Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Despite the fact that ontologies are a good idea for interoperation, existing e-Learning systems use different ontologies for describing their resources. Consequently, exchanging resources between systems as well as searching appropriate ones from several sources is still a problem.

We propose the concept of in addition to metadata standards. Correspondences specify relationships between ontologies that can be used to bridge their heterogeneity. We show how we use them for building evolvable federated information systems on e-Learning resources in the World Wide Web. Beside this integration scenario, we also describe other interoperation scenarios where correspondences can be useful.

Courseware increasingly consists of generic information and communication tools. These offer a plethora of functionalities, but their usefulness to a particular learning community is not easy to assess. The aim should be to develop comprehensive learning information systems tailored to the specific needs of a community. Design patterns are important instruments for capturing best practice design knowledge. Ontologies, in turn, can help to precisely capture and reason about these patterns. In this paper, we make the case for ontology-guided learning IS design, and sketch the ontological core of a potential design method. Such methods should enable communities to specify and access relevant best design practice patterns. Design knowledge can then be reused across communities, improving the quality of communication support provided, while preventing wheels from being reinvented.

We describe how a web-based collaboration system is used to generate a document by referring ontology within a specific subject area. We have chosen nursing science as the target subject area as the nurses collaboratively plan and apply necessary treatments to the patients. The planning process involves coming up with a set of decisions and activities to perform according to the knowledge embedded in the nursing subject ontology. The nurses copiously record the patient conditions, which they observed, and also the ensuing reasoning outcome in the form of the diagnoses. Nursing care plan is a representative document, which is generated during the application of nursing processes. The plan includes general patient information, medical history, one or more goals of the nursing care plan, nursing diagnoses, expected outcomes of the care, and possible nursing interventions. We are developing a collaborative nursing care plan generation system, where several nurses can record and update the collected factual information about the patients and then come up with the most appropriate nursing diagnoses, outcomes, and interventions. The nursing care plan generation system is designed to double as a learning aid in order for the nurses by allowing them to observe what others do during the plan generation process. Eventually, the nurses are expected to share the same semantics of each ontology as they repeat the ontology-based decision makings.

Our purpose is to extract RDF-style triples from text corpora in an unsupervised way and use them as preprocessed material for the construction of ontologies from scratch. We have worked on a corpus taken from Internet websites and describing the megalithic ruin of Stonehenge. Using a shallow parser, we select functional relations, such as the syntactic structure subject-verb-object. The selection is done using prepositional structures and frequency measures in order to select the most relevant triples. Therefore, the paper stresses the choice of patterns and the filtering carried out in order to discard automatically all irrelevant structures. At the same occasion, we are experimenting with a method to objectively evaluate the material generated automatically.

Usually, ontologies are used to solve terminology problems or to allow automatic processing of information. They are also used to improve the development of software. One promising application area for ontologies is Virtual Reality (VR). Developing a VR application is very time consuming and requires skilled people. Introducing ontologies in the development process can eliminate these barriers. We have developed an approach, VR-WISE, which uses ontologies for describing a Virtual Environment (VE) at a conceptual level. In this paper we will describe the Behavior Ontology, which defines the modeling concepts for object behavior. Such an ontology has several advantages. It improves the intuitiveness; facilitates cross-platform VR development; smoothens integration with other ontologies; enhances the interoperability of VR applications; and allows for more intelligent systems.