In this thesis, an ontology for the mineral exploration domain is designed and developed applying the Protégé ontology editor. The MinExOnt ontology includes a formal and explicit representation of the terms describing real objects, activities, and processes in mineral exploration. The stages used for these activities have various vocabularies, which are semantically modeled in this ontology with Web Ontology Language (OWL). The aim of the thesis is to show how ontologies can be designed and developed to help manage and represent geological knowledge. In addition to providing a general workflow for building the ontology, this thesis presents a simple user guide for the used software, including Protégé, used for ontology development, and Knoodl-OntVis, used for OWL visualization.

Developing a model of a service system and mobile units including cellphone, PDA, Laptop is an important preliminary step of designing the systems which could provide these units some convenient and entertainment services through common short range communication like blue tooth, wireless LAN, etc. In this project, an ontology is created to represent this model. Meanwhile, some basic service rules are also programmed and combined with this ontology can be used to simulate some interactions between items inside this model. The description of this model (ontology) has been made through Protégé and demonstrated by using its graphical interface. The rules have been created by using Jess and implemented with the ontology by using JessTab.

How to best conduct a mentoring relationship has been confounded by the lack of a consistent definition of “mentoring” and the scarcity of studies addressing how to achieve a positive outcome. This study contributes new, operationalized definitions of “mentoring,” “mentor,” and “protégé,” and a modified version of the Critical Incident Technique and the Enhanced Critical Incident Technique, called the Adapted Critical Incident Technique (ACIT), which is more consistent with a qualitative methodology. The researcher interviewed 18 self-described mentors and protégés to obtain 207 quotes about what critical behaviours helped or hindered mentoring relationship outcomes. Independent judges confirmed the placement of quotes into 13 categories of behaviours that helped mentors and protégés to reach the mentoring goals and 10 categories of behaviours that hindered the mentoring outcome. The findings contribute to an increased understanding of the foundation upon which mentors and protégés in all fields may potentially build better programs and training under the guise of mentorship. / Graduate / 2018-12-01

Knowledge Graph (KG) is an emerging topic of research. The promise of KGs is to be able to turn data into knowledge by supplying the data with context at the source. This could in turn allow machines to make sense of data by inference; looking at the context of the data and being able to derive knowledge from its context and relations, thus allowing for new ways of finding value in the sea of data that the world produces today. Working with KGs today involves many steps that are open to simplification and improvement, especially in regards to usability. In this thesis, we've aimed to design and produce an application that can be used to modify, extend and build KGs. The work includes the front-end library VueJS, the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) library D3 and the graph database Stardog. The project has made use of Scrum methodology to distribute and plan the work that took place over a span of six months, with two developers working halftime (20 hours/week). The result of the project is a working application that can be used by developers within the KG domain who want to be able to test and modify their graphs in a visual manner.

The focus of this study is on pastoral counselling and mentorship in the South African context and how it can contribute to the improvement of parent-child relationships. The Practical Theological model of Osmer is used as a framework in which the study is conducted. It consists of the Descriptive-empirical, Interpretative, Normative and Pragmatic tasks (which, for the purpose of the study, are called methods of approximation). In the first chapter the emphasis is on the way in which the study will be conducted with the aim of obtaining positive outcomes. This is also addressed in Chapter 2 by means of empiric research. Interviews are conducted with 24 participants that consist of parents and children. The aim of this is to determine how many problems really occur within families in a South African context. Many problems in this regard have come to light. The third chapter is mainly dedicated to a literature study that discusses the effect of positive and negative outcomes through the application of Biblical principles and mentorship within families. The effect of negative or positive parenthood is discussed as well as the effect it has on the child in his/her development process. Parents can learn many lessons from this chapter so that their children won’t have to grow up with emotional anguish. In the fourth chapter the theological aspects are discussed and proof is given for the value of these aspects as addressed by theological experts. Moral values, pastoral models, the value of the Holy Spirit and how God is portrayed are discussed here. These principles also contribute to happier families. In the fifth chapter attempts are made to find summarising solutions for this study’s initial problem statement, research question and central theoretical argument. Various results and conclusions can be made to find answers to the different key terms. Problem identification and problem solving techniques are discussed. A typical counselling session is held on the basis of a pastoral phase model in order to provide clarity to the solution of the abovementioned problems. / PhD (Pastoral Studies), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

The focus of this study is on pastoral counselling and mentorship in the South African context and how it can contribute to the improvement of parent-child relationships. The Practical Theological model of Osmer is used as a framework in which the study is conducted. It consists of the Descriptive-empirical, Interpretative, Normative and Pragmatic tasks (which, for the purpose of the study, are called methods of approximation). In the first chapter the emphasis is on the way in which the study will be conducted with the aim of obtaining positive outcomes. This is also addressed in Chapter 2 by means of empiric research. Interviews are conducted with 24 participants that consist of parents and children. The aim of this is to determine how many problems really occur within families in a South African context. Many problems in this regard have come to light. The third chapter is mainly dedicated to a literature study that discusses the effect of positive and negative outcomes through the application of Biblical principles and mentorship within families. The effect of negative or positive parenthood is discussed as well as the effect it has on the child in his/her development process. Parents can learn many lessons from this chapter so that their children won’t have to grow up with emotional anguish. In the fourth chapter the theological aspects are discussed and proof is given for the value of these aspects as addressed by theological experts. Moral values, pastoral models, the value of the Holy Spirit and how God is portrayed are discussed here. These principles also contribute to happier families. In the fifth chapter attempts are made to find summarising solutions for this study’s initial problem statement, research question and central theoretical argument. Various results and conclusions can be made to find answers to the different key terms. Problem identification and problem solving techniques are discussed. A typical counselling session is held on the basis of a pastoral phase model in order to provide clarity to the solution of the abovementioned problems. / PhD (Pastoral Studies), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

The integration and interoperability of autonomous and heterogeneous electronic government (e-government) systems of government departments and agencies for a seamless services delivery to citizens through one-stop e-government portals remain challenging issues in egovernment development. In recent years, Semantic Web technologies have emerged as promising solutions to these problems. Semantic Web technologies base on ontology allow the description and specification of electronic services (e-services), making it easy to compose, match, map and merge e-services and facilitate their semantic integration and interoperability. However, a unified and comprehensive methodology that provides structured guidelines for the semantic-driven planning and implementation of e-government systems does not exist yet. This study presents a methodology framework for the semantic-driven development of future e-government systems. The features of maturity models, software engineering and Semantic Web domains are investigated and employed to draw and specify the methodology framework. Thereafter, the semantic content of the methodology framework is further specified using ontology building methodology and Semantic Web ontology languages and platforms. The study would be useful to e-government developers, particularly those of developing countries where there is little or no practice of semantic content development in e-government processes as well as where little progress has been made towards the development of one-stop e-government portals for seamless services delivery to citizens. Part of the study would also be of interest to novice Semantic Web developers who might use it as a starting point for further investigations. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Computer Science))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2012

Dans cette thèse, nous fournissons un examen complet des technologies du Web sémantique et de leurs utilités dans le contexte actuel des petites et moyennes entreprises (PME). Les approches traditionnelles d'intégration des entreprises favorisent essentiellement les grandes entités. Les obligations contractuelles fortes sur les PME, mais en même temps leur volonté de garder leurs compétences individuelles, et ce, dans un environnement limitant leur choix, les obligent à prendre des décisions stratégiques et de conclure des accords sur le long terme avec leurs partenaires, limitant ainsi leur flexibilité aux fluctuations du marché. Nous proposons, donc, une approche ontologique basée sur Web sémantique pour l'intégration de l'information ainsi que des ressources matérielles de l'entreprise distribuée. Cette approche, basée sur le Web, agit comme un système d'aide à la décision pour utiliser des ressources de meilleure qualité ainsi que pour l'intégration de l'information distribuée. Les travaux relatifs à l'ontologie web, pour l'intégration d'information ne sont pas nouveaux, mais l'approche proposée par nous est une valeur ajoutée pour l'entreprise distribuée. De plus, nous avons également proposé l'ontologie Web sémantique comme un système de configuration pour gérer les ressources distribuées de l'entreprise virtuelle. Puis, nous avons modélisé l'ontologie OWL-DL en nous basant sur la sémantique de la norme ISA-95, relative à l'intégration d'entreprises industrielles. Ensuite, nous utilisons cet artefact ontologique comme un artefact de configuration permettant de gérer le matériel de l'entreprise virtuelle distribuée ainsi que les ressources matérielles. C'est la proposition principale de cette thèse : utiliser l'ontologie Web sémantique comme un système d'aide à la décision pour la configuration de l'utilisation des ressources / In this thesis, we have provided a complete review of the semantic web technologies and their corresponding utility in the current environment for small to medium sized enterprise (MSE). The traditional approaches to enterprise integration favour large enterprise entities and force contractual limitations on smaller partners, but at the same time the pressure to guard the individual enterprise competence is ever increasing, the distributed enterprise (MSE) in such an environment have limited number of choices, which forces them to make strategic decisions and enter into a long term agreements with their partners and this limits their flexibility to the market changes. We, in this thesis, propose a semantic web based ontology approach for integrating the information as well as physical resource of the distributed enterprise. This web based approach acts as a decision support for better resources utility as well as distributed information integration. The work related to web ontology?s for information integration is not new, but the approach proposed in this thesis for distributed enterprise is an added value. Similarly, we have also proposed semantic web ontology as a configuration system to manage the distributed resources of the virtual enterprise, for this we have modelled OWL-DL ontology on the semantic of the industrial integration standard ISA-95, and subsequently used this ontology artefact as a configuration artefact to manage the distributed virtual enterprise material and equipment resources this is the main proposition of the thesis of utilizing semantic web ontology as resource configuration decision support

M. Tech. (Information Technology, Department of Information and Communications Technology, Faculty of Applied an Computer Sciences), Vaal University of Technolog / One of the main research topics in Semantic Web is the semantic extraction of knowledge stored in relational databases through ontologies. This is because ontologies are core components of the Semantic Web. Therefore, several tools, algorithms and frameworks are being developed to enable the automatic conversion of relational databases into ontologies. Ontologies produced with these tools, algorithms and frameworks needs to be valid and competent for them to be useful in Semantic Web applications within the target knowledge domains. However, the main challenges are that many existing automatic ontology construction tools, algorithms, and frameworks fail to address the issue of ontology verification and ontology competency evaluation. This study investigates possible solutions to these challenges. The study began with a literature review in the semantic web field. The review let to the conceptualisation of a framework for semantic knowledge extraction to deal with the abovementioned challenges. The proposed framework had to be evaluated in a real life knowledge domain. Therefore, a knowledge domain was chosen as a case study. The data was collected and the business rules of the domain analysed to develop a relational data model. The data model was further implemented into a test relational database using Oracle RDBMS. Thereafter, Protégé plugins were applied to automatically construct ontologies from the relational database. The resulting ontologies are further validated to match their structures against existing conceptual database-to-ontology mapping principles. The matching results show the performance and accuracy of Protégé plugins in automatically converting relational databases into ontologies. Finally, the study evaluated the resulting ontologies against the requirements of the knowledge domain. The requirements of the domain are modelled with competency questions (CQs) and mapped to the ontology using SPARQL queries design, execution and analysis against users’ views of CQs answers. Experiments show that, although users have different views of the answers to CQs, the execution of the SPARQL translations of CQs against the ontology does produce outputs instances that satisfy users’ expectations. This indicates that Protégé plugins generated ontology from relational database embodies domain and semantic features to be useful in Semantic Web applications.

La gestion d'animaux potentiellement "à problème", tels que le loup et le sanglier, est complexe. Il s'agit de maîtriser au mieux des comportements animaux intrinsèquement imprévisibles. Mais en plus, les modalités d'une « bonne gestion » font l'objet de conflits et de controverses, les hommes ne s'accordant pas sur les catégories socio-spatiales dans lesquelles ces animaux doivent être pensés. A la croisée entre aménagement et géographie sociale, cette thèse s'attache à explorer les formes de relations que suscite la gestion du loup ou du sanglier entre territoires politiques, territorialités humaines et spatialités animales. Elle articule outils conceptuels géographiques et sociologiques et approches théoriques de l'aménagement. Une de ses spécificités tient dans sa posture épistémologique, privilégiant un regard symétrique entre acteurs et actants non humains ou profanes et scientifiques. Le déploiement des controverses autour des caractéristiques et des agissements des humains et non-humains met en lumière des « arguments génériques ». Leur trame argumentative montre des similarités dans l'opposition entre partisans et détracteurs de ces animaux. Si de tels arguments apportent des éléments de compréhension des conflits, ils donnent une image trop caricaturale des réactions territoriales face à la gestion de ces animaux. Les innovations socio-spatiales, impulsées par les opérateurs territoriaux "loup" et "sanglier", ne peuvent être mises à jour qu'en procédant à une microgéographie. Des opérateurs spécifiques aux territoires, expliquant le caractère conflictuel ou non des "vivre ensemble", ont alors été identifiés. Des pistes d'opérationnalisation sont enfin proposées.