NUI Galway – UL Alliance First Annual ENGINEERING AND - ARAN ...

E-Brainstorming in Support of Innovation Processes
Lorea Lorenzo, Alexandre Passant
Digital Enterprise Research Institute, NUIG, Galway
{lorea.lorenzo},{alexandre.passant}@deri.org
The aim of the project is to support Innovation
processes with Social and Semantic Web technologies.
To achieve this goal we discuss (i) the design of the
brainstorming ontology and (ii) the implementation of
semantics into real-time online text editors to perform
E-brainstorming tasks for network Innovation processes
based on Semantic Web technologies.
1. Motivations
Organisations are introducing Innovation aspects as
part of their business processes. Innovation is
understood as a consistent process where participants
contribute their ideas to improve products, services, etc.
New Innovation models are also understood as network
Innovation models where they take advantage of
applications and Web technologies.
A way to achieve Innovation is by fostering
participation and collaboration among users. The
proposed Innovation process [1] is based on 3 phases,
idea generation, idea analysis and idea rating.
This research focuses on the first phase, idea
generation, and brainstorming (BS) sessions are a good
practice for this purpose. However, these activities can
lead into difficulties when trying to gather and organise
all ideas, track them or obtain conclusions based on
participants and their contributions. We are aiming to
make this task easier by structuring BS sessions with
Semantic Web technologies.
Hence, we propose an approach of using electronic
brainstorming (E-Brainstorming) [2] sessions. To
perform this task we suggest using real-time text editors
based on Semantic Web technology. Our project offers
a real-time text editor based on brainstorm ontology to
represent the information in RDF (Resource Description
Language) and make it possible to query ideas and
contribute in different BS sessions with related ideas .
2. Modelling brainstorm ontology
Brainstorm ontology offers a vocabulary for the idea
generation domain and makes it possible for machines
to interpret the generated information within this
domain. The proposed ontology reuses existing social
ontologies such as FOAF 1 (Friend of a Friend), that
describes connections between people in social Web
1
http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/
2
http://sioc-project.org/ontology
3
http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-swbp-skos-core-guide-
20050510/
4
http://vocab.org/review/terms.html
5 http://www.holygoat.co.uk/projects/tags/
6 http://gobby.0x539.de/trac/
126
sites, SIOC 2 (Semantically-Interlinked Online
Communities) that deals with online communities’
information or SKOS 3 (Simple Knowledge
Organisation System), which expresses knowledge
organisation systems. In addition, we also import the
Review 4 and Tags 5 ontologies. Reusing ontologies is a
useful method to make it easier for systems to interact
with other applications.
Brainstorm ontology links people, ideas and reviews
done on these ones. On the one hand we combine
FOAF’s human’s social network information and
SIOC’s online communities’ information to obtain
participant’s social network information. On the other
hand we use SKOS to map BS as a SKOS Collection
and Ideas as SKOS concepts, which are described as
members of the collection. Review ontology expresses
reviews and ratings, and combing it with FOAF
information we obtain knowledge about participant’s
interests on Ideas. Moreover, tagging action is also
represented in the ontology by the Tag ontology that
connects the person, the tagged idea and the tag
definition.
3. Semantic Web real-time brainstorming
While BS sessions are team-based techniques carried
out with physical presence, E-brainstorming offers the
possibility to celebrate these sessions in a distributed
and parallel way without any production blocking.
Gobby 6 is a free collaborative text editor that runs in
multiple operative systems. A Gobby server centralises
all documents created in a same BS session and makes
it possible for participants to collaborate on them
simultaneously. Different colours are used to highlight
each person’s contributions.
These files are then translated into RDF annotations
obtaining structured information mapped by our
brainstorm ontology. Enabling data access services the
system will be able to query other BS and permit idea
exchange enforcing user’s initial ideas.
To conclude, this project aims to generate a
Semantic Web real-time text editor based on the
proposed brainstorm ontology to perform BS sessions.
It will offer an E-Brainstorm system for idea generation
phases within organisations’ Innovation processes.
8. References
[1] N. Errasti, I. Santos, and O. Lizarralde. Social Software in
Support of Collaborative Innovation Processes. Towards new
challenges for Innovative, June, 2010.
[2]Vlahakis, G., E-brainstorming?,
http://www.indiana.edu/~ocmhp/082004/text/technology.shtm
l, August, 2004.