Tech Reports

Tech Report kmi-09-04 Abstract

Modelling Scholarly Debate: Conceptual Foundations for Knowledge Domain Analysis Technology
Techreport ID: kmi-09-04
Date: 2009
Author(s): Neil Benn

Knowledge Domain Analysis (KDA) research investigates computational support for users who desire to understand and/or participate in the scholarly inquiry of a given academic knowledge domain. KDA technology supports this task by allowing users to identify important features of the knowledge domain such as the predominant research topics, the experts in the domain, and the most influential researchers. This thesis develops the conceptual foundations to integrate two identifiable strands of KDA research: Library and Information Science (LIS), which commits to a citation-based Bibliometrics paradigm, and Knowledge Engineering (KE), which adopts an ontology-based Conceptual Modelling paradigm. A key limitation of work to date is its inability to provide machine-readable models of the debate in academic knowledge domains. This thesis argues that KDA tools should support users in understanding the features of scholarly debate as a prerequisite for engaging with their chosen domain. To this end, the thesis proposes a Scholarly Debate Ontology which specifies the formal vocabulary for constructing representations of debate in academic knowledge domains. The thesis also proposes an analytical approach that is used to automatically detect clusters of viewpoints as particularly important features of scholarly debate. This approach combines aspects of both the Conceptual Modelling and Bibliometrics paradigms. That is, the method combines an ontological focus on semantics and a graph-theoretical focus on structure in order to identify and reveal new insights about viewpoint-clusters in a given knowledge domain. This combined ontological and graph-theoretical approach is demonstrated and evaluated by modelling and analysing debates in two domains. The thesis reflects on the strengths and limitations of this approach, and considers the directions which this work opens up for future research into KDA technology.

Publication(s):

Benn, N. (2009). Modelling Scholarly Debate: Conceptual Foundations for Knowledge Domain Analysis Technology. Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University. PhD Thesis.

Future Internet

Knowledge
Management Multimedia &
Information Systems Narrative
Hypermedia New Media Systems Semantic Web &
Knowledge Services

Future Internet is...

With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection