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IAF Calls & Action Lines
An ontology for planning applications
(Peter Demeester, KaHo Sint-Lieven)
Problems arise when people with different backgrounds want to communicate with each other: they use their own specialized jargon or they use words in the wrong context. The same problem arises when two software systems want to co-operate with each other: they lack a common consensus about the domain they want to co-operate on.
The way to solve this is to introduce a kind of shared understanding - this is more or less what the word ontology in the title means. The above-described problem also exists with planning applications. Two planning systems can generate more or less the same results although they can use different concepts. When we want to merge these two applications, problems arise since the developers of each system can use different concepts, or, if they use the same concept, it can mean something completely different.
The goal of this project idea is to construct first an ontology for planning applications and to develop a method to filter those elements out of a set of data that have a meaning in the ontology. Areas of application are for example: timetabling, scheduling, rostering, shop floor control, planning of television programs, and so on,. The mapping we want to make from the set of data to the ontology should enable bi-directional communication. Someone who uses a program that is not really based on an ontology, should be able to continue using that program in the same way he is used to, even if the program is merged with another application. When the ontology is built, software agents which have an ontology of the domain can be used to search the set of possibly unstructured data. This ontology can then be used to map the set of unstructured data.
See also the abstract "Non-holistic agents" (Patrick De Causmaecker).
- Presentation slides
- e-mail: Peter.Demeester@kahosl.be
- URL: http://www2.kahosl.be/~ocapi/coala