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.

Ontology Driven Software Development (ODSD) combines traditional Model Based Software Development (MBSD) techniques with ontology technology in order to provide extensions to and advantages over MBSD. The goal of the paper is to identify current ODSD approaches and to provide qualitative and comparative analysis of the collection of identified approaches. Main research questions of the paper concern the ways of how ontologies are integrated to MBSD process and how their usage advances MBSD. Benefits and challenges of each of the discussed approaches are presented. The analysis is based on literature and projects reviews in the fields of ontology engineering, MBSD and ODSD. The result of the analysis provides understanding of what is the role of ontologies in ODSD and shows whether application of ontology technologies to the MBSD process gives rise to a new paradigm called consistency preserving software development or not.

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.

Business process engineering is an important part of the advanced enterprise engineering. One of the still open issues is the question how in the enterprise system design to reuse ontological knowledge about business processes. The paper proposes to consider a family of similar business processes as a generic process and to represent knowledge about generic processes in a domain independent way. It describes the main scheme for reuse of such a domain independent knowledge when developing enterprise-wide information systems (IS). The main attention is paid to the process configuration problem. In order to solve this problem, a configurator (human being or machine) must find a set of components that fit together to satisfy the problem specification. An approach based on Description Logics is proposed for this aim. The main contribution of the paper is the proposed process configuration technique.

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.