Homework: Ontology Use Case

Apologies for the late posting. The use cases below are a more-or-less
representative sample of the knowledge management themes within the
Advanced Knowledge Technologies IRC[1]; I've tried to pick use cases
which aren't likely to be duplicated by other WG members.

1. Conceptual Open Hypermedia

Open Hypermedia is a form of hypermedia in which links are considered
to be first class objects that exist independently of the resources
they link (as opposed to traditional HTML links which are embedded in
the resource which contains the source endpoint of the link). In the
Web world, the XLink recommendation[2] provides a method of specifying
OH links.

Conceptual Open Hypermedia takes the view that links between resources
are merely the navigable surface manifestations of more fundamental
relations between entities. For example, a link from the string "Nigel
Shadbolt" in one resource to the resource with URI
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~nrs/ might correspond to a relation
hasHomepage which relates people to their homepages. Rather than
creating such links by hand and then annotating them according to an
ontology, our intention is to use the structures in the ontology to
select appropriate relations from knowledge bases and create links
based on those relations.

The product of this WG has a bearing on our work on COH because it may
give us a way to describe and distinguish between these relations in
order to filter the set of links which are to be applied to a
document, or to create links which result from the composition of
relations.

2. Communities of Practice / Expert Finding

A community of practice is a group of people which are self-selecting
by virtue of their involvement in some common activity, such as
habitual co-publication or attendance at similar events. We have been
developing heuristic techniques for identifying such groups using the
structures in an ontology. The expert finding task is related to COPs
because experts are often key participants in the COP related to their
field of expertise. While it is not necessarily the case that there is
mutual awareness between all members of a COP, we believe that the
social network which underlies a COP can be used to 'justify'
introductions to experts within that COP. In both cases, the knowledge
which we use to identify COPs and experts is defined in terms of an
ontology.

Footnotes: 
[1]  http://www.aktors.org
[2]  http://www.w3.org/TR/xlink/

-- 
Nick Gibbins                                            nmg@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Advanced Knowledge Technologies                    tel: +44 (0) 23 80592831
University of Southampton                          fax: +44 (0) 23 80592865

Received on Thursday, 29 November 2001 08:57:54 UTC