Informatica

Ontologies are used to semantically enrich different types of information systems (IS), ensure a reasoning on their content and integrate heterogeneous IS at the semantical level. On the other hand, fuzzy theory is employed in IS for handling the uncertainty and fuzziness of their attributes, resulting in a fully fuzzy IS. As such, ontology- and fuzzy-based IS (i.e. ontology and fuzzy IS) are being developed. So, in this paper, we present a bibliometric analysis of the ontology and fuzzy IS concept to grasp its main ideas, and to increase its body of knowledge by providing a concept map for ontology and fuzzy IS. The main results obtained show that by adding ontologies and fuzzy theory to traditional ISs, they evolve into intelligent ISs capable of managing fuzzy and semantically rich (ontological) information and ensuring knowledge recognition in various fields of application. This bibliometric analysis would enable practitioners and researchers gain a comprehensive understanding of the ontology and fuzzy IS concept that they can eventually adopt for development of intelligent IS in their work.

Semantic Web is envisioned as semantic description of data and services enabling unambiguous computerized interpretation. Thanks to semantic description, computers can perform demanding tasks such as automation of discovery and access to heterogeneous data sources. Although this is possible with the existing technologies, combination of web services technology, ontologies and generative programming methods makes this simpler and more efficient. This paper presents the model for dynamic generation of web services for data retrieval from heterogeneous data sources using ontologies. Emphasis is on dynamic generation of web services customized to a particular user based on the request defined by ontology. The paper also describes a prototype of the model implementation. Some advantages of our approach over other approaches are also provided.

Inter-Organizational Workflow (IOW) aims at supporting the collaboration between several autonomous and heterogeneous business processes, distributed over different enterprises or organizations. Coordination of these processes is a fundamental issue that has been mainly addressed in a static context, but it still remains open in a dynamic one such as the Internet in which IOW applications are more and more enacted nowadays. In such a context, Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are known to be a natural solution for modeling IOW since they provide adequate abstractions and specific mediators to cope with IOW coordination. Consequently, this paper provides an agent-based model for coordinating business processes involved in a dynamic IOW. This model is a triplet (E, M, R). E is the set of coordinated entities. It corresponds to the different business processes that may be published, discovered or deployed by IOW partners. M is the media supporting coordination. It is a multi-agent architecture compliant with the Workflow Management Coalition architecture and integrating specific components devoted to coordination issues. Finally, R is the set of rules governing the coordination. In our context, R is described through an organizational model aiming at structuring the interaction among the coordinated entities and the different components of the architecture.

The advance of the Web has significantly and rapidly changed the way of information organization, sharing and distribution. The next generation of the web, the semantic web, seeks to make information more usable by machines by introducing a more rigorous structure based on ontologies. In this context we try to propose a novel and integrated approach for a semi-automated extraction of ontology-based semantic web from data-intensive web application and thus, make the web content machine-understandable. Our approach is based on the idea that semantics can be extracted by applying a reverse engineering technique on the structures and the instances of HTML-forms which are the most convenient interface to communicate with relational databases on the current data-intensive web application. This semantics is exploited to produce over several steps, a personalised ontology.

In this paper the framework for business object modeling with focus on distributed enterprise is proposed. It is based on Business Object Architecture, UML and Catalysis method. Business Object Architecture is methodology bringing business semantics to component-based development – the next generation of object-oriented methodology. Basic modeling concepts are business objects, business processes and business rules. Process of business process modeling with Business Objects is described and generic modeling patterns are presented. The framework is illustrated via work effort process modeling.