=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-48/paper-6
|storemode=property
|title=Ontologies, Multi-Perspective Modelling and Knowledge Auditing
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-48/kingston.pdf
|volume=Vol-48
}}
==Ontologies, Multi-Perspective Modelling and Knowledge Auditing==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-48/kingston.pdf
Ontologies, Multi-Perspective Modelling and Knowledge Auditing
John Kingston
Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute
Division of Informatics
University of Edinburgh
Abstract. I have extended an existing ontology for knowledge acquisition to support the task of
knowledge auditing. This has required two types of change: the ontology has been extended
according to the principles of multi-perspective modelling so that it represents knowledge from the
viewpoints of ”who”, “what”, “where” and “how”; further work may add “when” and “why”
perspectives. It also adds some slots to the class of Publications, which are intended to store
information for the purpose of knowledge valuation.
1 Introduction
This paper is a position paper describing work being carried out under the EPSRC-funded Advanced
Knowledge Technologies project. It describes an attempt to apply the philosophy of multi-perspective
modelling [1] to an existing ontology of knowledge resources, in order to extend that ontology in
sensible ways. It also touches on further extension of the ontology to permit evaluation of knowledge
resources. The overall aim of the work currently being carried out is to support a knowledge audit –
that is, a survey of the knowledge that is available in an organisation.
The goal of this work described in this paper has been to produce an ontology that represents all the
aspects of multi-perspective modelling; that is, for any knowledge resource, it can represent what it is,
who possesses it, how it is used, where it can be found, when it is needed and why it exists (or why it is
useful). If knowledge is collected and is indexed according to all aspects of the above ontology, then it
should be possible to browse all the people who possess a particular knowledge resource (or part of it);
or all the knowledge resources held by a particular person; or all the activities that can be supported by
a particular knowledge resource.
However, a good knowledge audit does not just produce a survey report; it must provide estimates of
the “goodness” or “value” of knowledge, and it also ought to encode a number of relationships between
knowledge of different types, in order to allow browsing of knowledge from different viewpoints or
different foci of interest. This paper briefly discusses the principles of multi-perspective modelling and
of knowledge valuation, and then describes the ontology that has been developed, with a couple of
examples of its use. The examples are drawn from the self-referential domain of AI researchers, their
research and their collaborators – specifically, the researchers and industrial collaborators on the AKT
project. The “semantic web researchers” ontology published by the KA2 project was used as a starting
point.
2 Multi-Perspective Modelling
The thesis of multi-perspective modelling is that for any “knowledge asset” to be represented
adequately, it’s necessary to represent a number of different perspectives on its knowledge – and,
possibly, to represent the asset at multiple different levels of decomposition. These ideas are based on
those of the Zachman framework [2], and are embodied in various knowledge modelling methods,
notably the CommonKADS methodology for knowledge engineering [3].
The Zachman framework (also called the Information Systems Architecture framework) has six
columns representing who, what, how, when, where and why perspectives on knowledge, and six rows
representing different levels of abstraction (see Table 1). Zachman illustrates the different levels of
abstraction using examples from design and construction of a building, starting from the “scope” level
(which takes a “ballpark” view on the building which is primarily the concern of the architect, and may
represent the gross sizing, shape, and spatial relationships as well as the mutual understanding between
the architect and owner), going through the “enterprise” level (primarily the concern of the owner,
representing the final building as seen by the owner, and floor plans, based on architect’s drawings) and
on through three other levels (the “system” level, the “technology constrained” level and the “detailed
representation” level, respectively the concerns of the designer, the builder and the subcontractor)
before arriving at the “functioning enterprise” level (in this example, the actual building). Zachman
describes this framework as "a simple, logical structure of descriptive representations for identifying
‘models’ that are the basis for designing the enterprise and for building the enterprise’s systems" [2].
So the thesis of multi-perspective modelling is that, in order to capture all the important aspects of a
knowledge asset, it is necessary to model (or at least, consider modelling) each of the six columns of
the Zachman framework.
Table 1. The Zachman framework (from [2])
Data Function Network People Time Motivation
“what” “how” “where” “who” “when” “why”
Objectives/ List of List of List of List of List of List of Business
Scope things processes the locations in Organizations Events goals/ strategies
“contextual” important business which the important to significant to
to the performs business the business the business
business operates
Enterprise e.g. e.g. Business e.g. Business e.g. Work e.g. Master e.g. Business
“conceptual” Semantic process Model legacy Flow model Schedule Plan
Model systems
System e.g. Logical e.g. e.g. e.g. Human e.g. e.g. Business
“logical” data model Application Distributed Interface Processing Rule Model
Architecture Systems Architecture Structure
Architecture
Technology e.g. e.g. System e.g. System e.g. e.g. Control e.g. Rule design
constrained Physical Design Architecture Presentation Structure
“physical” data model Architecture
Detailed e.g. Data e.g. programs e.g. Network e.g. Security e.g. Timing e.g. Rule
representations description architecture Architecture Description Specification
“out-of-context”
Functioning e.g. Data e.g. Function e.g. Network e.g. e.g. e.g. Strategy
enterprise Organization Schedule
3 Valuation of Knowledge
Valuing knowledge is a difficult task, because measuring knowledge is a difficult task, and
determining the contribution of knowledge to an activity is also difficult. Some people have taken an
approach of valuing products and partial products, calculating the knowledge required to produce each
product as a function of the training time and/or salaries required by practitioners, and then generating
statistics such as “return on knowledge” (see e.g. [4]). Others (e.g. England’s North Western AI
Applications Group) have focused on knowledge items instead [5], but concentrated less on the content
of knowledge items than on the relationships with other knowledge items – e.g. “you need to know A
before you can understand B”. Such a “knowledge map” could be used in conjunction with acquisition
times for each knowledge item to determine approximate total acquisition times for certain knowledge
items, and thus to calculate an “opportunity cost” for them.
4 Our Approach
I have devised an approach to knowledge auditing which uses an ontology of knowledge-related
terms. The aim is to carry out a knowledge audit of AI research and researchers, and so the terms focus
on research topics, publication details, and so on. I used the KA2 Knowledge Acquisition Community
ontology [6] as a starting point.1
Fig. 1. Top 3 levels of the Knowledge Acquisition Community ontology
The Knowledge Acquisition Community ontology provides the following top level classes: Event,
Organisation, Person, Product, Project, Publication, ResearchTopic2. I consider that this provides two
or three of the six recommended perspectives; the ResearchTopic is the domain (“what”) of a
knowledge item, the Person is the owner (“who”), and the location (“where”) of the knowledge is likely
to be in a Publication or a Project. I have added an ontology of tasks that need to be performed, which
outlines how certain top level tasks are carried out; for example, “developing a KBS” breaks down into
1
Specifically, I downloaded the OIL version, and read it into Protégé-2000 as an RDF Schema file. Some
additional work was necessary to recreate slot-to-class links which did not translate correctly.
2
ValidationANDVerification is also given as a top level class. I consider this to be poor modelling and have made
it a sub-class of ResearchTopic – see Figure 2.
several subtasks, which are themselves decomposed down to the level of tasks such as “detecting
circularity in rule based systems”. As yet, there are no specific ontologies of when knowledge is created
or used (the date of a publication is considered sufficient) nor of why knowledge exists or is needed,
but such ontologies could be developed if needed – for example, for time-critical applications or
applications where storage space or acquisition time is limited.
Using this ontology, it should be possible to encode every relevant piece of information about a
knowledge item. For example, the ontology describes the publication details of the paper
“COVERAGE: Verifying Multiple-Agent Knowledge-based Systems” [7] covers the research topics of
Verification and Validation, Anomaly Detection and Agent Based Systems; the task supported is
Anomaly Detection in Multi Agent Systems; and the knowledge owner is the author of the paper (Alun
Preece). The paper was published in a journal, whose details are duly recorded, and its publication year
was 1999, so it is recent work. An ontology such as this that contained details of all the papers by a
large group of researchers should provide the ability to move seamlessly between different views on
knowledge; e.g. “show me all the people who know about agent based systems” or “show me all the
work on KBS design after 1996”.
Fig. 2. Revised ontology showing “who”, “where”, “what” and “how” ontologies (left) and the current full
ontology of tasks (right)
5 Ontology for Knowledge Valuation
However, we not only want to capture all the information about the knowledge present in a group of
AI researchers, we also want to attach valuations to this knowledge. The reason is simple; even with a
relatively small group of researchers, there may well be a problem of information overload because
there is so much knowledge available about certain topics. The aim of knowledge valuation is to
identify those items of knowledge that are (or are considered to be) more valuable.
Within the ontology, this is achieved by adding a couple of slots and an entire new ontology section.
The slots are attached to the class of Publications; one is intended to record usage statistics (i.e. number
of clicks for an online publication, or number of times borrowed for a paper publication), while the
other records the “publication quality”, which contains one or more terms from the new section of the
ontology. These terms correspond to heuristics which give guidance on the quality of a publication; for
example, “Few References”, “Several References” or “Many References”; “One Reference Discussed
In Detail” or “More than One Reference Discussed In Detail”; and on the software side, “Prototype
with One Example”, “Proof of Concept system”, or “Fully Functional system”. An unlimited number
of these entries can be attached to any publication (or project report), with the intention of being used
as guidance on the quality of a publication.
Fig. 3. Ontology for evaluation (left) and slots for Publication class (lower right). Note that several slots exist in
order to collect valuation information
6 Future Activities
The priority in future work is to discover related research work and to use that to make further
extensions to the ontology, either in the multi-perspective modelling area or in the valuation area.
We also have ongoing work on construction of a knowledge based system to help in determination
of the quality of knowledge in databases. This system works by using heuristics to determine the
likelihood of obtaining useful knowledge from the database with data mining techniques.
Another piece of work concerns the development of ontology meta-data to allow merging of
knowledge models from different sources. This should be coordinated with the multi-perspective
ontology work.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the efforts of all my co-workers on the AKT project. I would especially
like to acknowledge Stuart Aitken for guidance on existing valuation methods and for general advice.
This work is supported under the Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) Interdisciplinary
Research Collaboration (IRC), which is sponsored by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences
Research Council under grant number GR/N15764/01. The AKT IRC comprises the Universities of
Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Sheffield, Southampton and the Open University.
The EPSRC and the Universities comprising the AKT IRC are authorised to reproduce and
distribute reprints for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon.
The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as
necessarily representing official policies or endorsements, either express or implied, of the EPSRC or
any other member of the AKT IRC.
References
1. J. Kingston and A. Macintosh, “Knowledge Management through Multi-Perspective Modelling: Representing
and Distributing Organizational Memory”. Research and Development in Expert Systems XVI, proceedings
of the Technical stream of ES ’99, the 19th BCS SGES International Conference on Knowledge Based
Systems and Applied Artificial Intelligence, 220-239, 1999.
2. J. Zachman, The Framework for Enterprise Architecture. http://www.zifa.com/zifajz02.htm.
3. A. Th. Schreiber, J. M. Akkermans, A. A. Anjewierden, R. de Hoog, N. R. Shadbolt, W. Van de Velde and B.
J. Wielinga. “Knowledge Engineering and Management: The CommonKADS Methodology”, MIT Press,
ISBN 0262193000. 2000.
4. Knowledge Value-Added (KVA) Methodology Tutorial. http://www.iec.org/tutorials/kva/
5. Structural Knowledge Auditing http://www.nwaiag.com/what/struct.htm
6. KA2 - Knowledge Acquisition Community Ontology. http://ontobroker.semanticweb.org/ontos/ ka2.html
7. A. Preece, “COVERAGE: Verifying Multiple-Agent Knowledge-based Systems”, Knowledge Based
Systems, 12, 37-44, 1999.