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The purpose of this paper is to develop an ontology of eco or natural assets to represent eco asset knowledge at two levels: eco asset metal model and eco asset ontology (EA_Onto). The three objectives of this paper are to: define eco assets explicitly to reach a common understanding of the terms; evaluate the ontology; and discuss a potential area of application.

A seven-step methodology was used to develop the proposed ontology: define the scope; develop the eco asset meta model (EA_MM), define taxonomy, code ontology, capture ontology, evaluate ontology and document ontology.

The EA_MM was developed to represent eco asset domain knowledge, which was further extended to develop the EA_Onto, explicitly defining the eco asset knowledge in asset management. As a part of evaluation, it was found that the knowledge representation is consistent, concise, clear, complete and correct.

Theoretically, the proposed ontology is a significant contribution to the body of knowledge in asset management. Practically, the knowledge representation provides a common understanding of eco assets for asset management experts. In addition, it will be used in applications for effective eco asset management.

The current literature lacks explicit declaration of eco assets, how they are related to built environment for effective integration and how asset management functions are to be applied to accomplish effective eco asset management. Presently, eco assets are managed on an ad hoc basis, which need to be explicitly defined through developing an EA_Onto for implementation in applications for effective eco asset management.

With the increasing complexity of public–private partnership (PPP) projects, the amount of data generated during the construction process is massive. This paper aims to develop a new information management method to cope with the risk problems involved in dealing with such data, based on domain ontologies of the construction industry, to help manage PPP risks, share and reuse risk knowledge.

Risk knowledge concepts are acquired and summarized through PPP failure cases and an extensive literature review to establish a domain framework for risk knowledge using ontology technology to help manage PPP risks.

The results indicate that the risk ontology is capable of capturing key concepts and relationships involved in managing PPP risks and can be used to facilitate knowledge reuse and storage beneficial to risk management.

The classes in the risk knowledge ontology model constructed in this research do not yet cover all the information in PPP project risks and need to be further extended. Moreover, only the framework and basic methods needed are developed, while the construction of a working ontology model and the relationship between implicit and explicit knowledge is a complicated process that requires repeated modifications and evaluations before it can be implemented.

The ontology provides a basis for turning PPP risk information into risk knowledge to allow the effective sharing and communication of project risks between different project stakeholders. It can also have the potential to help reduce the dependence on subjectivity by mining, using and storing tacit knowledge in the risk management process.

The apparent suitability of the nine classes of PPP risk knowledge (project model, risk type, risk occurrence stage, risk source, risk consequence, risk likelihood, risk carrier, risk management measures and risk case) is identified, and the proposed construction method and steps for a complete domain ontology for PPP risk management are unique. A combination of criteria- and task-based evaluations is also developed for assessing the PPP risk ontology for the first time.

Pertinent information sharing across various government agencies, as well as non‐governmental and private organizations, is essential to assess the incident situation, identify the needed resources for emergency response and generate response plans. However, each agency may have incident management systems of its choice with valuable information in its own format, posing difficulty in effective information sharing. Application‐to‐application sharing cross agency boundaries will significantly reduce human efforts and delay in emergency response. Information sharing from disparate systems and organizations, however, requires solving of the interoperability issue. The purpose of this paper is to present the UICDS™‐based resource sharing framework as a step toward addressing the afore‐mentioned challenges.

A prototype middleware system is developed using a standards‐based information sharing infrastructure called UICDS™ (Unified Incident Command and Decision Support™), an initiative led by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology division. This standards‐based middleware, resource management plug‐in utilizes the ontology of organizational structure, workflow activities and resources, and the inference rules to discover and share resource information and interoperability from different incident management applications.

The middleware prototype implementation shows that the UICDS™‐based interoperability between heterogeneous incident management applications is feasible. Specifically, the paper shows that the resource data stored in the Resource Directory Database (RDDB) of the NJ Office of Emergency Management (NJOEM), Hippocrates of the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services (NJDHSS) can be discovered and shared with other incident management systems using the ontology and inference rules.

This study illustrates the possible solutions to the application to application interoperability problem using the DHS initiated interoperability platform called UICDS™.

The resource discovery and emergency response planning can be automated using the incident domain ontology and inference rules to dynamically generate the location‐based incident response workflows.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a new ontology for knowledge management (KM) technologies, determining the relationships between these technologies and classification of them.

The study applies NOY methodology – named after Natalya F. Noy who initiated this methodology. Protégé software and ontology web language are used for building the ontology. The presented ontology is evaluated with abbreviation and consistency criteria and knowledge retrieval of KM technologies by experts.

All the main concepts in the scope of KM technologies are extracted from existing literature. There are 241 words, 49 out of them are domain concepts, eight terms are about taxonomic and non-taxonomic relations, one term relates to data property and 183 terms are instances. These terms are used to develop KM technologies’ ontology based on three factors: facilitating KM processes, supporting KM strategies and the position of technology in the KM technology stage model. The presented ontology is created a common understanding in the field of KM technologies.

Lack of specific documentary about logic behind decision making and prioritizing criteria in choosing KM technologies.

Uploading the presented ontology in the web environment provides a platform for knowledge sharing between experts from around the world. In addition, it helps to decide on the choice of KM technologies based on KM processes and KM strategy.

Among the many categories of KM technologies in literature, there is no classifying according to several criteria simultaneously. This paper contributes to filling this gap and considers KM processes, KM strategy and stages of growth for KM technologies simultaneously to choice the KM technologies and also there exists no formal ontology regarding KM technologies. This study has tried to propose a formal KM technologies’ ontology.

This paper presents a framework for ontology evolution tailored to Digital Libraries, which makes use of two different sources for change detection and propagation, the usage of ontologies by users and the changes of available data.

After presenting the logical architecture of the evolution framework, we first illustrate how to deal with usage‐driven changes, that is changes derived from the actual usage of ontologies. Second, we describe the generation of data‐driven ontology changes based on the constant flow of documents coming into digital libraries.

The proposed framework for ontology ontology evolution, which is currently applied and evaluated in the case studies, significantly reduces the costs of ontology updates and improves the quality of the ontology with respect to the users' requirements.

The management of dynamic knowledge is crucial for many knowledge management applications. Our approach for usage‐driven and data‐driven change discovery not only assures the consistency of ontologies modeling dynamic knowledge, but also reduces the burden of manual ontology engineering.

This paper presents the first approach towards a common framework for ontology evolution based on usage‐driven and data‐driven change discovery.

The purpose of this study is to explore an ontology of designer-user interaction with a knowledge management foundation. To address this research gap, the authors ask the following research question: what types of knowledge on designer-user interactions are associated with design function and approach in creating effective design outcomes in a collaborative design process?

Based on ontology of a knowledge management foundation and 99 design projects, the authors conceptualized the ontology of designer-user interaction, which considers design role, function, approach and outcome as a knowledge of designer-user interaction in the design process.

Based on this analysis, the authors theorize an ontology of designer-user interactions with five dimensions: participant, role, function, design approach and design outcome. Also, this study presents a case study of how this ontology could be applied into the actual projects.

In this study, the authors explore an ontology of designer-user interaction with a knowledge management foundation, because previous interdisciplinary design studies have not formalized the types of designer-user interaction. To address this research gap, the authors ask the following research question: What types of knowledge on designer-user interactions are associated with design function and approach in creating effective design outcomes in a collaborative design process?

This paper aims to show the difficulties involved in dealing with the quantity, diversity and the lack of semantics security information. It seeks to propose the use of ontologies to tackle the problem.

The paper describes the general methodology to create security ontologies and illustrates the case with the design and validation of two ontologies: system vulnerabilities and security incidents.

Two examples of ontologies, one related to systems vulnerability and the other related to security incidents (designed to illustrate this proposal) are described. The portability/reusability propriety is demonstrated, inferring that the information structured at lower levels (by security management tools and people) can be successfully used and understood at higher levels (by security governance tools and people).

Work in the area of managing privacy policies, risk assessment and mitigation management, as well as CRM, business alignment and business intelligence, could be greatly eased by using an ontology to properly define the concepts involved in the area.

Ontologies can facilitate the interoperability among different security tools, creating a unique way to represent security data and allow the security data from any security tool (for instance, Snort) to be mapped into an ontology, such as the security incident one described in the paper. An example showing how the two ontologies could be plugged into a high level decision‐making system is described at the end.

Although several previous papers examined the value of using ontologies to represent security information, this one looks at their properties for a possible integrated use of management and governance tools.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the benefits of an approach in which document management systems (DMSs) are based on a formal and explicit document model, primarily in terms of facilitating domain-specific customization.

Within this paper, a generic document model is proposed. The model consists of two layers. A general purpose layer, which represents common features of the documents, and a domain-specific layer, modeling properties particular to application domain. The general purpose layer is based on ISO 82045, providing high degree of interoperability with other systems developed with respect to this set of standard.

Splitting document model into the layers enables DMSs to be tailored for each particular domain of application, depending on the general purpose layer. The existence of domain-specific layer allows documents to be interpreted differently in different domains of application.

In order to enable customization of DMS for a particular domain, the implementation of domain-specific document layer is required. Also, the proposed model does not explicitly deal with document dynamics.

The proposed document ontology is general enough to provide the representation of documents not depending on a specific scope of application, yet flexible enough to enable extensions through which domain-specific document features can be expressed. The separation of document model enables development of core DMS offering services relying explicitly on the general purpose layer on one hand, as well as domain-specific customization of DMS on the other.

The purpose of this research is to develop a framework of an ontology-based Asset Information Model (AIM) for a Digital Twin (DT) platform and enhance predictive maintenance practices in building facilities that could enable proactive and data-driven decision-making during the Operation and Maintenance (O&M) process.

A scoping literature review was accomplished to establish the theoretical foundation for the current investigation. A study on developing an ontology-based AIM for predictive maintenance in building facilities was conducted. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with industry professionals to gather qualitative data for ontology-based AIM framework validation and insights.

The research findings indicate that while the development of ontology faced challenges in defining missing entities and relations in the context of predictive maintenance, insights gained from the interviews enabled the establishment of a comprehensive framework for ontology-based AIM adoption in the Facility Management (FM) sector.

The proposed ontology-based AIM has the potential to enable proactive and data-driven decision-making during the process, optimizing predictive maintenance practices and ultimately enhancing energy efficiency and sustainability in the building industry.

The research contributes to a practical guide for ontology development processes and presents a framework of an Ontology-based AIM for a Digital Twin platform.

The purpose of this paper is to present a framework for integrating construction supply chain in order to resolve the data heterogeneity and data sharing problems in the construction industry.

Standardized web service technology is used in the proposed framework for data specification, transfer, and integration. Open standard SAWSDL is used to annotate web service descriptions with pointers to concepts defined in ontologies. NoSQL database Cassandra is used for distributed data storage among construction supply chain stakeholders.

Ontology can be used to support heterogeneous data transfer and integration through web services. Distributed data storage facilitates data sharing and enhances data control.

This paper presents examples of two ontologies for expressing construction supply chain information – ontology for material and ontology for purchase order. An example scenario is presented to demonstrate the proposed web service framework for material procurement process involving three parties, namely, project manager, contractor, and material supplier.

The use of web services is not new to construction supply chains (CSCs). However, it still faces problems in channelizing information along CSCs due to data heterogeneity. Trust issue is also a barrier to information sharing for integrating supply chains in a centralized collaboration system. In this paper, the authors present a web service framework, which facilitates storage and sharing of information on a distributed manner mediated through ontology-based web services. Security is enhanced with access control. A data model for the distributed databases is also presented for data storage and retrieval.