Ontological modelling of content management and provision

Abstract

Information provision to address the changing requirements can be best supported by content management. The current information technology enables information to be stored and provided from various distributed sources. To identify and retrieve relevant information requires effective mechanisms for information discovery and assembly. This paper presents a method, which enables the design of such mechanisms, with a set of techniques for articulating and profiling users’ requirements, formulating information provision specifications, realising management of information content in repositories, and facilitating response to the user’s requirements dynamically during the process of knowledge construction. These functions are represented in an ontology which integrates the capability of the mechanisms. The ontological modelling in this paper has adopted semiotics principles with embedded norms to ensure coherent course of actions represented in these mechanisms.

Introduction

The knowledge economy implies a need for continued learning by the whole society. This leads to a required support to a diverse community of information consumers while they acquire knowledge and skills for improving their qualifications and enhancing their productivity in the work place. According to a constructivist paradigm, learning is seen as a process of knowledge construction [24]. In a knowledge construction process there are different requirements on provision of content as information consumers have their specific purposes, goals, and expectations. It is often noticed that pedagogical requirements may serve the common interests of many users. This is described as a one-to-many approach which has been traditionally adopted to create and deliver information content to many users regardless of their specific needs [38]. Such approaches have been critically examined as they do not incorporate personalised capability, though knowledge construction is an information-intensive process where individuals employ their social experience, culture background, and cognition in information processing [10], [25].

Modelling individual users requirements are essential for effective information provision during knowledge construction [39]. Such modelling is required to produce a holistic and integrated representation of information content organisation and provision which ensures individual users satisfaction. Subsequently it imposes challenges to the existing methods, because they normally provide the techniques which focus on specific modelling aspects, e.g. process, functions, data, and infrastructure [1], [3], [6], [7], [14], [35]. The requirements specifications generated by these techniques are sometime fragmented and difficult to be integrated into a coherent whole. Therefore, our research has developed a new method which enables the complex information provision services to be represented in a holistic ontology. In this model, a number of techniques are employed to perform a series of analysis: (1) articulating user’s requirements and capturing the user’s requirements in a user profile; (2) mapping the user’s profile onto information content requirements and formulating these requirements as dimensions in an information space; (3) configuring the dimensions of the information space in to information provision specifications; and (4) organising information objects in a repository for the information provision specifications to aid the discovery and retrieval of suitable content. The method has built constraints through a norm construct which controls systemically the analysis process and the documentation of results in an integrated manner.

A semiotics-based ontology modelling provides an innovative approach and technique to construct an ontology, which explicitly represents semantics by modelling the concepts, social relationships, and temporal aspects as well as normative constraints in social experiences [2], [30], [37], [44]. Understanding is contextualised by means of stakeholders, roles, and responsibilities in a domain and a formal representation of the ontology is produced for knowledge sharing and reasoning. This approach has critically been examined as it should incorporate personalised capability, because knowledge construction is an information-intensive process where individuals employ their social and culture background in relation to cognition in information processing [25], [44].

The remainder of the paper is organised as follow: Section 2 describes the characteristics of information provision to support effective knowledge construction and examines specific means for representing users cognitive styles in processing information. To model personalised capability in users requirements, existing conceptualisation approaches including ontology are discussed in Section 3, where a critical review on these approaches lead to a new method for modelling personalised information provision. Section 4 details a development of the method and techniques which facilitate the requirements analysis process and formulate the requirements specifications for tailoring learning objects. A validation of the method is summarised in Section 5 which also draws conclusions and recommendations for further work.