernment settings. Our findings suggest that interoperability has important implications for how risk management is conducted.

Information governance as a basis for cross-sector e-services in public administration

Information governance and systematic work with metadata and semantics are important elements of the implementation of an open, transparent, accessible, accountable, user-friendly and service-oriented public sector. Top management commitment is crucial in order to achieve necessary attention and sufficient budgets. Management needs to be aware of metadata and semantics as important enablers for the goals set forth in strategies and requirements from ministries. Documentation of economic potential and cost savings will help to get attention among decision makers, but today, few trustworthy sources are available. The development of cross-sector services and the demand for reuse of public service information, both in the public sector itself, but also for commercial services, underpins the importance of well-defined information. Participation in cross-sector e-Services demands the establishment of metadata repositories and ontologies as obligatory parts of the public sector information governance regimes.

A data quality framework applied to e-government metadata: A prerequsite to establish governance of interoperable e-services

Data quality is becoming increasingly important in information critical systems and the data, also coined information product (IP)[1] is frequently considered as an item with equal importance to the physical product. Several frameworks for both data quality processes and data quality methods have been defined and are routinely applied to transactional and master data systems. However, it has been suggested that the same principles could also be successfully implemented for metadata repositories[7]. This article outlines how data quality processes and a data quality framework both based on semiotics[2] and Wang[1] are being applied to monitor and improve the content in an e-government metadata repository. In the work described here, the term data is used to denote data instances whereas metadata denotes the reusable data definitions.

Concept Signatures and Semantic Drift

Ontology evolution is the process of incrementally and consistently adapting an existing ontology to changes in the relevant domain. Semantic drift refers to how ontology concepts’ intentions gradually change as the domain evolves. Normally, a semantic drift captures small domain changes that are hard to detect with traditional ontology management tools or ontology learning methods, but may be important to the maintenance of the ontology. This paper discusses a new approach to detecting semantic drift that makes use of concept signatures reflecting the textual references to concepts over time. Comparing how signatures change over time, we see how concepts’ semantic content evolves and how their relationships to other concepts gradually reflect these changes. An experiment with the DNV’s business sector ontology from 2004 and 2008 demonstrates the value of this approach to ontology evolution.

Quality of subsumption hierarchies in ontologies

Ontologies are becoming increasingly more popular tools for many tasks, such as information integration, information retrieval, knowledge management and extraction etc. The cost and complexity of developing good ontologies is high, and therefore it is important to be able to verify the ontology and detect flaws early. In this paper we propose an approach to expose desirable properties of ontological structures. The approach is based on an ontological profile which is an ontology extended with a vector of weighted terms describing the semantics of each concept of the ontology. We describe four hypotheses for the relations among the classes of the ontology and perform experiments to verify them. Our initial findings are that the experiments support the hypotheses.

Visualization of Complex Relations in E-government Knowledge Taxonomies

The successful collaboration and interoperability between fully and partially related E-government subject domains requires well understood and high quality definitions of terms and a unified view of the relationships between the defined terms. The common terms and corresponding relation are defined in knowledge taxonomies (or even ontologies) and several good tools exist to create and maintain these models for the appropriate sub domains. The engineering process is carried out in a multi-user environment including remote workers editing the taxonomy. However, the sheer complexity and size of the full models dictates more powerful and dedicated visualization tools to graphically inspect, assess and diagnose the full taxonomies. This article describes a case where a social network analysis (SNA) tool is used as a part of a regime for the quality assurance of a knowledge taxonomy for e-government interoperability. In addition to the visual aids provided by the SNA tool, some comments are also made as to the applicability of SNA centrality metrics to knowledge taxonomies.