Information visualisation workshop

An ontology for planning applications (Peter Demeester, KaHo Sint-Lieven)

Problems arise when people with different backgrounds want to communicate with each other: they use their own specialized jargon or they use words in the wrong context. The same problem arises when two software systems want to co-operate with each other: they lack a common consensus about the domain they want to co-operate on.

The way to solve this is to introduce a kind of shared understanding - this is more or less what the word ontology in the title means. The above-described problem also exists with planning applications. Two planning systems can generate more or less the same results although they can use different concepts. When we want to merge these two applications, problems arise since the developers of each system can use different concepts, or, if they use the same concept, it can mean something completely different.

The goal of this project idea is to construct first an ontology for planning applications and to develop a method to filter those elements out of a set of data that have a meaning in the ontology. Areas of application are for example: timetabling, scheduling, rostering, shop floor control, planning of television programs, and so on,… The mapping we want to make from the set of data to the ontology should enable bi-directional communication. Someone who uses a program that is not really based on an ontology, should be able to continue using that program in the same way he is used to, even if the program is merged with another application. When the ontology is built, software agents which have an ontology of the domain can be used to search the set of possibly unstructured data. This ontology can then be used to map the set of unstructured data.

See also the abstract “Non-holistic agents” (Patrick De Causmaecker).

e-mail: [e-mail]
URL: http://www2.kahosl.be/~ocapi/coala

OntoWeb - Ontology-based information exchange for Knowledge Management and electronic commerce (Dieter Fensel, Free University of Amsterdam)

The goal of the OntoWeb Network is to bring together researchers and industrials coming from the research and applications areas above, promoting interdisciplinary work and strengthening the European influence on Semantic Web standardisation efforts such as those based on RDF and XML. Europe's cultural diversity and multi linguality, together with the strong scientific competences existing in the ontology field, may give Europe a unique opportunity to fully exploit ontology-based technology and to play a leading role in these emerging area.

The main long term goals of the network are:

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  To stimulate and support the transfer of research on the Semantic Web from academia to industry;
  
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  To stimulate the translation from industrial needs to technical and scientific problems;
  
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  To represent and co-ordinate ontology-related research being carried out in different research areas, such as: Web Markup Languages, Knowledge Acquisition, Knowledge Engineering, Knowledge Representation, Information systems and database integration, Information Retrieval, Language Engineering, Digital Libraries, Software Agents, and Machine Learning;
  
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  To disseminate information, research and application results about ontologies and related fields;
  
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  To represent the European ontology community world wide and co-operating with related initiatives like DAML in the US;
  
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  To enhance the training in ontology-related technologies at the European level;
  
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  To distribute results and stimulate applications in all areas, with special emphasis on Web-based applications, electronic commerce, and information integration;
  
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  To cooperate with content standardisation committees to promote the development of ontology-based standards and the harmonization/interoperability across different standards (with special emphasis on standards being developed for electronic commerce in the B2B area);
  

To cooperate with language standardisation committees as the W3C to promote the development of standard languages for meta data (future versions of RDF and RDFS); (Dieter Fensel, Free University of Amsterdam)

e-mail: [e-mail]

URL: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~dieter

Self-Organizing Maps for Knowledge Management (Timo Honkela, Gurusoft Oy)

Gurusoft (Espoo, Finland) creates commercial tools and solutions for information and documentation exploration, classification, search, and visualization. Solutions cover new media, e-commerce, extranets and intranets. The products are based on advanced neural network and natural language processing technology. Gurusoft technology is based on the groundbreaking research on the self-organizing maps and the WEBSOM method at Helsinki University of Technology.

The approach based on self-organizing maps allows detailed analysis and efficient personalisation of information flows without or with minimal human intervention. The tools even allow in-depth conceptual and dynamic analysis of any domain ranging from product areas and customer feedback to business models and decision making. All this is made available in the web.

Gurusoft approach replaces methods that are based on, for instance, symbolic rule-based AI or specification of fixed classes or categorizations. The underlying self-organizing map applies unsupervised learning. This enables Gurusoft systems to adapt automatically and follow the conceptual changes of the application domain even with no human supervision. Moreover, the system can tune itself to the personal needs and preferences. Gurusoft approach gives basis for systems that are semantically autonomous and that even create a mapping between different conceptual systems. Gurusoft provides tools that make information retrieval more efficient and intuitive, tools that makes handcoding of metadata unnecessary, tools that help information needs and supply to meet each other.

e-mail: [e-mail]

URL: http://www.gurusoft.fi