KISF: An interactive ontology framework

Abstract

Nowadays information circulates quickly in a human organization, what generates an internal difficulty in preserving inside the organization essential information to support decision-making. Decision Support Systems (DSS) aiding organizational decision-making, had, up to now, rigid inferences machines restricted to the organization area. These factors do not totally satisfy an integrated strategic decision-making process within a holistic view, an imposition of the current Information Age. So, the need of developing a DSS with inference capacity to relate the knowledge spread in the organizational structure became clear. To attain such result, the DSS must be associated with other methodologies and/or technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence, like Computational Agents and Ontology. This article intends to present the “KISF” (Knowledge Integration & Sharing Framework), which is an interactive framework using ontology, based on autonomous agents, for the knowledge integration and sharing and support strategic decision-making. The “KISF” provides the ontology construction and evolution throughout the individual and group agent actions when it comes to happen on the phenomenon perception. The framework developed aimed to formally represent the operation of an organization through ontology, and also map the abilities and competences of its members by creating Users’ Profiles. After representing the organizational structure, a society of computational agents was established with the intent of performing computational reasoning within the information formalized by the organization, emphasizing Ontology, Profiles and Phenomena. Rules, priming on representing ways of extracting and formalizing knowledge in organizations, were elaborated. The attained results were shown to managers in the organization so as to undergo importance analysis. These were then incorporated to the Ontology of the organization, allowing its constant learning.Nowadays information circulates quickly in a human organization, what generates an internal difficulty in preserving inside the organization essential information to support decision-making. Decision Support Systems (DSS) aiding organizational decision-making, had, up to now, rigid inferences machines restricted to the organization area. These factors do not totally satisfy an integrated strategic decision-making process within a holistic view, an imposition of the current Information Age. So, the need of developing a DSS with inference capacity to relate the knowledge spread in the organizational structure became clear. To attain such result, the DSS must be associated with other methodologies and/or technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence, like Computational Agents and Ontology. This article intends to present the “KISF” (Knowledge Integration & Sharing Framework), which is an interactive framework using ontology, based on autonomous agents, for the knowledge integration and sharing and support strategic decision-making. The “KISF” provides the ontology construction and evolution throughout the individual and group agent actions when it comes to happen on the phenomenon perception. The framework developed aimed to formally represent the operation of an organization through ontology, and also map the abilities and competences of its members by creating Users’ Profiles. After representing the organizational structure, a society of computational agents was established with the intent of performing computational reasoning within the information formalized by the organization, emphasizing Ontology, Profiles and Phenomena. Rules, priming on representing ways of extracting and formalizing knowledge in organizations, were elaborated. The attained results were shown to managers in the organization so as to undergo importance analysis. These were then incorporated to the Ontology of the organization, allowing its constant learning.