Vijayan Sugumaran

A semiotic metrics suite for assessing the quality of ontologies

A suite of metrics is proposed to assess the quality of an ontology. Drawing upon semiotic theory, the metrics assess the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and social aspects of ontology quality. We operationalize the metrics and implement them in a prototype tool called the Ontology Auditor. An initial validation of the Ontology Auditor on the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) library of domain ontologies indicates that the metrics are feasible and highlights the wide variation in quality among ontologies in the library. The contribution of the research is to provide a theory-based framework that developers can use to develop high quality ontologies and that applications can use to choose appropriate ontologies for a given task.

A framework for creating hybrid‐open source software communities

Abstract The open source software (OSS) model is a fundamentally new and revolutionary way to develop software. The success of the OSS model is also setting the stage for a structural change in the software industry; it is beginning to transform software industry from manufacturing to a service industry. Despite the success of the OSS model, for‐profit organizations are having difficulty building a business model around the open source paradigm. Whereas there are some isolated empirical studies, little rigorous research has been done on how traditional organizations can implement and benefit from OSS practices. This research explores how organizations can foster an environment similar to OSS to manage their software development efforts to reap its numerous advantages. Drawing on organizational theory, we develop a framework that guides the creation and management of a hybrid‐OSS community within an organization. We discuss the implications of this framework and suggest areas for future research.

Ontologies for conceptual modeling: their creation, use, and management

Although ontologies have been proposed as an important and natural means of representing real world knowledge for the development of database designs, most ontology creation is not carried out systematically. To be truly useful, a repository of ontologies, organized by application domain is needed, along with procedures for creating and integrating ontologies into database design methodologies. This research proposes a methodology for creating and managing domain ontologies. An architecture for an ontology management system is presented and implemented in a prototype. Empirical validation of the prototype demonstrates the effectiveness of the research.

A semantic-based approach to component retrieval

There continues to be a great deal of pressure to design and develop information systems within a short period of time. This urgency has reinvigorated research on software reuse, particularly in component based software development. One of the major problems associated with component-based development is the difficulty in searching and retrieving reusable components that meet the requirement at hand. In part, this problem exists because of the lack of sophisticated query methods and techniques. In this research, a semantic-based approach to component retrieval is presented as a solution to this problem. This approach makes use of domain models containing the objectives, processes, actions, actors, and, an ontology of domain terms, their definitions, and relationships with other domain-specific terms. A reuse repository is developed that contains the components relevant for the creation of new applications, along with their attributes and methods. The natural language interface, domain model, and reusable repository are implemented in a prototype that uses Web and JavaBeans technologies. A sample session is provided for an online auction application to illustrate the usefulness of the proposed approach.

The role of domain ontologies in database design: An ontology management and conceptual modeling environment

Database design is difficult because it involves a database designer understanding an application and translating the design requirements into a conceptual model. However, the designer may have little or no knowledge about the application or task for which the database is being designed. This research presents a methodology for supporting database design creation and evaluation that makes use of domain-specific knowledge about an application stored in the form of domain ontologies. The methodology is implemented in a prototype system, the Ontology Management and Database Design Environment. Initial testing of the prototype illustrates that the incorporation and use of ontologies is effective in creating entity-relationship models.

E‐knowledge networks for inter‐organizational collaborative e‐business

Evaluates the increase in inter‐ and intra‐organizational knowledge sharing capabilities brought about by the Internet‐driven “new economy” technologies and the resulting managerial implications. Presents a framework for evaluating and deploying such technologies. Firms employing knowledge networks can also use e‐knowledge to improve organizational decision making, react more quickly to changes in the economic landscape, and create dynamic custom content and consumer intimacy. Builds on the extensive literature in knowledge management and inter‐organizational systems by identifying the opportunities of each in creating “e‐knowledge networks” to support organizational collaboration. This framework is applied to four industry case studies – supply chain management networks, adserver networks, content syndication networks, and business‐to‐business exchange networks. Analysis suggests that in the new economy, characterized by ubiquitous and often automated information sharing capabilities, the ability to create knowledge‐based networks of partners will be critical to maintaining competitive advantage.

Designing multi-agent systems: a framework and application

The era of distributed software environments is emerging and research on multi-agent systems (MAS), which tries to solve complex problems using entities called agents, is on the rise. This paper proposes an architecture-centric method for developing MAS that supports the important phases of systematic software development. In particular, this approach is geared towards supporting system properties specially focused on agent coordination and autonomy. A goal-based approach is utilized for the problem domain analysis, and individual agents are mapped to the systems refined goals. Further, architectural styles and patterns are applied to generate the overall design of MAS. UML (Unified Modeling Language) and ADL (Architecture Description Language) are used for modeling and formalizing the MAS architecture. The proposed architecture is applied to ITS (Intelligent Transport Systems) domain and a proof-of-concept prototype has been developed to demonstrate our approach.

Building knowledge base of urban emergency events based on crowdsourcing of social media

An emergency event is an unexceptional event that exceeds the capacity of normal resources and organization to cope and a situation that poses an immediate risk to health, life, property, or environment. Crowdsourcing connects unobtrusive and ubiquitous sensing technologies, advanced data management and analytics models, and novel visualization methods, to create solutions that improve urban environment, human life quality, and city operation systems. The crowdsourcing on social media can be used to detect and analyze urban emergency events. In this paper, in order to detect and describe the real‐time urban emergency event, the knowledge base model is proposed. The crowdsourcing‐based knowledge base model is firstly introduced, which uses the information from social media. Secondly, the basic definition of the proposed knowledge base model including keywords, patterns, positive sentences, and knowledge graph is given. Thirdly, the temporal information is added to the proposed knowledge base model. The case study on real data sets shows that the proposed algorithm has good performance and high effectiveness in the analysis and detection of emergency events. Copyright

CONQUER: A Methodology for Context-Aware Query Processing on the World Wide Web

A major impediment to accurate information retrieval from the World Wide Web is the inability of search engines to incorporate semantics in the search process. This research presents a methodology, CONQUER (CONtext-aware QUERy processing), that enhances the semantic content of Web queries using two complementary knowledge sources: lexicons and ontologies. The methodology constructs a semantic net using the original query as a seed, and refines the net with terms from the two knowledge sources. The enhanced query, represented by the refined semantic net, can be executed by search engines. This paper describes the methodology and its implementation in a prototype. An empirical evaluation shows that queries suggested by the prototype produce more relevant results than those obtained by the original queries. The research, thus, provides a successful demonstration of the use of existing knowledge sources to enhance the semantic content of Web queries. The paper concludes by identifying potential uses of such enhancements of search technology in organizational contexts.

A heuristic-based methodology for semantic augmentation of user queries on the web

As the World Wide Web continues to grow, so does the need for effective approaches to processing users’ queries that retrieve the most relevant information. Most search engines provide the user with many web pages, but at varying levels of relevancy. The Semantic Web has been proposed to retrieve and use more semantic information from the web. However, the capture and processing of semantic information is a difficult task because of the well-known problems that machines have with processing semantics. This research proposes a heuristic-based methodology for building context aware web queries. The methodology expands a user’s query to identify possible word senses and then makes the query more relevant by restricting it using relevant information from the WordNet lexicon and the DARPA DAML library of domain ontologies. The methodology is implemented in a prototype. Initial testing of the prototype and comparison to results obtained from Google show that this heuristic based approach to processing queries can provide more relevant results to users, especially when query terms are ambiguous and/or when the methodology’s heuristics are invoked.