pdf 820Kb - INSEAD CALT

Evaluation report of the use of Onto-Logging
platform in the user site
Deliverable ID: D8b
Page : 32 of 110
Version: 1.0
Date: 27 january 2004
Status: Final
Confid.: Public
components include the Ontology editor, and the Ontology Knowledge Evaluator for its
diagnostics functions). The evaluation of technical tools represents a relatively well-known
territory, which consist in assessing several dimensions such as: the reliability of the system
and its scalability, the richness of the functionalities, the ergonomics, etc.
Usability view
A second element to be considered is related to the ability the ontology approach to
effectively model the concept of domain in a complete way, and to take into account
evolution. In order words, are the theories of knowledge representation rich and powerful
enough to represent the concepts that need to be represented? A subsidiary question is related
to the difficulty to effectively model these concepts: what level of competency is required
from an author to model and maintain an ontology (does he need to be a rocket scientist, or is
just common sense enough)? Answering these questions may consist in setting up some
experiment in modelling the semantic of a particular domain (for instance the tendering
process), and measuring the effort required to arrive the definition of an Ontology that satisfy
the modelling need of this domain.
A final question is related to the amount of effort that is required to create and then, to
maintain these ontologies. The experience of using ontologies will help to answer this
question and in particular the key question: will the ontologies stabilize rapidly enough to
shared ontologies that will require very minimum maintenance, or on the contrary, will we
the ontologies will have to enter into a process of constant evolution, in which the concepts of
the ontologies will have to be modified, and new concept will have to be introduced to take
into account the need of the organization.
Organizational view
The last element is organizational and relates to role and responsibility: which structure in the
organization will be responsible and entitled (has the resources) to author these ontologies?
How to guaranty that these ontologies will effectively be adopted by all the parts of the
organization? How should conflict on the definition of the semantic be managed? The
answer to these questions will have to be addressed as part of the deployment process (related
to the non technical dimensions of this deployment).
3.3.4.2 Goal 2: Ontologging for supporting knowledge capitalisation
The knowledge capitalization role of Ontologging originates relates from to the formalization
of the knowledge of the organization. It has to be reminded that this knowledge can include
both very concrete knowledge elements such as documents, but also less tangible elements
such as processes knowledge (present in cases, experiences shared in a bulletin board), an
expertise (via the explicit representation of people competency).
Technical view