Sean M. Falconer

A cognitive support framework for ontology mapping

Ontology mapping is the key to data interoperability in the semantic web. This problem has received a lot of research attention, however, the research emphasis has been mostly devoted to automating the mapping process, even though the creation of mappings often involve the user. As industry interest in semantic web technologies grows and the number of widely adopted semantic web applications increases, we must begin to support the user. In this paper, we combine data gathered from background literature, theories of cognitive support and decision making, and an observational case study to propose a theoretical framework for cognitive support in ontology mapping tools. We also describe a tool called COGZ that is based on this framework.

Synthesis of the optimal 4-bit reversible circuits

Optimal synthesis of reversible functions is a non-trivial problem. One of the major limiting factors in computing such circuits is the sheer number of reversible functions. Even restricting synthesis to 4-bit reversible functions results in a complexity explosion (16! ≈244 functions). The output of such a search alone, counting only the space required to list Toffoli gates for every function, would require over 100 terabytes of storage. In this paper, we present an algorithm, that synthesizes an optimal circuit for any 4-bit reversible specification. We employ several techniques to make the problem tractable. We report results from several experiments, including synthesis of random 4-bit permutations, optimal synthesis of all 4-bit linear reversible circuits, synthesis of existing benchmark functions, and distribution of optimal circuits. Our results have important implications for the design and optimization of quantum circuits, testing circuit synthesis heuristics, and performing experiments in the area of quantum information processing.

Will semantic web technologies work for the development of ICD-11?

The World Health Organization is beginning to use Semantic Web technologies in the development of the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11). Health officials use ICD in all United Nations member countries to compile basic health statistics, to monitor health-related spending, and to inform policy makers. While previous revisions of ICD encoded minimal information about a disease, and were mainly published as books and tabulation lists, the creators of ICD-11 envision that it will become a multipurpose and coherent classification ready for electronic health records. Most important, they plan to have ICD-11 applied for a much broader variety of uses than previous revisions. The new requirements entail significant changes in the way we represent disease information, as well as in the technologies and processes that we use to acquire the new content. In this paper, we describe the previous processes and technologies used for developing ICD. We then describe the requirements for the new development process and present the SemanticWeb technologies that we use for ICD-11. We outline the experiences of the domain experts using the software system that we implemented using Semantic Web technologies. We then discuss the benefits and challenges in following this approach and conclude with lessons learned from this experience.

Interactive Techniques to Support Ontology Matching

There are many automatic approaches for generating matches between ontologies and schemas. However, these techniques are far from perfect and when the use case requires an accurate matching, humans must be involved in the process. Yet, involving the users in creating matchings presents its own problems. Users have trouble understanding the relationships between large ontologies and schemas and their concepts, remembering what they have looked at and executed, understanding output from the automatic algorithm, remembering why they performed an operation, reversing their decisions, and gathering evidence to support their decisions. Recently, researchers have been investigating these issues and developing tools to help users overcome these difficulties. In this chapter, we present some of the latest work related to human-guided ontology matching. Specifically, we discuss the cognitive difficulties users face with creating ontology matchings, the latest visual tools for assisting users with matching tasks, Web 2.0 approaches, common themes, challenges, and the next steps.

An analysis of collaborative patterns in large-scale ontology development projects

Today, distributed teams collaboratively create and maintain more and more ontologies. To support this type of ontology development, software engineers are introducing a new generation of tools. However, we know relatively little about how existing large-scale collaborative ontology development works and what user workflows the tools must support. In this paper, we analyze our experience in supporting several such projects. We describe a visual and interactive project-management tool that we have developed, which helps ontology developers explore historical ontology change and discussion data. We present the results of qualitative and quantitative studies of the collaborative activity associated with three large-scale ontology-development projects. Based on the analysis, we conclude that domain and ontology experts have different patterns of ontology editing behavior, which has important implications for ontology-development tools.

Ontology development for the masses: creating ICD-11 in WebProtégé

The World Health Organization is currently developing the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11). ICD is the standard diagnostic classification used in health care all over the world. In contrast to previous ICD revisions that did not have a formal representation and were mainly available as printed books, ICD-11 uses OWL for the formal representation of its content. In this paper, we report on our work to support the collaborative development of ICD-11 in WebProtege--a web-based ontology browser and editor. WebProtege integrates collaboration features directly into the editing process. We report on the results of the evaluation that we performed during a two-week meeting with the ICD editors in Geneva. We performed the evaluation in the context of the editors learning to use WebProtege to start the ICD-11 development. Participants in the evaluation were optimistic that collaborative development will work in this context, but have raised a number of critical issues.

Synchronized tag clouds for exploring semi-structured clinical trial data

Searching and comparing information from semi-structured repositories is an important, but cognitively complex activity for internet users. The typical web interface displays a list of results as a textual list which is limited in helping the user compare or gain an overview of the results from a series of iterative queries. In this paper, we propose a new interactive, lightweight technique that uses multiple synchronized tag clouds to support iterative visual analysis and filtering of query results. Although tag clouds are frequently available in web interfaces, they are typically used for providing an overview of key terms in a set of results, but thus far have not been used for presenting semi-structured information to support iterative queries. We evaluated our proposed design in a user study that presents typical search and comparison scenarios to users trying to understand heterogeneous clinical trials from a leading repository of scientific information. The study gave us valuable insights regarding the challenges that semi-structured data collections pose, and indicated that our design may ease cognitively demanding browsing activities of semi-structured information.

A visualization service for the semantic web

The Web presents an opportunity to openly collaborate and share visualizations of semantic web data. Many desktop tools for visually exploring ontologies exist; however, few researchers have investigated how visualizations could be used in an online environment to enhance the semantic web. In this paper, we present our experience with developing a visualization service for the semantic web. We discuss the advantages and challenges with moving to a web-based platform, as well as the features of the service through several case studies. We reflect on this experience and provide recommendations for future work and data integrations.

A knowledge base driven user interface for collaborative ontology development

Scientists and researchers often use ontologies to describe their data, to share and integrate this data from heterogeneous sources. Ontologies are formal computer models that describe the main concepts and their relationships in a particular domain. Ontologies are usually authored by a community of users with different roles and levels of expertise. To support collaboration among distributed teams and to provision for distinct authoring requirements of each of the user roles and of individual users, we designed a configurable Web-based ontology editor, WebProtege. WebProtege extends Protege, a widely popular ontology editor with more than 150,000 registered users. The user interface layout and configuration for WebProtege is model-based and declarative: we represent it in a knowledge base, with an ontology defining its structure, and linking the interface configuration to the users, their roles, and access policies. We will discuss how the knowledge base driven configuration of the user interface supports the reuse and modularization of layout configurations. Such configuration is also highly flexible and extensible, and is easier to manage than many traditional approaches.

Quantum circuit placement: optimizing qubit-to-qubit interactions through mapping quantum circuits into a physical experiment

We study the problem of the practical realization of an abstract quantum circuit when executed on quantum hardware. By practical, we mean adapting the circuit to particulars of the physical environment which restricts/complicates the establishment of certain direct interactions between qubits. This is a quantum version of the classical circuit placement problem. We study the theoretical aspects of the problem and also present empirical results that match the best known solutions that have been developed by experimentalists. Finally, we discuss the efficiency of the approach and scalability of its implementation with regards to the future development of quantum hardware.