Andreas P. Schmidt

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Archive for the ‘ontology’ Category

SOPRANO Ambient Middleware

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

Last week we had the very successful second annual review of the Integrated Project SOPRANO in the field of Ambient Assisted Living. Our approach to a semantic middleware based on OSGi has been highly appreciated. At the core is on the one side a context management approach, which is largely based on my PhD work and has been developed further by my colleague Peter Wolf, on the other side the semantic service description approach from DIANE, which Michael Klein from CAS has developed. Our lightweight semantics approach on both sides plays very well together, as the following presentation shows:

SOPRANO Ambient Middleware (AAL)

View more presentations from Andreas Schmidt.

We want plan to make this technology available to everyone. Stay tuned.

Tags: aal, soprano
Posted in aal, context, ontology, soprano | Comments Off

OntoContent 2008

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

After a successful OntoContent 2007 workshop, we are now preparing a next instance of the OntoContent workshop series. This year will will concentrate on user-centered semantics (under the theme of Web 3.0) and on collecting experiences on ontology engineering and maintenance from the fields of Human Resources, and e-health/life sciences/ambient assisted living.

Ontology Content and Evaluation in Enterprise
with two Special Tracks on Human Resources and E-Health/AAL

in conjunction with OnTheMove Federated Conferences 2008, Monterrey, Mexico

http://ontocontent2008.mature-ip.eu

Under the buzz word Semantic Web a lot of research has been going on in recent years, exploring formalisms for expressing ontologies, reasoning algorithms for inferencing hidden knowledge in an open world, but also on “semantifying” different types of problems. But outside the Semantic Web research community, there has been little uptake so far. This is also due to the fact that the concept of ontology is more about content than formalism, and we are in dire need for content-related research and experiences. As Braun et al. 2007 stated, a “good” ontology is a balance of the degree of social agreement, the level of formality, and the appropriateness for the problem at hand that is supposed to be solved with ontologies. In line with this view, the workshop is looking for experiences and empirical results on which formalism is better suited, how to achieve or measure social agreement, and how to judge whether an ontology is appropriate. It is the mission of this workshop to report on these experiences and to reflect them back to the Semantic Web community.

In the area of system design, there is currently a major shift taking place towards user-centered design, and the workshop aims to foster use-centered ontology-based system design. Therefore, we also welcome research and experiences on participatory and evolutionary approaches (i.e., with a continuously high degree of involvement of the actual users) to building and maintaining ontologies that pave the way towards a Web 3.0, bringing together users and semantics.

We also strongly encourage to submit critical papers deriving lessons from failures with “ontologies in the wild”, not only stereotypical success reports!

Workshop Structure and Topics

The workshop will consists of three main parts: a general part on experiences with real-world ontology engineering and approaches to assessment of ontologies, a special track on ontologies in Human Resources and a special track on ontologies in e-health and ambient-assisted living.

Towards Web 3.0: a user-centered semantic web
- lessons from Web 2.0 for ontology engineering
- experiences with participatory and evolutionary approaches to ontology engineering (e.g., based on social software)
- lightweight ontology formalisms (e.g., SKOS) and microformats
- experiences/empirical results on lightweight vs. heavy-weight ontologies
- experiences/empirical results on graphical modeling of ontologies
- experimental evidence (e.g., from cognitive science) on conceptual modeling
- challenges/requirements for maintenance and evolution of ontologies
- good, best, and bad practices

Methods for assessing ontologies
- Ontology evaluation
- Quality measures for ontologies
- assessment of ontologies with regard to social agreement, formality, and appropriateness
- experiences with assessment and evaluations methods

Ontologies in Human Resources (Recruiting, Development, Employability)
- modeling and representation of: Jobs, CVs, Competencies, Skills, Employees, People, Organizations, Social Events, etc.
- HR upper level concepts
- E-Portfolio (standards) and ontologies
- Semantics of HR-XML
- Semantic metadata for HR applications
- Semantics in job matching
- Semantics in learning technologies
- Good/Best practices for semantics in HR
- Maintenance of ontologies in HR

Ontologies in E-Health and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL)
- Upper level concepts of healthcare and life sciences ontologies.
- Ontologies of diseases, nursing, therapeutics, drug, etc.
- Ontologies and ontology-driven approaches in Ambient-Assisted Living
- Maintenance of ontologies in e-health and AAL

If you feel that something fits into the theme of the workshop, but is not listed here, just contact the organizers.

Submissions

Types of papers include:

research papers (max. 10 pages)
case studies experience reports (preferrably from industry) (max 10 pages)
position papers, clearly analyzing current state of practice for future challenges of research (max. 6 pages)

Papers submitted to OntoContent 2008 must not have been accepted for publication elsewhere or be under review for another workshop or conference. All submitted papers will be evaluated by at least three members of the program committee, based on originality, significance, technical soundness, and clarity of expression.

Papers will be published in an LNCS volume by Springer as part of OTM 2008 proceedings. Excellent papers will be considered for a journal publication or as book chapters

Important Dates

Abstract Submission Deadline: June 15, 2008
Paper Submission Deadline: June 30, 2008
Acceptance Notification : August 15, 2008
Camera Ready Due: August 25, 2008
Registration Due: August 25, 2008
OTM Conferences: November 9 – 14, 2008

Organizers

Andreas Schmidt, FZI Research Center for Information Technologies, Karlsruhe, Germany [main contact]
andreas.schmidt@fzi.de

Mustafa Jarrar, University of Cyprus
mustafa@jarrar.info

Werner Ceusters, University of Buffalo, USA

Program Committee (partially to be confirmed and to be completed)

Bill Andersen, Ontology Works, USA
Keith Baker, University of Reading, UK
Ernst Biesalski, EnBW AG, Germany
Paolo Bouquet, University of Trento, Italy,
Simone Braun, FZI Research Center for Information Technologies, Germany
Christopher Brewster, University of Sheffield, UK
Michael Brown, Skillsnet.Com
Yannis Charalabidis, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Ernesto Damiani, Computer Science Department, Milan University, Italy
Aldo Gangemi, Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR, Rome, Italy
Fausto Giunchiglia, University of Trento, Italy
Giancarlo Guizzardi, University of Twente, The Netherlands
Mohand-Said Hacid, University Claude Bernard Lyon 1 LIRIS – Villeurbanne, France
Martin Hepp, DERI Innsbruck, Austria
Stijn Heymans, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Christine Kunzmann, Kompetenzorientierte Personalentwicklung, Germany
Jens Lemcke, SAP AG, Germany
Tobias Ley, Know-Center Graz, Austria
Stefanie Lindstaedt, Know-Center Graz, Austria
Alessandro Oltramari, Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR, Trento, Italy
Viktoria Pammer, Know-Center Graz, Austria
Jeff Pan, University of Aberdeen, UK
Paul Piwek, Open University, UK
Christophe Roche, Université de Savoie, France
Peter Scheir, Know-Center Graz, Austria
Pavel Shvaiko, University of Trento, Italy
Miguel-Angel Sicilia, University of Alcalá, Spain
Barry Smith, State University of New York at Buffalo, USA
Silvie Spreeuwenberg, LibRT, The Netherlands
Armando Stellato, University of Roma, Italy
Andrew Stranieri, JUSTSYS, Ballarat, Australia
Karl Stroetmann, Empirica, Germany
Sergio Tessaris, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
Robert Tolksdorf, Free University of Berlin, Germany
Francky Trichet, University of Nantes, France
Luk Vervenne, Synergetics, Belgium

Sponsoring institutions/projects

This workshop is organized in a joint effort by the Ontology Outreach Advisory (OOA), the MATURE IP, and the SOPRANO IP.

The OOA is an international not-for-profit association that consists of industry, government, and research leaders and innovators with respect to ontology development, use, or education. The general mission of the OOA is to develop strategies for ontology recommendation and standardization, and promote the ontology technology to industry.
The MATURE IP is a large-scale integrating European project (FP7) in the field of technology-enhanced learning aiming at support of knowledge maturing processes within and across companies, including in particular ontology maturing.
The SOPRANO IP is an integrated European project (FP6) in the field of ambient-assisted living and follows an ontology-driven service-oriented approach to construct a flexible and affordable platform for in-house ambient-assisted living solutions.

Tags: aal, competence, hr, ontology, web30
Posted in aal, CfP, competencies, hr, maturing, ontology, soprano | 1 Comment »

Good Tags – Bad Tags: Social Tagging in Knowledge Organization

Monday, February 25th, 2008

Tagging as a lightweight, more participatory approach to resource metadata has become a hype in a wide range of disciplines, among them computer science, information management, and psychology. Last week’s workshop “Good Tags – Bad Tags: Social Tagging in Knowledge Organization”, well organized at Tübingen at the Knowledge Media Research Center, showed the different, but converging perspectives on tagging. Main success factors identified were:

simplicity (and the resulting ease of use), although a “tagging competency” was still considered necessary
enabling of participatory system design (i.e., tagging as appropriate metadata formalism for user generated content)
reduction of cognitive load for the annotator
flexibility and agility (not prescribing metadata structure, but allowing for emergence thereof)

The workshop also showed different understanding of “tags” and “tagging”. Johannes Busse (a colleague from ontoprise working in our project Im Wissensnetz made a good point with differentiating between linguistic tagging (where a tag represents a syntactic string) and semantic tagging (where a tag is another resource, be it a semantic concept, a person, another resource etc.). Also, some definitions of a tag annotation were presented, which stressed that a tag annotation is basically a triple (resource, tag, user) with several other attributes (e.g., timestamp, but also additional semantic qualifiers).

While tagging is a challenge for controlled vocabularies like library thesauri, it should be clear that controlled vocabularies and ontologies have their clear benefits in terms of disambiguation, multilinguality, levels of abstraction, and simple typos. So our contribution on ontology maturing, from simple tags to full-fledged ontologies actually showed the way: leverage on the simplicity of tagging for broadening the group of users contributing to the metadata generating, while retaining the possibility of higher-quality metadata. Interesting lightweight developments in that respect was the approach on Semantic Weblog by Benjamin Birkenhage.

Posted in maturing, ontology, symposium | Comments Off

First German Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) Congress 2008

Friday, February 1st, 2008

The last three days I was at the first German AAL Congress at Berlin and presented (together with my colleague Christophe Kunze) our results in the area of context-aware technologies for ambient assisted living. This encompassed intelligent sensor systems for detecting activities and other vital parameters, our ontology-centered design methodology as well as our AAL ontology from our work in SOPRANO. I had some interesting discussions with a lot of interesting people

The congress had 330 participants on the first two days alone (and they had to close registration early in January) Demographic change was the stereotypical motivation slide… And the dominating discussion theme of the German-speaking part was the lack of business models, which was seen as a main cause for the lack of market take-up. Closer inspection revealed that the majority of problems probably is due to regulatory conditions, especially in the area of health and care insurance. This is supposed to change with the new financial system of the health insurance in Germany, starting 2009 where a lot of interesting things are expected to happen. Let’s see if this helps to reduce barriers.

The European day was dominated by the new Joint AAL Programme under Article 169, which is supposed to introduce a new funding programme that is aimed at more short-term projects (2-3 years time-to-market). The first call will be published end of March/beginning of April. Available funding does not appear to be extremely high – so the call will probably be highly competetive. Expected consortia are about the size of FP7 STREPs. The proposals will be evaluated centrally (at an European level), however, the funding contracts will be made with the national authorities. Although it was claimed that the funding regulations are making it easier to participate, especially for SMEs, because of the national funding agencies, I believe this introduces additional complexity (while FP7 rules are – also for SMEs – quite simple if they have some consulting on it). The national authorities have budget limits so that situations may arise where a consortium is recommended for funding while the national funding agency does not have any money left… Probably, also with decentralized reporting, you will generate additional overhead.

The emerging AAL community appears to be an interesting mix of various disciplines with surprisingly concrete visions and a challenging field for applied research where technology can achieve much – but only if it is embedded in a holistic solution.

Posted in aal, conference, ontology, soprano | Comments Off

OnTheMove Conferences 2007 & OntoContent 2007 Workshop

Friday, November 30th, 2007

The last days I was at the OTM Conferences 2007 (for the third time) and mainly organized the OnToContent 2007 workshop together with Mustafa Jarrar (supported by the OOA and this year by SOPRANO). Although we had less submissions than the year before, we decided to keep up the quality level (with an acceptance rate of 38%) and rather have less presentations in the workshop. The strategy turned out well, and there was a lot of interaction in the workshop . Unfortunately, this year there was no high quality submission in the HR area, which is a topic particularly of interest to me.

On the ODBASE conference, my colleague Andreas Walter presented his ImageNotion application for collaborative semantic annotation of images (developed in the IMAGINATION project). By the way, Andreas currently conducts an evaluation of the tool and needs as many participants as possible. So if you want to have the chance of winning an iPod Nano with video, participate under www.imagenotion.com/go.

In the breaks, we had some interesting discussions in the “emerging community” of collaborative and evolutionary approaches to ontology engineering (especially with Pieter De Leenheer from the VU Brussels and Katharina Siorpaes from STI Innsbruck). Katharina presented on a simple, but promising game-based approach to ontology engineering, borrowing ideas from similar games for image annotation with tags.

FInally, OTM local organization was much better than last year – no serious issues apart from bad luck with keynote speakers. But Frank Leymann was there to give a very good ad hoc replacement talk.

Posted in conference, ontology | Comments Off

HCSIT 2007 / ePortfolio 2007 – Ontologies, employability and e-portfolios

Thursday, October 18th, 2007

The last two days I was at Maastricht for the Human Capital & Social Innovation Summit (HCSIT 07), which encompasses among other events also the ePortfolio conference. I was invited by Luk Vervenne and the VUB STARLAB to present our competency-oriented approach together with Tobias Ley from the Know-Center, Graz and Clementina Marinoni in an OOA session. The track was aimed at bringing together researchers on the topic of competencies with a special focus on semantics and the potential influence on the HR-XML standardization. It was a promising insight that the different approaches are actually complementary, and discussions revealed that there is a high degree of mutual agreement so that we may in the future actually come to a shared framework. In the OOA session, there was attempt for online conceptual modeling, but time was way too short for such an approach so that the result was not convincing. A wrap-up is of the session is available.

| View | Upload your own

It was interesting to see that there is interest for semantic technologies from various sides, e.g., it is increasingly acknowledged that complex standards may need for their own coherence, but especially for interaction with other standards a conceptual layer on top. This is clearly inspired by model-driven ideas from software engineering. Despite this interest and remarkable awareness of ontological approaches, there is still a lot of doubt because semantic technologies still lack their applications. Probably, we need to continue to work on pragmatic and useful solutions instead of complex and powerful ones, just to show that it works and delivers a benefit.

E-Portfolios are a promising concept – for various purposed. However, I am not sure whether the single label portfolio actually denotes a shared concept and whether it is beneficial to consider all types of portfolios as instances of a single concept. For me, still, a reflective work portfolio a student at school/university actually uses as a way to organize learning is very different from a portfolio used for student assessment or for applying to a potential employer. Mixing different purposes may prevent effective usage. So for me, transfering portfolios from one system to another has no priority, but rather making it easy to transfer individual items makes sense. And this probably best in the context of a personal learning environment – and not restricted to transfer between portfolios, but also exchange with other systems so that maturing processes across individuals can take place. Anyway, I see a huge potential of bringing the e-portfolio community and the workplace learning/knowledge management community together – it can open up the perspective to holistic concepts.

The keynotes on the second day were very interesting. I was especially surprised about how quickly the Dutch government introduces innovative employability solutions, compared to the cumbersome German procedures and discussions. Especially the policy that you have to give a data about you only once to the government would be healthy. Some may have privacy concerns, but I think that much more annoying and dangerous is collecting data again and again, each time with the possibilty that a new error is introduced.

When I listened to Thomas Sporer’s talk on an eportfolio-based approach to university education, it came again to my mind how old-fashioned our university education system currently is: it does not help students in building competencies in setting goals on their own, working with uncertainty, social interaction within a project context, presentation competencies etc. Let’s hope that things will change with approaches like that one so that students become really employable at the end of their studies.

Finally, the conference was a good place for meeting interesting people with various backgrounds.

Technorati tags: eportfolio07, hcscit07

Posted in competencies, conference, hr, ontology | Comments Off

OnToContent 2007 Workshop with HR Track

Tuesday, March 27th, 2007

After contributing to the workshop in 2006, I am this year co-chair of the OnToContent 2007 workshop together with Mustafa Jarrar, Claude Ostyn and Werner Ceuters. The workshop will take place at the OTM 2007 conferences at the Algarve in Portugal in the week of Nov 25-29, 2007.

The workshop focuses on ontology content, i.e. on making use of the notion of ontology in real-world applications, especially in the areas of human resources (which includes staffing, development, competence management, learning technologies among others) and e-health. The workshop is organized by the Ontology Outreach Advisory and contributes to its mission of promoting the use of ontologies in enterprises.

Abstract submission deadline is July 14, the full paper is expected until July 22.

Posted in CfP, hr, ontology | Comments Off

Ontology Maturing @ WWW 2007 Workshop CKC07, Banff

Monday, March 12th, 2007

For the WWW 2007 Workshop on Collaborative Construction of Structured Knowledge, we have submitted a fairly comprehensive overview of our current ontology maturing research – and got accepted. The paper combines our activities in the EU project IMAGINATION on so-called Imagenotions and our social bookmarking tool SOBOLEO (developed with in the project Im Wissensnetz), which will also be evaluated and presented by Valentin as a demo at the same workshop.

Ontology Maturing Process

Posted in maturing, ontology, publications | Comments Off

Contributing to an HR Roadmap

Wednesday, February 7th, 2007

Following a meeting at the OntoContent workshop at the OTM Federated Conferences in Montpellier, Christine Kunzmann and I were invited by Mustafa Jarrar to contribute to a roadmapping initiative on the application potential of ontologies and semantic technologies in the HR domain. This initiative is part of the Ontology Outreach Advisory of which I have become a founding member. It is an interesting compilation of the state-of-the-art in the domain and identifies several open challenges. The roadmap document is still in draft state, but you can have a look.

Posted in competencies, hr, ontology | Comments Off

Ontology Outreach Advisory Founded

Thursday, January 11th, 2007

The Ontology Outreach Advisory was officially founded today. It is non-profit organization with the purpose of fostering the application of ontologies in “the real world”. It has grown out of the KnowledgeWeb Network of Excellence. The inaugural executive council consists of Robert Meersman, Theo Mensen and Mustafa Jarrar; first meeting will be in Innbruck beginning of June.

As a founding member I will primarily contribute to the HR chapter, promoting the ontology developments and ontology-based techniques in the HR domain.

Posted in hr, ontology | Comments Off

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