Ontologies

Business Process Management



Introduction

The critical task of designing domain ontologies for any sector of practice is a non-trivial exercise in terms of finance, time and human resources. Once this task is concluded, the newly designed ontology needs to be adopted and diffused on a large scale to best fulfil its role. The diffusion of ontologies is influenced by a multitude of factors, from technical issues that have been reported in the Computer Science arena, to social, economic and legal difficulties reported by experts in Economics and Market research. This study provides an overall picture on these factors based on an Information Systems perspective. The HTE model, grounded in several well-established Information Systems theories, has been used as a basis for conducting interviews for exploratory case studies in AUSTRALIA government agencies as part of a study aiming to build a theoretical model for the diffusion of ontologies in the Road Asset Management sector. The ultimate goal of this research is to provide a comprehensive model for the adoption and diffusion of ontologies in Road Asset Management to provide practitioners with a systematic view on the issues related to implementing ontology in practice. At the same time, the diffusion of ontologies model will provide useful insights into the Road Asset Management industry for the designers of ontologies so that they can create ontologies that can be easily adopted and implemented(Fensel,2001).

Ontologies and Their Applications in Road asset Management

Effective Road Asset Management requires large quantities of data, from road inventory and condition data, to road usage and financial data. Complex Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) and Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) information systems have been frequently implemented to support the collection and analysis of data to perform asset management tasks, with a majority of these systems being million dollars Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) systems. However, fewer than 8% of the CMMS/EMS customers worldwide have realized the expected savings from these systems, as maintaining the CMMS/ EAM programs required in many cases the creation of whole new IT departments and/or hiring of very specialized consultants(Borgo,2008). At the same time, the proliferation of the Internet and the associated Web technologies created an information environment suitable for managing large amounts of data in a very efficient way as long as data and information are collected and stored in a systematic way. In order to take advantage of the Web information environment, the AUSTRALIA government agencies have recognized the need for data and information consistency across various domains of practice(Alshare,2009). Ontologies are information structures that can assist in solving consistent terminology issues. The basic role of ontologies in practice is to provide a shared understanding of concepts in a specific domain of knowledge. The most widely used definition of ontologies in the Computer Science literature is Gruber's in which ontologies are "explicit specifications of conceptualizations” (Obyung,2009). Guarino prefers another of Gruber's definitions, that of "agreements about shared conceptualizations” where the emphasis is placed on 'agreements', which brings a new dimension to the original definition, that ...