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In this paper, we describe a novel approach for ontology distribution in ubiquitous environments. We present the Context Aware Explorer (CAE) framework we have developed which allows building context aware applications. Our approach, while built upon Web Ontology Language OWL and RDF Schema, is aiming at modeling context ontology for supporting context reasoning and the design of a Smart Rule Engine that maintains a shared model of context for all computing entities in the smart space. The CAE main contribution is its ability to distribute ontology based on abstract parameters related to situation and to user profile. The ultimate goal is to decrease the response time of the reasoning engine with regards to reasoning accuracy. We also describe the implementation of CAE, and its associated ontology, in a prototype demonstrator of smart environment handling indoor and outdoor context aware services. The validation of the ontology distribution approach was applied to assistive environment dedicated to people having motor disabilities and tested within laboratory conditions. Preliminary performance results are presented to highlight the impact of distributed ontology concept.

In this article, we discuss an innovative audience research methodology developed for the AHRC-funded “Beyond the Multiplex: Audiences for Specialised Film in English Regions” project (BtM). The project combines a computational ontology with a mixed-methods approach drawn from both the social sciences and the humanities, enabling research to be conducted both at scale and in depth, producing complex relational analyses of audiences. BtM aims to understand how we might enable a wide range of audiences to participate in a more diverse film culture, and embrace the wealth of films beyond the mainstream in order to optimise the cultural value of engaging with less familiar films. BtM collects data through a three-wave survey of film audience members’ practices, semi-structured interviews and film-elicitation groups with audience members alongside interviews with policy and industry experts, and analyses of key policy and industry documents. Bringing each of these datasets together within our ontology enables us to map relationships between them across a variety of different concerns. For instance, how cultural engagement in general relates to engagement with specialised films; how different audiences access and/or share films across different platforms and venues; how their engagement with those films enables them to make meaning and generate value; and how all of this is shaped by national and regional policy, film industry practices, and the decisions of cultural intermediaries across the fields of film production, distribution and exhibition. Alongside our analyses, the ontology enables us to produce data visualisations and a suite of analytical tools for audience development studies that stakeholders can use, ensuring the research has impact beyond the academy. This paper sets out our methodology for developing the BtM ontology, so that others may adapt it and develop their own ontologies from mixed-methods empirical data in their studies of other knowledge domains.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the development of a knowledge management system. It allows the creation of new knowledge, its consolidation, distribution and combination in the field of educational innovation, in such a way that the knowledge is transferred from individuals to the organisation and from the organisation to individuals. To achieve this, the knowledge spirals of Nonaka are integrated. The epistemological spiral is used to obtain the ontologies that feed the ontological spiral.

More than 600 university teachers participated in the research and the development of the management system, in which more than 400 educational innovation experiences and 1,100 authors have been included.

The epistemological spiral is used to obtain the ontologies that feed the ontological spiral. The result is a double spiral that allows the contribution of a conceptual model and the development of an innovative tool that enables and automates the effective management of knowledge in educational innovation.

A repository about educational innovation best practices and experiences is available.

The presented model for the sustainability and evolution for an educational innovation best practices repositories has a huge impact for education innovation recognition in the professional development of university teachers. On the other hand, it is way of sharing best practices of educational innovation all over the world.

The major contribution of this research work is based on the way that the knowledge is transferred from individuals to the organisation and from the organisation to individuals. The classification schema and the proposed indicators are based on the elicitation of more than 600 experts and the study of a corpus of more than 400 educational innovation experiences that involve 1,100 university teachers approximately.

We explore the significance of social ontology and its capacity to inform the specification of organizational status, architecture and capacities. We consider how different conceptions of social ontology are critical for explicating a range of epistemological and socio-economic questions concerning organizations and develop a research agenda oriented to studying these issues from the perspective of management and organization studies.

Ontologies are prone to wide semantic variability due to subjective points of view of their composers. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new approach for maximal unification of diverse ontologies for controversial domains by their relations.

Effective matching or unification of multiple ontologies for a specific domain is crucial for the success of many semantic web applications, such as semantic information retrieval and organization, document tagging, summarization and search. To this end, numerous automatic and semi-automatic techniques were proposed in the past decade that attempt to identify similar entities, mostly classes, in diverse ontologies for similar domains. Apparently, matching individual entities cannot result in full integration of ontologies’ semantics without matching their inter-relations with all other-related classes (and instances). However, semantic matching of ontological relations still constitutes a major research challenge. Therefore, in this paper the authors propose a new paradigm for assessment of maximal possible matching and unification of ontological relations. To this end, several unification rules for ontological relations were devised based on ontological reference rules, and lexical and textual entailment. These rules were semi-automatically implemented to extend a given ontology with semantically matching relations from another ontology for a similar domain. Then, the ontologies were unified through these similar pairs of relations. The authors observe that these rules can be also facilitated to reveal the contradictory relations in different ontologies.

To assess the feasibility of the approach two experiments were conducted with different sets of multiple personal ontologies on controversial domains constructed by trained subjects. The results for about 50 distinct ontology pairs demonstrate a good potential of the methodology for increasing inter-ontology agreement. Furthermore, the authors show that the presented methodology can lead to a complete unification of multiple semantically heterogeneous ontologies.

This is a conceptual study that presents a new approach for semantic unification of ontologies by a devised set of rules along with the initial experimental evidence of its feasibility and effectiveness. However, this methodology has to be fully automatically implemented and tested on a larger dataset in future research.

This result has implication for semantic search, since a richer ontology, comprised of multiple aspects and viewpoints of the domain of knowledge, enhances discoverability and improves search results.

To the best of the knowledge, this is the first study to examine and assess the maximal level of semantic relation-based ontology unification.

The purpose of this paper is to look into the latest advances in ontology-based text summarization systems, with emphasis on the methodologies of a socio-cognitive approach, the structural discourse models and the ontology-based text summarization systems.

The paper analyzes the main literature in this field and presents the structure and features of Texminer, a software that facilitates summarization of texts on Port and Coastal Engineering. Texminer entails a combination of several techniques, including: socio-cognitive user models, Natural Language Processing, disambiguation and ontologies. After processing a corpus, the system was evaluated using as a reference various clustering evaluation experiments conducted by Arco (2008) and Hennig et al. (2008). The results were checked with a support vector machine, Rouge metrics, the F-measure and calculation of precision and recall.

The experiment illustrates the superiority of abstracts obtained through the assistance of ontology-based techniques.

The authors were able to corroborate that the summaries obtained using Texminer are more efficient than those derived through other systems whose summarization models do not use ontologies to summarize texts. Thanks to ontologies, main sentences can be selected with a broad rhetorical structure, especially for a specific knowledge domain.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the global scientific outputs of ontology research, an important emerging discipline that has huge potential to improve information understanding, organization, and management.

This study collected literature published during 1900-2012 from the Web of Science database. The bibliometric analysis was performed from authorial, institutional, national, spatiotemporal, and topical aspects. Basic statistical analysis, visualization of geographic distribution, co-word analysis, and a new index were applied to the selected data.

Characteristics of publication outputs suggested that ontology research has entered into the soaring stage, along with increased participation and collaboration. The authors identified the leading authors, institutions, nations, and articles in ontology research. Authors were more from North America, Europe, and East Asia. The USA took the lead, while China grew fastest. Four major categories of frequently used keywords were identified: applications in Semantic Web, applications in bioinformatics, philosophy theories, and common supporting technology. Semantic Web research played a core role, and gene ontology study was well-developed. The study focus of ontology has shifted from philosophy to information science.

This is the first study to quantify global research patterns and trends in ontology, which might provide a potential guide for the future research. The new index provides an alternative way to evaluate the multidisciplinary influence of researchers.

Fixture design is a complicated task requiring both intensive knowledge and experience. This paper aims to present a computer-aided fixture design (CAFD) system framework based on design reuse technology.

Fixture design domain ontology is constructed by analyzing fixture design document corpus. A design reuse engine is proposed to realize fixture design knowledge retrieval and fixture model retrieval based on ontology and find fixture design cases similar to fixture design problem, and then use evolutionary methods to modify the retrieved model to meet the design requirements and then generate a new fixture.

The paper finds that the proposed framework is an efficient tool to improve efficiency of fixture design.

Fixture design existing experience and cases can be used efficiently reused and to advance new fixture design processes.

This paper presents a CAFD system framework capable of carrying out fixture design through full using of the existing fixture design resource and experienced knowledge.

The paper aims to present an approach for services in the domain of tourism based on a software application in the area of ontology engineering, showing a methodology for intelligent knowledge‐based P2P networks creation, in the tourism knowledge domain, given that, potential tourists share and organize their experiences, interests and knowledge. Using the proposed software application, they automatically exchange their knowledge, with an intelligent and transparent way, with other users that have the same or similar interests and make use of it.

The approach followed was categorizing tourism‐related interests and services into ontologies (system and user), then comparing them, using intelligent algorithms, suggesting new, unknown to the user, interests. The data were evaluated by experts in order to provide a guide for correct (according to the expert) interestingness of profile concepts.

The paper presents the outcomes of the software used, running on mobile devices, showing the connection for them, among user knowledge profiles and tourism services. It has been found that the return results (concepts) are of high interestingness to the user.

Experiments have been performed with one central ontology, used as reference and two user ontologies at the same time. The authors would suggest more experimentation, with more users connected concurrently.

Of high practical importance is the creation of intelligent social networking processes and user communities based on interests for further e‐commerce activities, based on a semantic framework.

The paper fulfils the need for intelligent interaction and distribution of knowledge and content to users in an autonomous way, anywhere.

Nowadays, the use of WCMS (web content management systems) is widespread. The conversion of this infrastructure into its semantic equivalent (semantic WCMS) is a critical issue, as this enables the benefits of the semantic web to be extended. The purpose of this paper is to present a FLERSA (Flexible Range Semantic Annotation) for flexible range semantic annotation.

A FLERSA is presented as a user‐centred annotation tool for Web content expressed in natural language. The tool has been built in order to illustrate how a WCMS called Joomla! can be converted into its semantic equivalent.

The development of the tool shows that it is possible to build a semantic WCMS through a combination of semantic components and other resources such as ontologies and emergence technologies, including XML, RDF, RDFa and OWL.

The paper provides a starting‐point for further research in which the principles and techniques of the FLERSA tool can be applied to any WCMS.

The tool allows both manual and automatic semantic annotations, as well as providing enhanced search capabilities. For manual annotation, a new flexible range markup technique is used, based on the RDFa standard, to support the evolution of annotated Web documents more effectively than XPointer. For automatic annotation, a hybrid approach based on machine learning techniques (Vector‐Space Model + n‐grams) is used to determine the concepts that the content of a Web document deals with (from an ontology which provides a taxonomy), based on previous annotations that are used as a training corpus.