CID contributions to the MULECO project

Ambjörn Naeve

The Knowledge Management Research groupCentre for user-oriented IT Design (CID)

Numerical Analysis and Computer Science (NADA)Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)

Stockholm / Sweden

amb@nada.kth.se

http://kmr.nada.kth.se

MULECO (Multi-lingual Upper Level Electronic Commerce Ontology)Objective:

To develop a high-level ontology and a set of tools for expressing the relationship between ontologiesused to identify the requirements of particular electronic commerce applications.

The ontology will be expressed as a network of industry descriptors, commercial terms and business roles.

They will be described in such a way that each entry can be addressed from other ontologies and applications by means of a URI or XML-Path/Query (Edutella!).

MULECO - participants

The SGML centre (Martin Bryan, initiator)

Btexact Technologies (John Shepherdson)

CID/Royal Institute of Technology (Ambjörn Naeve)

University of Klagenfurt (Gerhard Friedrich)

CommerceWorks (Man-ze Li)

What is important about MULECO ?

Multilingual ------------------------ Vital

Upper-level ------------------------- Very significant

Electronic Commerce ------------- Limiting Scope

Ontology ---------------------------- Not just classification

Addressable ------------------------ Must be web accessible

Understandable -------------------- For the layman

Multilingual

• Most ontologies are monolingual. They fail to consider the problems involved when the terms are not exact synonyms.

• Most ontologies are for a specific domain. They fail to recognize that different domains use different phrases.

• Electronic commerce ontologies should simplify the integration of European marketplaces into a single market.

Upper-level

• Not an attempt to integrate a whole set of ontologies that have been developed from the bottom up.

• Designed to provide reference points to which application specific ontologies can be tied.

• Designed to allow ontologies developed in different languages to be integrated.

Electronic Commerce

MULECO is not trying to define an ontology to end all ontologies.

MULECO is not trying to define an ontologyfor describing ontologies.

MULECO starts from a well known set of business semantics developed by UN (UN/CEFACT)

Ontology

Build on subset of well-researched techniquesdeveloped for language engineering.

Use multiple types of relationships:hypernymy, hyponymy, synonymy, antonymy, etc.

Need to identify overlaps as well as disjuncts(business processes typically overlap classification boundaries).

A Knowledge Manifold

• is a conceptual framework for designing interactive learning environments that support Question Based Learning.

• can be regarded as a Knowledge Patchwork, with a number of linked Knowledge Patches, each with its own Knowledge Gardener.

• gives the users the opportunity to ask questions and search for certified human Knowledge Sources.

A Knowledge Manifold (cont.)

• has access to distributed archives of resource components.

• allows teachers to compose components and construct customized learning environments.

• makes use of conceptual modeling to support separation of content from context.

• contains a conceptual exploration tool (Conzilla) that supports these principles and activites.

Design principles for Concept Browsers

• separate context (= relationships) from content.

• describe each context in terms of a concept map.

• assign an appropriate set of components as the content of a concept or a conceptual relationship.

• filter the components through different aspects.

• label the components with a standardized data description (meta-data) scheme (IMS-LOM).

• transform a content component which is a map into a context by contextualizing it.

calibrationprocess

P

Modeling for Conceptual Calibration

Adam Eve

Adam’s image of P Eve’s image of P

this

Generalization of

that

Context for that

Specialization of

that

Part of that

Instance of

that

that

Type for

The hierarchical directions from this to that

UnifiedLanguageModeling

Car

Vehicle

is a:Car

kind of

is a kind of

a

Unified Language Modeling

:Wheel Wheel

abstraction of

part of has

is a

a

is a part of ahas a

a kind of

References• Naeve, A., The Garden of Knowledge as a Knowledge Manifold - a conceptual framework for computer supported subjective education, CID-17, KTH, 1997.

• Naeve, A., Conceptual Navigation and Multiple Scale Narration in a Knowledge Manifold, CID-52, KTH, 1999.

• Nilsson, M. & Palmér M., Conzilla - Towards a Concept Browser, (CID-53), KTH, 1999.

• Nilsson, M., The Conzilla design - the definitive reference, CID/NADAKTH, 2000.

• Naeve, A., The Concept Browser, a New Form of Knowledge Management Tool, Proc.of the 2:nd european conference on Web Based Learning Environments (WBLE-2001), Lund, Sweden, Oct. 24-26, 2001.

• Naeve, A., The Knowledge Manifold – an educational architecture for inquiry based personalizable e-learning, Proceedings of WBLE-2001.

Reports are available in pdf at http://kmr.nada.kth.se

• Naeve, A. & Nilsson, M. & Palmér, M., The Conceptual Web - Our Research Vision, Proceedings of the First Semantic Web Working Symposium, Stanford, July 30 - Aug 2, 2001.

• Naeve, A. & Nilsson, M. & Palmér, M., E-learning in the Semantic Age, Proceedings of WBLE-2001.

• Nilsson, M., The Role of RDF in the IMS Family of Specifications, To be published as an IMS whitepaper.

References (cont)