Information Technology Reference
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our research is to develop a suite of tools that support knowledge visualization and
management for the Semantic Web. This suite of tools is created based on the theoretical
framework of the Inferential Modeling Technique, which provides support for both static
and dynamic knowledge modeling. The tools can be used to support the process of KA
during the building of a KBS.
Existing software tools for knowledge engineering support will be critically examined and
observations drawn in the assessment will provide the basis for design of the tools we
propose for supporting knowledge visualization and management.
This chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 presents background literature relevant to
our research. Section 3 describes the development of tools for static and dynamic knowledge
visualization and ontology management. Section 4 provides some discussion of the tools.
Section 5 provides some conclusions and discussions on directions for future work.
2. Background literature
2.1 Ontology tools
Software tools support knowledge engineers in the difficult task of knowledge acquisition
and ontology construction. From a survey of research work on ontology tools, we found the
existing tools do not provide adequate support in five areas, which include (Harrison &
Chan, 2005): (1) support for an ontological engineering methodology, (2) support for
dynamic knowledge modeling, (3) support for dynamic knowledge testing, (4) support for
ontology visualization, and (5) support for ontology management. They are discussed in
detail as follows:
2.1.1 Lack of support for an ontological engineering methodology
Most of the examined tools were not developed based on an ontological engineering
methodology, which can help expedite the ontological engineering process. The
methodology provides a sequence of steps, procedure or guidelines that help developers in
the process of constructing an ontology. Some examples of research works on tool support
for ontological engineering methodologies include OntoEdit which supports On-To-
Knowledge (Fensel et al., 2002), WebODE which supports METHONTOLOGY (WebODE),
and Knowledge Modeling System (KMS) which supports the Inferential Modeling
Technique (IMT) (Chan, 2004).
2.1.2 Lack of support for modeling dynamic knowledge
While a primary function of a tool that supports ontology construction is its ability to model
the problem domain. Most tools only model static domain knowledge about classes and
attributes but ignore dynamic knowledge, which refers to the knowledge about objectives,
tasks and activities (Chan, 2004). A brief survey of the different ontological engineering
support tools reveal there are diverse methods employed. For example, the method used by
Protégé (Protégé), Ontolingua (Ontolingua), and OntoBuilder (OntoBuilder) for modeling
ontologies is to use a hierarchical tree listing all the concepts, and input fields are provided
to capture characteristics of concepts. A graphical method of modeling ontologies is
employed in tools such as KAON (KANO) and Protégé OWLViz Plug-in (Protégé OWLViz),
in which the representational method involves nodes to represent concepts and edges to
represent relationships between concepts.
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