The project has reached several results:
1) In the first phase of the project, the knowledge management analysis and diagnosis has empowered a reflection on content management and knowledge exploitation opportunities in the company.
2) In the second phase, the work done on the definition of the new UNiCS architecture has some relevant added values not just on the design of the developed system but also throughout the rest of the platform. Amongst other, the new architecture permits:
- Systematize the integration of new datasets.
- Bring a way to manage the grown of the ontology.
- Facilitate the maintenance of the knowledge base.
- Make the knowledge model more consistent and understandable.
- Ease the interoperability with other systems.
It’s important to stress that the UNiCS ontology is an open source solution. Therefore, the new features developed will also boost a better use of the tool outside the company. In addition and beyond setting a robust architecture for UNiCS, the work done in this phase provides a set of correspondences that permit to map concepts between well-known domain standards for data representation. This work has two main impacts: 1) To improve the UNiCS capacity to integrate and to interoperate with more datasets. 2) The correspondences are a valuable result by themselves (independently of the implementation of an OBDA platform) as these provide to the HER&I community a tool to translate information between different representation schemes and contexts.
3) In a third phase the work has been focused on the development of the CONSTRAINS ontology. It is a novel UNiCS module that stores and manages from general recommendations and good practises to specific initiatives and policies on higher education, research and innovation. The tool offers a systematic way to retrieve valuable insights about key aspects that influence the adoption of a strategy. For instances, users can ask question such as “What are the recommended instruments that a Research-intensive university can use to get Prestige?” or “What are the key indicators of performance affected by a given set of instruments?.
CONSTRAINS was also designed to provide a valuable solution beyond the considered use cases on Higher Education and Research. In fact, the conceptualisation has been developed on the basis of a flexible scheme, thus supporting different kinds of decision-making approaches and applications.
In addition, and beside the software functionalities, the modelling process of CONSTRAINS has configured a mean to reflect on the organisation of the knowledge and to systematise the methodology around strategy consultancy. The developed approach on modelling and formalising domain knowledge can configures a business product itself whose market is being explored by the company.
