An Ontology and a Software Framework for Competency Modeling and

An Ontology and a Software Framework for Competency Modeling and Management

"The importance given to competency management is well justified. Acquiring new competencies is the central goal of any education or knowledge management process. Thus, it must be embedded in any software framework as an instructional engineering tool, to inform the runtime environment of the knowledge that is processed by actors, and their situation toward achieving competency-acquisition objectives. We present here some of our results in the last 10 years that have led to an ontology for designing competency-based learning and knowledge management applications. Based on this ontology, we present a software framework for ontology-driven e-learning systems."

Beyond Concepts: Ontology as Reality Representation

"Abstract. There is an assumption commonly embraced by ontological engineers, an assumption which has its roots in the discipline of knowledge representation, to the effect that it is concepts which form the subject-matter of ontology. The term 'concept' is hereby rarely precisely defined, and the intended role of concepts within ontology is itself subject to a variety of conflicting (and sometimes intrinsically incoherent) interpretations. It seems, however, to be widely accepted that concepts are in some sense the products of human cognition.

The present essay is devoted to the application of ontology in support of research in the natural sciences. It defends the thesis that ontologies developed for such purposes should be understood as having as their subject matter, not concepts, but rather the universals and particulars which exist in reality and are captured in scientific laws. We outline the benefits of a view along these lines by showing how it yields rigorous formal definitions of the foundational relations used in many influential ontologies, illustrating our results by reference to examples drawn from the domain of the life sciences."

Ontology and the Semantic Web

"Ontology and the Semantic Web
Zhang, Jane (2007) Ontology and the Semantic Web. In Tennis, Joseph T., Eds. Proceedings North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization 2007 1, pages pp. 9-20, Toronto, Ontario.

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Abstract

This paper discusses the development of a new information representation system embodied in ontology and the Semantic Web. The new system differs from other representation systems in that it is based on a more sophisticated semantic representation of information, aims to go well beyond the document level, and designed to be understood and processed by machine. A common theme underlying these three features, i.e., turning documents into meaningful interchangeable data, reflects a rising use expectation nurtured by modern technology and, at the same time, presents a unique challenge for its enabling technologies."

Towards semantic web agents: Knowledge Web and AgentLink

Towards semantic web agents: Knowledge Web and AgentLink: "This paper presents an overview on the role of agents in the Semantic Web, that was the topic of the AgentLink Technical Forum Group on "Semantic Web Agents", aimed at fostering closer collaboration between the European communities working in these areas. The paper is structured in three main sections. In the first one, we argue how agents are an essential component of the Semantic Web, then we provide a brief history, by no means comprehensive, of how the Semantic Web vision -- that includes agents -- has evolved in the past fifteen years. We then conclude reporting on the topics presented and discussed during the Technical Forum."

Content-based Ontology Ranking

ECS EPrints Service - Content-based Ontology Ranking: "Techniques to rank ontologies are crucial to aid and encourage the re-use of publicly available ontologies. This paper presents a system that obtains a list of ontologies from a search engine that contain the terms provided by a knowledge engineer and ranks them. The ranking of these ontologies will be done according to how many of the concept labels in those ontologies match a set of terms extracted from a corpus of documents related to the domain of knowledge identified by the knowledge engineer's original search terms."

Vikings Set Out to Conquer Semantic Web

Vikings set out to conquer Semantic Web: "German scientists are working on a project they call Wikinger (German for 'Viking') based on the concept of Wikipedia to provide virtual knowledge networking in addition to the classic exchange of knowledge at Congresses. The goal of the project is to create a domain-neutral platform for scientists to allow them to perform research in knowledge bases regardless of where they are and to generate new knowledge via the Internet in collaboration. The researchers are paying special attention to support for colleagues in networking new contributions with current knowledge. To this end, techniques from the Semantic Web are being used."

IST Project Wide

Project Wide: "WIDE aims to provide a basis for improving the quality and efficiency of innovative product design. The objectives are to investigate and demonstrate the application of emerging Semantic Web (SW) technologies and methods in an integrated, scalable and reconfigurable design information support management and knowledge sharing system. The key to improving innovative design lies in better information management and knowledge sharing support of the inter-working of multi-disciplinary design teams. The machine-understandable semantics of information sources, offered by the SW, driven by a general design process ontology (based upon an existing Knowledge Level theory of designing), together with meta data based filtering and presentation techniques, thus form the key components of the information support management and knowledge sharing system to be developed in the project."

Named Graphs as a Mechanism for Reasoning about Provenance

ECS EPrints Service - Named Graphs as a Mechanism for Reasoning about Provenance: "Named Graphs is a simple, compatible extension to the RDF abstract syntax that enables statements to be made about RDF graphs. This approach is in contrast to earlier attempts such as RDF reification, or knowledge-base specific extensions including quads and contexts. In this paper we demonstrate the use of Named Graphs and our experiences developing new kinds of semantic web application that build on Named Graphs for digital signatures, provenance, and semantic reasoning. We present a working example based on the Named Graphs for Jena (NG4J) API, from which we developed a semantic version control system for Software Engineering capable of reasoning about Named Graph-based provenance. We go on to discuss the implications of Named Graphs for Description Logics and semantic inference strategies."

SiberLogic, XML, RDF, and OWL

SiberLogic, XML, RDF, and OWL: SiberLogic, based in Toronto, has some very interesting products that seem to be putting it all together. "SiberLogic today offers a complete and cost-effective environment for teams producing technical documents. A flexible family of products provides not only fundamentals such as version and workflow control, conditional and multi-channel publishing, and staging & deployment options, but also leading-edge functionality that includes semantic enablement via emerging standards such as OWL and RDF, full DITA and S1000D support, real-time fragment reuse analysis, and dynamic generation of a cross-platform knowledge base."