Pieter De Leenheer

DOGMA-MESS: a meaning evolution support system for interorganizational ontology engineering

In this paper, we explore the process of interorganizational ontology engineering. Scalable ontology engineering is hard to do in interorganizational settings where there are many pre-existing organizational ontologies and rapidly changing collaborative requirements. A complex socio-technical process of ontology alignment and meaning negotiation is therefore required. In particular, we are interested in how to increase the efficiency and relevance of this process using context dependencies between ontological elements. We describe the DOGMA-MESS methodology and system for scalable, community-grounded ontology engineering. We illustrate this methodology with examples taken from a case of interorganizational competency ontology evolution in the vocational training domain.

Context dependency management in ontology engineering: a formal approach

A viable ontology engineering methodology requires supporting domain experts in gradually building and managing increasingly complex versions of ontological elements and their converging and diverging interrelationships. Contexts are necessary to formalise and reason about such a dynamic wealth of knowledge. However, context dependencies introduce many complexities. In this article, we introduce a formal framework for supporting context dependency management processes, based on the DOGMA framework and methodology for scalable ontology engineering. Key notions are a set of context dependency operators, which can be combined to manage complex context dependencies like articulation, application, specialisation, and revision dependencies. In turn, these dependencies can be used in context-driven ontology engineering processes tailored to the specific requirements of collaborative communities. This is illustrated by a real-world case of interorganisational competency ontology engineering.

Using conceptual models to explore business-ICT alignment in networked value constellations

In this paper, we introduce e3alignment for inter-organizational business-ICT alignment. With the e3alignment framework, we create alignment between organizations operating in an agile networked value constellation—which is a set of organizations who jointly satisfy a customer need—by (1) focusing on the interaction between the organizations in the constellation, (2) considering interaction from four different perspectives, and (3) utilizing conceptual modeling techniques to analyze and create alignment within and between the perspectives. By creating inter-organizational business-ICT alignment between the actors in the constellation, e3alignment ultimately contributes to a sustainable and profitable constellation. To actually create alignment, e3alignment iteratively takes three specific steps: (1) identification of alignment issues, (2) solution design, and (3) impact analysis. We illustrate our approach with cases from the Dutch aviation industry, Spanish electricity industry, and Dutch telecom industry.

Dynamic Cluster-based Service Bundling: A Value-oriented Framework

In this paper we present a framework for dynamic service bundling, which focuses on the exchange of valuable outcomes between customers and service suppliers. The approach is based on three components: A customer, a broker and a pool of suppliers. The broker is in charge of matching the customer and supplier perspectives and performing a cluster-based bundling process. The applicability of our approach is proven by means of a case study in the educational service industry.

Fuzzy verification of service value networks

Service Value Networks (SVNs) represent a flexible design for service suppliers to offer attractive value propositions to final customers. Furthermore, networked services can satisfy more complex customer needs than single services acting on their own. Although, SVNs can cover complex needs, there is usually a mismatch between what the SVNs offer and what the customer needs. We present a framework to achieve SVN composition by means of the propose-critique-modify (PCM) problem-solving method and a Fuzzy Inference System (FIS). Whereas the PCM method composes alternative SVNs given some customer need, the FIS verifies the fitness of the composed SVNs for the given need. Our framework offers not only an interactive dialogue in which the customer can refine the composed SVNs but also visualizes the final composition, by making use of e3-valuemodels. Finally, the applicability of our approach is shown by means of a case study in the educational service sector.

On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM 2013 Conferences : Confederated International Conferences: CoopIS, DOA-Trusted Cloud, and ODBASE 2013, Graz, Austria, September 9-13, 2013. Proceedings

The OnTheMove 2013 event, held 9-13 September in Graz, Austria, further consolidated the importance of the series of annual conferences that was started in 2002 in Irvine, California. It then moved to Catania, Sicily in 2003, to Cyprus in 2004 and 2005, Montpellier in 2006, Vilamoura in 2007 and 2009, in 2008 to Monterrey, Mexico, to Heraklion, Crete in 2010 and 2011, and to Rome in 2012. This prime event continues to attract a diverse and relevant selection of todays research worldwide on the scientific concepts underlying new computing paradigms, which, of necessity, must be distributed, heterogeneous, and supporting an environment of resources that are autonomous and yet must meaningfully cooperate. Indeed, as such large, complex, and networked intelligent information systems become the focus and norm for computing, there continues to be an acute and even increasing need to address the implied software, system, and enterprise issues and discuss them face to face in an integrated forum that covers methodological, semantic, theoretical, and application issues as well. As we all realize, email, the Internet, and even video conferences are not by themselves optimal nor even sufficient for effective and efficient scientific exchange.

T-Lex: a role-based ontology engineering tool

In the DOGMA ontology engineering approach ontology construction starts from a (possibly very large) uninterpreted base of elementary fact types called lexons that are mined from linguistic descriptions (be it from existing schemas, a text corpus or formulated by domain experts) An ontological commitment to such ”lexon base” means selecting/reusing from it a meaningful set of facts that approximates well the intended conceptualization, followed by the addition of a set of constraints, or rules, to this subset The commitment process is inspired by the fact-based database modeling method NIAM/ORM2, which features a recently updated, extensive graphical support However, for encouraging lexon reuse by ontology engineers a more scalable way of visually browsing a large Lexon Base is important Existing techniques for similar semantic networks rather focus on graphical distance between concepts and not always consider the possibility that concepts might be (fact-) related to a large number of other concepts In this paper we introduce an alternative approach to browsing large fact-based diagrams in general, which we apply to lexon base browsing and selecting for building ontological commitments in particular We show that specific characteristics of DOGMA such as grouping by contexts and its ”double articulation principle”, viz explicit separation between lexons and an applications commitment to them can increase the scalability of this approach We illustrate with a real-world case study.

DOGMA-MESS: A Tool for Fact-Oriented Collaborative Ontology Evolution

Ontologies being shared formal specifications of a domain, are an important lever for developing meaningful internet systems. However, the problem is not in what ontologies are, but how they become operationally relevant and sustainable over longer periods of time. Fact-oriented and layered approaches such as DOGMA have been successful in facilitating domain experts in representing and understanding semantically stable ontologies, while emphasising reusability and scalability. DOGMA-MESS, extending DOGMA, is a collaborative ontology evolution methodology that supports stakeholders in iteratively interpreting and modeling their common ontologies in their own terminology and context, and feeding back these results to the owning community. In this paper we extend DOGMA Studio with a set of collaborative ontology evolution support modules.

Service Network Approaches

This chapter discusses several approaches to design, analyze, describe and compose service networks.We analyze the technical and business-related aspects of these approaches, their evolution, and the trends they will be likely to follow. We further suggest how the two major trends driving these approaches (i.e., business and process orientation) can converge. The chapter concludes with a discussion of future lines of research in this area.

Towards community-based evolution of knowledge-intensive systems

This article wants to address the need for a research effort and framework that studies and embraces the novel, difficult but crucial issues of adaptation of knowledge resources to their respective user communities, and vice versa, as a fundamental property within knowledge-intensive internet systems. Through a deep understanding of real-time, community-driven evolution of so-called ontologies, a knowledge-intensive system can be made operationally relevant and sustainable over longer periods of time. To bootstrap our framework, we adopt and extend the DOGMA ontology framework, and its community-grounded ontology engineering methodology DOGMA-MESS, with an ontology that models community concepts such as business rules, norms, policies, and goals as firstclass citizens of the ontology evolution process. Doing so ontology evolution can be tailored to the needs of a particular community. Finally, we illustrate with an example from an actual real-world problem setting, viz. interorganisational exchange of HR-related knowledge.