Domain-specific Vocabulary Research Articles

What active users and designers contribute in the design process

With the hope of creating usable systems, we declare repeatedly that users should be involved in the design and development of computer systems, without questioning the reasons and motives behind this declaration. What, in fact, can users contribute to design and how can we best include their contributions in the development process in order to produce usable computer systems? This paper presents a study of the hands-on work of one group of designers and one group of user representatives (in this case marine captains) on a given design task. The groups met on separate occasions. The aim of the study was to present a qualitative analysis of the potential contributions to design by user representatives compared with interaction designers. The results are discussed in terms of methods and techniques that sanction the use of a particular domain-specific vocabulary, giving advantages to those who have a good command of that vocabulary. In addition, the study discusses how users' narratives may reveal qualitative domain knowledge that could function as the glue that keeps users and designers together in the design process.

Enhancing the semantic interoperability of multimedia through a core ontology

A core ontology is one of the key building blocks necessary to enable the scalable assimilation of information from diverse multimedia sources. A complete and extensible ontology that expresses the basic concepts that are common across a variety of domains and media types and that can provide the basis for specialization into domain-specific concepts and vocabularies, is essential for well-defined mappings between domain-specific knowledge representations (i.e., metadata vocabularies) and the subsequent building of a variety of services such as cross-domain searching, tracking, browsing, data mining and knowledge acquisition. As more and more communities develop metadata application profiles which combine terms from multiple vocabularies (e.g., Dublin Core, MPEG-7, MPEG-21, CIDOC/CRM, FGDC, IMS), a core ontology will provide a common understanding of the basic entities and relationships, which is essential for semantic interoperability and the development of additional services based on deductive inferencing. In this paper, we first propose such a core ontology (the ABC model) which was developed in response to a need to integrate information from multiple genres of multimedia content within digital libraries and archives. Although the MPEG-21 RDD was influenced by the ABC model and is based on a model extremely similar to ABC, we believe that it is important to define a separate and domain-independent top-level extensible ontology for scenarios in which either MPEG-21 is irrelevant or to enable the attachment of ontologies from communities external to MPEG, for example, the museum domain (CIDOC/CRM) or the biomedical domain (ON9.3). We evaluate the ABC model's ability to mediate and integrate between multimedia metadata vocabularies by illustrating how it can provide the foundation to facilitate semantic interoperability between MPEG-7, MPEG-21 and other domain-specific metadata vocabularies. By expressing the semantics of both MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 metadata terms in RDF Schema/DAML+OIL [and eventually the Web Ontology Language (OWL)] and attaching the MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 class and property hierarchies to the appropriate top-level classes and properties of the ABC model, we have defined a single distributed machine-understandable ontology. The resulting ontology provides semantic knowledge which is nonexistent within declarative XML schemas or XML-encoded metadata descriptions. Finally, in order to illustrate how such an ontology will contribute to the interoperability of data and services across the entire multimedia content delivery chain, we describe a number of valuable services which have been developed or could potentially be developed using the resulting merged ontologies.

An embedded modeling language approach to interactive 3D and multimedia animation

While interactive multimedia animation is a very compelling medium, few people are able to express themselves in it. There are too many low-level details that have to do not with the desired content-e.g., shapes, appearance and behavior-but rather how to get a computer to present the content. For instance, behavior such as motion and growth are generally gradual, continuous phenomena. Moreover, many such behaviors go on simultaneously. Computers, on the other hand, cannot directly accommodate either of these basic properties, because they do their work in discrete steps rather than continuously, and they only do one thing at a time. Graphics programmers have to spend much of their effort bridging the gap between what an animation is and how to present it on a computer. We propose that this situation can be improved by a change of language, and present Fran, synthesized by complementing an existing declarative host language, Haskell, with an embedded domain-specific vocabulary for modeled animation. As demonstrated in a collection of examples, the resulting animation descriptions are not only relatively easy to write, but also highly composable.

Kinderliteratuur als Knooppunt

The results of the pilot study reported on in this article indicate that the combination of children's books supplementary to the biology lessons does not diminish reading-achieve-ment test scores, and that there seems to be an advantage in domain-specific word knowledge. For 14 weeks, the time normally spent on unsustained silent reading in class was filled in by reading on particular subjects that were being discussed in biology lessons. The basic research assumption was that reading various texts on the same subject would not only positively affect the children's knowledge about this subject but would also improve their reading skills and their attitudes towards reading. The experimental group scored significandy better than their peer group on a domain-specific vocabulary test. This indicates that the books were used as stepping stones for building mental knowledge structures. Tests with respect to the other variables such as reading skills yielded no significant differences between the groups. However, post-hoc analysis showed an advantage for pupils from the lower social groups. Their attitude towards reading impro-ved considerably, in which respect they differed significandy from their peers. The results seem to confirm the ideas expressed in the international literature about content area reading and in aspects of schema theory. By reading the books in combination with the biology lessons, certain schemata could be activated which enable the pupils better to understand the new information and store it firmly in their memory. The redundancy of important words appearing in various contexts is a determinant of word knowledge.

Sharing and communicating health care information: summary and recommendations

Sharing and communicating information is a fundamental task in modern medicine. The health care system of the western world is based on teamwork of professionals who participate in the care of patients. Exchange of information (not just data) requires the communicating parties to agree on a communication channel, an exchange protocol, and a common language. The language includes an alphabet, words, phrases, and symbols that express and assign meaning, understood by all. The most common forms of communication are the spoken word and the paper-based patient record. Computers and communication systems improve the sharing of health care information by overcoming the limitations imposed by the dimensions of time and location. However, natural language is still too complex and too ambiguous for current computing devices to handle the complex interactions between health care professional and patients. A simpler ‘language’ is needed that uses domain specific vocabularies (and/or codes), well-defined exchange protocols for data, information, knowledge, and, in the future, perhaps even wisdom. This simpler ‘language’ is expected to handle most of the routine information exchange but not eliminate natural language. It is essential that health care information systems preserve and incorporate natural language expressions and integrate them with structured vocabularies. Today, agreeing on standard data exchange protocols and domain specific vocabularies and codes is our greatest challenge. However, standards alone are not sufficient. Acceptance of the standards by the health care professionals, verifications in clinical environments, and implementation agreements by the medical informatics industry are essential. The group on ‘Sharing and Communication of Health Care Information’ addressed the issues raised above and unanimously recommends a number of steps that will improve the sharing of information. In addition, specific recommendations are offered to governments, health care institutions, and to developers of health care information systems.

SHADE: Technology for Knowledge-based Collaborative Engineering

Effective information sharing and decision coordination are vital to collaborative product development and integrated manufacturing. However, typical special-purpose CAE systems tend to isolate information at tool boundaries, and typical integrated CAE systems tend to limit flexibility and process innovation. The SHADE (SHAred Dependency Engineering) project strikes a balance between these undesirable extremes by supporting reconfigurable exchange of engineering knowledge among special-purpose CAE systems. SHADE's approach has three main components: a shared knowledge representation (language and domain-specific vocabulary), protocols supporting information exchange for change notification and subscription, and facilitation services for content-directed routing and intelligent matching of information consumers and producers.

The advice taker/inquirer, a system for high-level acquisition of expert knowledge

The Advice Taker/Inquirer (AT/I) is a domain-independent program that is used to construct, monitor, and improve an expert system. In the knowledge acquisition phase, an expert teaches a strategy to the AT/I by providing it with declarative and procedural knowledge, expressed in the expert's domain-specific vocabulary. The expert can modify any advice given to the system earlier, and any advice dependent on the altered advice is reviewed automatically for syntactic and semantic soundness. This article discusses knowledge acquisition and methods for ensuring the integrity of the knowledge base in an expert system.