s. The Plinius ontology was developed to support the translation of natural-language sentences into expressions in a knowledge representation language [31]. Those design decisions taken during the development of the ontology which appeared to be domain-independent have been proposed as general ontology development principles. These are: (1) conflicting assertions about the same entity can be more readily discovered if the concepts are defined as fully as possible. (2) pre-existing formal theories are taken as given and a domain ontology does not specify the semantics of logical constants. (3) an ontology should be independent of any particular knowledge representation language. (4) the principle of the conceptual construction kit states that an ontology consists of primitives concepts and construction rules that allow the definition of all other concepts in terms of these primitives. (5) a bottom-up approach is taken in order that the ontology exhibits sufficient completeness for the...

The lack of methods for evaluating ontologies in laboratories can be an obstacle to their use in companies. This paper presents a set of emerging ideas in evaluation of ontologies useful for: (1) ontologies developers in the lab, as a foundation from which to perform technical evaluations; (2) end users of ontologies in companies, as a point of departure in the search for the best ontology for their systems; and (3) future research, as a basis upon which to perform progressive and disciplined investigations in this area. After briefly exploring some general questions such as: why, what, when, how and where to evaluate; who evaluates; and, what to evaluate against, we focus on the definition of a set of criteria useful in the evaluation process. Finally, we use some of these criteria in the evaluation of the Bibliographic-Data [5] ontology. 1. Introduction Several years ago, the idea of a knowledge factory emerged when several research groups [3, 7, 9] put their efforts in building ont...

Representing activities and the constraints on their occurrences is an integral aspect of commonsense reasoning, particularly in manufacturing, enterprise modelling, and autonomous agents or robots. In addition to the traditional concerns of knowledge representation and reasoning, the need to integrate software applications in these areas has become increasingly important. However, interoperability is hindered because the applications use different terminology and representations of the domain. These problems arise most acutely for systems that must manage the heterogeneity inherent in various domains and integrate models of different domains into coherent frameworks. For example, such integration occurs in business process reengineering, where enterprise models integrate processes, organizations, goals and customers. Even when applications use the same terminology, they often associate different semantics with the terms. This clash over the meaning of the terms prevents the seamless exchange of information among the applications. Typically, pointto-point translation programs are written to enable communication from one specific application to another. However, as the number of applications has increased and the information has become more complex, it has been more difficult for software developers to provide translators between every pair of applications that must cooperate. What is needed is some way of explicitly specifying the terminology of the applications in an unambiguous fashion. The Process Specification Language (PSL) ([13], [8]) has been designed to facilitate correct and complete exchange of process information among manufacturing systems 1. Included in these applications are scheduling, process modeling, process planning, production planning, simulation, project management, workflow, and business process reengineering. This chapter will give an 1 PSL has been accepted as project ISO 18629 within the International Organisation

Introduction What is a Supply Chain? Utilising Process Tools Interlingua, Modelling, Simulation Scenario Description Scenario Element Descriptions Process Overview Supply Chain Objects People, Companies and Departments Role-Defined Relationships Dates and Times Business Objects General Objects Detailed Scenario Processes Replenish Inventory (Retailer) Scenario Text Analysis Process Handbook PIF Representation IDEF3 Representation Take Delivery (Retailer) Scenario Text Analysis Process Handbook PIF Representation IDEF3 Representation PIF Semantics Summary References About this document ... Abstract The goal of the PIF Project is to develop an interchange format to help automatically exchange process descriptions among a wide variety of business process modelling and support systems such as workflow software, flow charting tools, process simulation systems, and process repositories. As an example of such an exchange, a demonstration scenario has been created which describes the use o...

There were many people who aided me during the completion of this research. I would first like to thank Dr. Donald H. Liles, the chair of my disseration committee, for his guidance and support with this research. He provided the vision of enterprise engineering and modeling which set the framework for this work. His encouraged me to stretch and to not settlle for anything less than what I was capable of. Special thanks also goes to Dr. G. T. Stevens, who served on my committee and whose counsel led me to choose industrial engineering as my field of study. I would also like to thank the other members of my committee: Dr. Brian Huff, Dr. Jamie Rogers, and Dr. R. C. Baker. Thanks also to Dr. Joseph Sarkis, an original member of the committee. I would like to thank my colleagues in the Enterrpise Engineering group at the Automation & Robotics Research Institute for their suggestions and for providing an outlet for many of my ideas. More anything, however, thank you for your firendship. Finally, to the people to whom I owe the most: my family. Thanks to my mother, Emiko Edwards, for always motivating me and encouraging me. To my children Janette, Nicky, and the one still to come and to my wife Theresa, thanks for your support, scarifices, and love. I love you all.

Scenarios have been already used for designing and evaluating ontology -based tools. For example, the so-called "motivating scenarios" are a core component of the TOVE ontological engineering method elaborated by Grninger and Fox (1995; Uschold and Grninger, 1996). We ourselves used a "scenario approach" for designing and evaluating CoMMA, a corporate memory computer platform based on ontologies and agents; the approach was inspired by the scenario approaches proposed in the HCI and CSCW communities, which we consider more user-oriented than the "motivating scenarios" approach. In this paper, we account for our CoMMA experience and its major lesson: the necessity to apply the scenario approach more systematically for assessing the usability and utility of ontology-based tools.

Abstract. In this paper, we present eXtreme Design with Content Ontology Design Patterns (XD): a collaborative, incremental, iterative method for pattern-based ontology design. We also describe the first version of a supporting tool that has been implemented and is available as a plugin for the NeOn Toolkit. XD is defined in the context of a general approach to ontology design based on patterns, which is also briefly introduce in this work. 1

Traditional negotiation systems have been implemented using agent architectures, where agents exchange messages generated by each system, based on particular language definitions implicitly encoded, giving different syntax and semantics to their messages. In this paper we address the problem of language interoperability between negotiation agents during message exchanging over the Internet. Our proposal incorporates an ontology-based translator architecture, which is executed only when a misunderstanding occurs. We implemented a service oriented architecture for executing negotiations over the Internet and conducted experiments incorporating different semantics to negotiation messages. The results of the tests show that the proposed solution improves communications between heterogeneous negotiation agents. 1.

A wide range of manufacturing software applications deal with the manipulation and expression of collections of activities. Examples include manufacturing process planning, production scheduling, simulation, project management, workflow, business process reengineering, and product realization process modeling. While each of these applications serves a specific audience and need and focuses on particular aspects of a process, much could be gained by sharing process information among applications. One of the primary obstacles to such integration is the lack of any common representation of what is really the underlying concept of process. The objective of the work described here is to investigate the feasibility of a unifying specification of process that is applicable to all of the above manufacturing applications, yet powerful and robust enough to meet each set of requirements. The results of the first phase of the work -- that of researching the process specification requirements for ...

Abstract. In the broader context of the development of an ontologybased new event detection system, we are developing the newsEvents ontology which allows modeling business events, the affected entities and relations between them. This paper presents requirements for and a first version of this ontology. A pattern-based approach to the design of the ontology was taken. Thereby a new useful pattern- the EventRole pattern- was identified and specified. 1