Αυτή η διδακτορική διατριβή αφορά στην εννοιολογική και λειτουργική ολοκλήρωση των Συστημάτων Υποστήριξης Ομαδικών Αποφάσεων και Διαχείρισης Οργανωσιακής Γνώσης. Η προτεινόμενη προσέγγιση αποτελεί μια καινοτόμο προσπάθεια συγκερασμού και διεύρυνσης των δυνατοτήτων που παρέχονται από υπάρχουσες τεχνικές και των δύο παραπάνω επιστημονικών περιοχών, με στόχο τόσο την πληρέστερη κάλυψη των ολοένα αυξανόμενων αναγκών των χρηστών που εμπλέκονται σε σχετικά προβλήματα, όσο και την αποτελεσματικότερη αξιοποίηση της γνώσης ενός οργανισμού. Λαμβάνοντας υπόψη τη διατυπωμένη ανάγκη για μια ολοκληρωμένη προσέγγιση, η διατριβή επιχειρεί τη σύνθεση αρχών και τεχνικών από διάφορα πεδία έρευνας, υποστηρίζοντας ότι η διαχείριση γνώσης και η λήψη αποφάσεων δε θα πρέπει να αντιμετωπίζονται ως χωριστές διαδικασίες. Προς αυτή την κατεύθυνση, προτείνεται ένα πλαίσιο ολοκλήρωσής τους. Αναγνωρίζοντας ότι σε αυτού του είδους τα περιβάλλοντα σημαντικό ρόλο παίζει η ενεργή συμμετοχή των ληπτών αποφάσεων στις διαδικασίες διανομής της γνώσης, η προτεινόμενη προσέγγιση προτείνει επίσης ένα πλαίσιο ενίσχυσης της συμμετοχής τους στις σχετικές διαδικασίες. Το προτεινόμενο πλαίσιο ολοκλήρωσης υποστηρίζεται από ένα πρωτότυπο εργαλείο λογισμικού, το οποίο αναπτύχθηκε στα πλαίσια της διατριβής. Στο προτεινόμενο εργαλείο, η ολοκλήρωση των διαδικασιών λήψης ομαδικών αποφάσεων και διαχείρισης οργανωσιακής γνώσης επιτυγχάνεται μέσω ενός Γράφου Συζήτησης, ο οποίος απεικονίζει το διάλογο που αναπτύσσεται μεταξύ των εμπλεκομένων στη λήψη μιας απόφασης. Ο βασισμένος σε επιχειρηματολογία διάλογος δομείται και αξιολογείται βάσει κοινά αποδεκτών Πλαισίων Λήψης Αποφάσεων και Μηχανισμών Αξιολόγησης. Οι λειτουργίες του προτεινόμενου εργαλείου, καθώς και η οργάνωση των σχετικών δεδομένων και γνώσης βασίζονται σε ένα πρωτότυπο μοντέλο οντολογίας, το οποίο επίσης αναπτύχθηκε στα πλαίσια της διατριβής. Η συνολική προσέγγιση υποστηρίζει και διευκολύνει τόσο την ομαδική λήψη αποφάσεων, όσο και την απόκτηση, εκμαίευση, επεξεργασία, αποθήκευση και διανομή της οργανωσιακής γνώσης. / Decision making is widely considered as a fundamental organizational activity that comprises a series of knowledge management tasks. Admitting that the quality of a decision depends on the quality of the knowledge used to make it, it has been widely argued that the enhancement of the decision making efficiency and effectiveness is strongly related to the appropriate exploitation of all possible organizational knowledge resources. Taking the above remarks into account, this PhD thesis presents a human-centred, multidisciplinary approach for the integration of Group Decision Support and Organizational Knowledge Management Systems. Towards this end, a conceptual framework that properly interweaves concepts, theories and practices from the Knowledge Management, Argumentation Theory, Decision Making and Multicriteria Decision Aid disciplines is first introduced. Acknowledging that in collaborative settings the decision makers’ active participation in the knowledge sharing processes is of major importance, the proposed approach also introduces a framework for the leveraging of their participation in the related processes. Furthermore, in order to functionally integrate the decision support and knowledge management processes, a software tool that fully supports the above two frameworks was developed. The core component of the proposed tool is a Discourse Graph that serves the visualization of the argumentative discourses taking place between the involved parties. In order to better support decision making, these discourses are structured and evaluated according to a set of commonly accepted Decision Making Frameworks and a set of Scoring Mechanisms that comply with broadly used Multicriteria Decision Aid models and techniques. Being based on a well-defined ontology model, the proposed approach enables the members of a group to collaborate and accomplish a common understanding. Furthermore, it facilitates the capturing of the organizational knowledge in order to augment teamwork in terms of knowledge acquisition, elicitation, processing, storage and sharing, thus further enhancing the decision making quality.

La gestion des connaissances permet d'identifier et de capitaliser les savoirs faires de l'entreprise afin de les organiser et de les diffuser. Cette thèse propose un système de gestion des connaissances hétérogènes et distribuées, appelé OCEAN. Basé sur les ontologies et sur un système multi-agents, OCEAN a pour but de résoudre le problème de la capitalisation et de réutilisation des connaissances provenant de plusieurs sources différentes, afin d'aider les acteurs métiers dans le processus de développement de produits mécaniques. Le système OCEAN repose sur un cycle de vie de quatre étapes Ce cycle de vie possède les phases : d'identification, d'extraction, de validation et se termine par la réutilisation des connaissances. Chaque phase constitue l'objectif d'une organisation d'agents.L'identification dans le système OCEAN consiste à définir les connaissances par un expert métier sous la forme d'une ontologie. Les ontologies sont utilisées dans notre système pour représenter les connaissances définis d'une façon structurée et formelle afin d'être compréhensible par les machines. L'extraction des connaissances dans OCEAN est réalisée par les agents de manière automatique à l'aide des ontologies créées par les experts métiers. Les agents interagissent avec les différentes applications métiers via des services web. Le résultat de cette phase est stocké dans une mémoire organisationnelle. La validation des connaissances consiste à permettre aux acteurs métiers de valider les connaissances de la mémoire organisationnelle dans un wiki sémantique. Ce wiki permet de présenter les connaissances de la mémoire organisationnelle aux acteurs pour les réutiliser, les évaluer et les faire évoluer. La réutilisation des connaissances dans OCEAN est inspiré de travaux antérieurs intégrés au sein d'OCEAN. Les quatre phases du cycle de vie des connaissances traitées dans cette thèse nous ont permis de réaliser un système apte à gérer les connaissances hétérogènes et distribuées dans une entreprise étendue.

The growing development and use of pervasive systems, equipped with increasingly sophisticated functionalities and communication means, offer fantastic potentialities of services, particularly in the eHealth and Telemedicine domains, for the benifit of each citizen, patient or healthcare professional. One of the current societal challenges is to enable a better exploitation of the available services for all actors involved in a given domain. Nevertheless, the multiplicity of the offered services, the systems functional variety, and the heterogeneity of the needs require the development of knowledge models of these services, systems functions, and needs. In addition, the distributed computing environments heterogeneity, the availability and potential capabilities of various human and material resources (devices, services, data sources, etc.) required by the different tasks and processes, the variety of services providing users with data, the interoperability conflicts between schemas and data sources are all issues that we have to consider in our research works. Our contribution aims to empower the intelligent exploitation of ubiquitous resources and to optimize the quality of service in ambient environment. For this, we propose a knowledge meta-model of the main concepts of a pervasive environment, such as Actor, Task, Resource, Object, Service, Location, Organization, etc. This knowledge meta-model is based on ontologies describing the different aforementioned entities from a given domain and their interrelationships. We have then formalized it by using a standard language for knowledge description. After that, we have designed an architectural framework called ONOF-PAS (ONtology Oriented Framework for Pervasive Applications and Services) mainly based on ontological models, a set of rules, an inference engine, and object oriented components for tasks management and resources processing. Being generic, extensible, and applicable in different domains, ONOF-PAS has the ability to perform rule-based reasoning to handle various contexts of use and enable decision making in dynamic and heterogeneous environments while taking into account the availability and capabilities of the human and material resources required by the multiples tasks and processes executed by pervasive systems. Finally, we have instantiated ONOF-PAS in the telemedicine domain to handle the scenario of the transfer of persons victim of health problems during their presence in hostile environments such as high mountains resorts or geographically isolated areas. A prototype implementing this scenario, called T-TROIE (Telemedicine Tasks and Resources Ontologies for Inimical Environments), has been developed to validate our approach and the proposed ONOF-PAS framework.

Ontologijų aprašymai yra dažniausiai naudojami semantiniame žiniatinklyje (Semantic Web/Web 2.0), tačiau pastaruoju metu jie randa vis daugiau ir daugiau pritaikymo kasdienėms informacijos sistemoms. Puikiai suformuota ontologija privalo turėti teisingą sintaksę ir nedviprasmišką mašinai suprantamą interpretaciją, tokiu būdu ji gali aiškiai apibrėžti fundamentalias sąvokas ir ryšius probleminėje srityje. Ontologijos vis plačiau naudojamos įvairiuose taikymuose: verslo procesų ir informacijos integravime, paieškoje ir žvalgyme. Tokie taikymai reikalauja geros greitaveikos, efektyvaus saugojimo ir didelio mąsto ontologinių duomenų manipuliavimo. Kai ontologijomis paremtos sistemos auga tiek akiračiu, tiek apimtimi, specialistų sistemose naudojami samprotavimo varikliai tampa nebetinkami. Tokiomis aplinkybėmis, ontologijų saugojimas reliacinėse duomenų bazėse tampa būtinas semantiniame žiniatinklyje ir įmonėse. Šiame darbe atsakoma į klausimą kokiu būdu OWL ontologijas galima efektyviai transformuoti į reliacinių duomenų bazių schemas. / Ontology descriptions are typically used in Semantic Web/Web2.0, but nowadays they find more and more adaptability in everyday Information Systems. Well-formed ontology must have correct syntax and unambiguous machine-understandable interpretation, so it is capable to clearly defining fundamental concepts and relationships of the problem domain. Ontologies are increasingly used in many applications: business process and information integration, search and navigation. Such applications require scalability and performance, efficient storage and manipulation of large scale ontological data. In such circumstances, storing ontologies in relational databases are becoming the relevant needs for Semantic Web and enterprises. For ontology development, Semantic Web languages are dedicated: Resource Description Framework (RDF) and schema RDFS, and Web Ontology Language (OWL) that consists of three sublanguages – OWL Lite, OWL Description Logic (DL) and OWL Full. When ontology based systems are growing in scope and volume, reasoners of expert systems are becoming unsuitable. In this work an algorithm which fully automatically transforms ontologies, represented in OWL, to RDB schemas is proposed. Some concepts, e.g. ontology classes and properties are mapped to relational tables, relations and attributes, other (constraints) are stored like metadata in special tables. Using both direct mapping and metadata, it is possible to obtain appropriate relational structures and not to lose the... [to full text]

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Traditional workflow systems have several drawbacks, e.g. in their inabilities to rapidly react to changes, to construct workflow automatically (or with user involvement) and to improve performance autonomously (or with user involvement) in an incremental manner according to specified goals. Overcoming these limitations would be highly beneficial for complex domains where such adversities are exhibited. Video processing is one such domain that increasingly requires attention as larger amounts of images and videos are becoming available to persons who are not technically adept in modelling the processes that are involved in constructing complex video processing workflows. Conventional video and image processing systems, on the other hand, are developed by programmers possessing image processing expertise. These systems are tailored to produce highly specialised hand-crafted solutions for very specific tasks, making them rigid and non-modular. The knowledge-based vision community have attempted to produce more modular solutions by incorporating ontologies. However, they have not been maximally utilised to encompass aspects such as application context descriptions (e.g. lighting and clearness effects) and qualitative measures. This thesis aims to tackle some of the research gaps yet to be addressed by the workflow and knowledge-based image processing communities by proposing a novel workflow composition and execution approach within an integrated framework. This framework distinguishes three levels of abstraction via the design, workflow and processing layers. The core technologies that drive the workflow composition mechanism are ontologies and planning. Video processing problems provide a fitting domain for investigating the effectiveness of this integratedmethod as tackling such problems have not been fully explored by the workflow, planning and ontological communities despite their combined beneficial traits to confront this known hard problem. In addition, the pervasiveness of video data has proliferated the need for more automated assistance for image processing-naive users, but no adequate support has been provided as of yet. A video and image processing ontology that comprises three sub-ontologies was constructed to capture the goals, video descriptions and capabilities (video and image processing tools). The sub-ontologies are used for representation and inference. In particular, they are used in conjunction with an enhanced Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) domain independent planner to help with performance-based selection of solution steps based on preconditions, effects and postconditions. The planner, in turn, makes use of process models contained in a process library when deliberating on the steps and then consults the capability ontology to retrieve a suitable tool at each step. Two key features of the planner are the ability to support workflow execution (interleaves planning with execution) and can perform in automatic or semi-automatic (interactive) mode. The first feature is highly desirable for video processing problems because execution of image processing steps yield visual results that are intuitive and verifiable by the human user, as automatic validation is non trivial. In the semiautomaticmode, the planner is interactive and prompts the user tomake a tool selection when there is more than one tool available to perform a task. The user makes the tool selection based on the recommended descriptions provided by the workflow system. Once planning is complete, the result of applying the tool of their choice is presented to the user textually and visually for verification. This plays a pivotal role in providing the user with control and the ability to make informed decisions. Hence, the planner extends the capabilities of typical planners by guiding the user to construct more optimal solutions. Video processing problems can also be solved in more modular, reusable and adaptable ways as compared to conventional image processing systems. The integrated approach was evaluated on a test set consisting of videos originating from open sea environment of varying quality. Experiments to evaluate the efficiency, adaptability to user’s changing needs and user learnability of this approach were conducted on users who did not possess image processing expertise. The findings indicate that using this integrated workflow composition and execution method: 1) provides a speed up of over 90% in execution time for video classification tasks using full automatic processing compared to manual methods without loss of accuracy; 2) is more flexible and adaptable in response to changes in user requests (be it in the task, constraints to the task or descriptions of the video) than modifying existing image processing programs when the domain descriptions are altered; 3) assists the user in selecting optimal solutions by providing recommended descriptions.

Les travaux de recherche de cette thèse portent sur la modélisation sémantique des informations industrielles, dans une approche og cycle de vie fg , de gestion des informations. Dans ce type d'approche, lever le verrou lié à l'interopérabilité des modèles d'information est une condition sine qua non à un échange d'information sans perte de flux sémantique. Jusqu'alors, des méthodes d'unification étaient envisagées, reposant sur l'utilisation mutuelle de modèles standards, tels que la norme STEP par exemple. Cependant, l'unification fait face à des limites en termes d'expressivité des modèles, de rigidité, et de perte de sémantique. Afin de lever ces limites, les paradigmes de modélisation évoluent et se tournent vers les ontologies d'inférence, outils du web sémantique.Dans cette thèse, nous proposons un cadre de modélisation sémantique général et une méthodologie de mise en place de ce cadre, qui reposent sur l'utilisation d'ontologies d'inférence. L'application du cadre de modélisation à un cas d'étude industriel, issu de l'ingénierie nucléaire (plus particulièrement l'expression et l'exécution des règles métier), permet alors d'évaluer les apports et limites des ontologies en tant que paradigme de modélisation. Les limites les plus importantes que nous identifions sur l'Open World Assumption, le manque de langage de règles performant et le manque d'outils d'implémentation robustes pour des applications à large échelle. Le développement d'un démonstrateur pour le cas d'étude industriel permet finalement de tendre vers une solution mixte, où les ontologies sont utilisées localement, afin d'en exploiter les divers avantages de manière optimale.

Internet est devenu une source importante d'information médicale pour les patients et leurs proches : recherche d'informations sur leurs maladies et les dernières recherches cliniques, ainsi que pour y constituer des communautés "numériques" de dialogue et de partage. Cependant, accès à Internet ne signifie pas nécessairement accès à l'information. Le manque de familiarité avec le langage médical constitue un problème majeur pour les usagers de santé dans l'accès à l'information et son interprétation. Le travail de cette thèse s'inscrit dans la problématique d'étude et de caractérisation de la terminologie des usagers de santé pour pouvoir proposer des services adaptés à leur langage et à leur niveau de connaissances. Sa production principale est une ontologie dans le domaine du cancer du sein orientée vers les usagers de santé. Cette ontologie est construite à partir d'un ensemble de corpus de textes représentant deux catégories : les médiateurs de santé et les usagers de santé. Les éléments de cette ontologie ont été analysés en utilisant des méthodes quantitatives et qualitatives sur plusieurs niveaux : termes, concepts et relations. L'ontologie produite a constitué le noyau d'une application de reformulation de requêtes d'usagers de santé en utilisant l'approche de propagation d'activation dans un réseau sémantique. Les concepts de l'ontologie représentent les noeuds dans le réseau sémantique et les liens entre ces noeuds ont des poids, calculés soit automatiquement sur la base des co-occurrences des concepts dans un corpus de textes soit, manuellement selon le type des liens ; ces poids reflètent la "force" de la relation entre les noeuds.

To a rapidly increasing degree, traditional organizational structures evolve in large parts of the world towards online business using modern Information and Communication Technology (ICT) capabilities. For efficient applications of inter-organizational information systems, the alignment between business and ICT is a key factor. In this context, business analysis using business modelling can be regarded as a first step in designing economically sustainable e-business solutions. This thesis examines how business modeling can be used to improve e-business design. We examine how business stakeholder intentions and different objectives of business collaborations can be used to obtain an explorative business model that can be used as a basis for designing e-business solutions. The thesis proposes a set of artifacts for business modeling and e-service design. In regard to business modeling, we propose methods that consider internal aspects such as strategic intentions of actors and external aspects such as business collaborations among them. Considering stakeholder intentions, we introduce a method to design business models based on goal models. A set of templates for designing goal models and a set of transformation rules to obtain business models based on goal models are proposed. To further improve business models considering business collaborations, we suggest a classification of business transactions that considers underlying business objectives of business collaborations. Utilizing the suggested business transactions, we then propose a method to improve business modeling. Finally, we propose a method for designing e-services using business models. The methods suggested support business modelers as well as process and services designers in executing their tasks effectively. The methods have been assessed through applications in two cases.

La arquitectura semántica diseñada ha sido probada dentro del entorno de la gestión de los derechos de la propiedad intelectual. Esta permite asimilar nuevos módulos y cambios en la estructura. Se ha diseñado específicamente una propia ontología: IPROnto, que es totalmente interoperable con el resto de estándares, y propone una nueva forma de gestionar los derechos de la propiedad intelectual.Se realizó un análisis estadístico de la Web Semántica así como de los elementos que estábamos utilizando, IPROnto. Este estudio reveló que la Web Semántica se comportaba como un sistema complejo, que poseía propiedades por las cuales se podía caracterizar un comportamiento microscópico. Algunas ontologías son discutidas como paradigma de conocimiento común como DOLCE o FrameNet, además de procesos para poder interiorizarlas cercanos a la ciencia cognitiva utilizando 'image-schemas' para conectarlos a la web semántica, además de utilizar álgebra geométrica para conectar el simbolismo (álgebra) y semántica (geometría entendida como significado geométrico) como último paso. / The main issue of this work is to discover and face new challenges in negotiation over the WWW, concretely over the Semantic Web (SW) because it provides a new paradigm not only in language expression but also in its manipulation.As a result, a heterogeneous architecture is provided (with Multi-agent Systems) and IPR knowledge is formalized in an IPR ontology.Nowadays, agents have to know about other agents and their environments. Ontologies are been used to model agents' knowledge. In order to provide a model of the SW as real as possible, a deep statistical analysis of it has been made. It reveals that the SW behaves as a complex system and shares some properties with them. Concepts classification could not be as objective as we expect. An effort is done by SW community to establish a shared basis of knowledge for common understanding. The contribution is a way to connect it to the physical domain.