Cooperative Building of Multiple Point-of-View Topic Maps with Hypertopic L’Hédi Zaher1, Jean-Pierre Cahier1, and Claude Guittard2 1
Tech-CICO / ICD, Université de Technologie de Troyes. 12 rue Marie Curie, 10010 Troyes cedex, France {zaher, cahier}@utt.fr 2 BETA, Université Louis Pasteur. 4 rue Blaise Pascal, 67070 Strasbourg cedex, France {
[email protected]}
Abstract. This paper presents a socio-semantic web-based application on Hypertopic knowledge representation models. Hypertopic [4] models are used to collaboratively construct topic maps with multiple viewpoints. expressing numerous user points-of-view within related communities. Three model building methods are presented herein: centralized, conflict-based, and hybrid. These methods are expressed using the socio-technical ‘SeeMe’ notation and method [7,8]. This paper will also illustrate how various co-building approaches can be used to construct Hypertopic maps in real communities. Keywords: Design methodology, Knowledge engineering, Socio-semantic Web.
1 Introduction Socio-semantic Web [3] applications make it possible for communities to co-produce and symbolically organize artifacts such as topic maps, tag clouds or shared indexes. A socio-semantic Web makes collective knowledge and activities more visible and more reflexived yet does not involve a high-level of automation due to the processing of formal ontologies by inferences. From the knowledge management point-of-view, the socio-semantic Web supports communities requiring a continuous and collective elicitation of information about the local semantic structures of business objects and their ongoing collective work. Projects of this nature involve the use of Web 2.0 collaborative applications requiring large-scale “architectures of participation” [10] such as the Open Directory Project, Del.icio.us, Flickr, or end-user cooperative classification and communication techniques based on shared metadata [9]. New approaches are needed for the co-building of large socio-semantic Web applications that employ focused and adaptable methods for each individual community. Furthermore, organizational rules must be affirmed depending on whether the semantic decision-making process is centralized or distributed, (i.e.
whether decision-making is a top-down, bottom-up, or hybrid process, whether a moderator or facilitator is involved, etc.) Since 2002, the Tech-CICO lab has promoted the standardization of the Hypertopic concepts and schema1 with several communities, such as ‘Argos’, ‘Agoræ’, ‘Porphyry’, ‘Cassandre’, using Tech-CICO Team developed2 Hypertopic-based groupware tools to co-build socio-semantic Web applications. In these instances, many pragmatic methods have been used to “bootstrap” Hypertopic maps including the multiple view point functionality. The study group proposes to focus on three of these co-building methods used in Hypertopic applications built with Agoræ: - a centralized co-construction method corresponding to a top-down approach with a semantic facilitator intervening at the bootstrap stage; - a conflict-based co-construction method with a facilitator to make the conflicts more explicit at the bootstrap stage in small groups; - a hybrid method associating top-down, centralized approaches with bottom-up decentralized approaches.
2 Socio-Semantic Activity Guidlines Community members require a set of socio-semantic activity guidelines which pertain to the launch and maintenance of topic map co-construction. These guidelines must articulate the specific models while combining three components: a knowledge representation language or ‘metasemiotic’ that community members can use to construct and discuss collective mappings. In order to provide a cartographic representation of items from multiple players’ points of view, the Hypertopic model is needed (cf. §3); an activity model must be articulated with and upon the knowledge representation model. In particular, a model of roles must be supported by groupware tools to allow for the map to be cooperatively co-built; and a method precisely defining player practices including how and when they interact with socio-semantic activities. The creation and the entire lifecycle of a socio-semantic Web cartography mobilizes players at both the socio-organizational and inter-personal levels. Methods of assisting these activities must, therefore consider a wide-range of socio-technical aspects. Thus, a special reference is made to recent studies on distributed collective practices and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) [1][9][12][15]. At the community level, the local semantic system is continuously and collectively constructed by the players as they perform their activities. In this autopoietic process, users are not only passive consumers of externally-designed semantic resources; they are users and creators of local semantic resources that they are able to manage by themselves using, for example, Web standards. Whenever it is necessary to explicitly define parts of the underlying semantic resources, the best, or in many cases, the only 1 2
See [18] and http://www.hypertopic.org See : http://sourceforge.net/projects/argos-viewpoint/ ; http://www.porphyry.org/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/cassandre-qda/ ; http://sourceforge.net/projects/agora
;
solution is therefore for semantic structures to be managed by the stakeholders involved in line with the ‘participatory design’ principle. This applies especially to situations where the underlying semantic resources which need to be elicited and updated are particularly voluminous, evolutionary, and even conflict-based.[1].
3 Hypertopic Hypertopic models [4,17,18] were designed to represent knowledge about a collection of items such as products (in the case of a virtual marketplace), R&D projects (catalogue), persons (map of skills), books (in a library), etc. Hypertopic provide the formal framework in which shared meaning is explicitly described by means of a topic map with multiple points-of-view . Given the need for re-usability, Hypertopic include several basic constructs which allow end-users to understand a map. The Point-of-View (PoV) is a descriptor which serves to contextualize an item to illustrate the relevant actors and/or the main aspects involved in its analysis.
Fig. 1. The Hypertopic Model: 1a) Semiotic View on the Item; 1b) UML notation
Hypertopic models can be considered as a particular template of Topic Maps [11][14] and are more constrained than the TMO standard [14]. Although partially inspired by the TMO standard for topics, associations, internal/external occurrences, and scope, the basic constructs of Hypertopic (Figure 1b) add methodological constraints, to be easily understood by the community of users and to give to many end-users the ability to edit maps without prior training. For example, as a PoV is a high-level element, users are restricted from creating a lower-levelled scope. The PoV, therefore, makes use of the user position or homogeneous Knowledge Management collective choices within the organization. To fix the usage by simplifying the knowledge representation makes it easier to deploy the socio-semantic activity. Note that Hypertopic Points-ofView can be either have multiple opinions with conflict-based plurality or multiple dimensions with analysis within a particular user’s PoV. This is generally for when more precise methods are needed (see §3) specifying which kind of PoV is involved in any given method and how & when users should build them.
3 Three Socio-Semantic ‘Bootstrap’ Methods We focus our methodological effort towards the more difficult “Bootstrap” phase of socio-semantic activity. This phase furnishes a set of points-of-view on a particular item. However, controversies can arise during the co-designing phase especially during the early ‘bootstrap’ stage. The challenge here would be to develop in parallel the shared community culture and the basic set of terms, standards and rules resulting from the often implicit knowledge of members. In the following diagrams, the “SeeMe” modelling method [7,8] is used to make the co-building methods more explicit with the sequencing of numbers showing the scheduling of actions. Table 1. Three applications with quantified data. Socio-semantic Web applications Reference paper [or more details : Map Points of view Topics Items Documentary resources Community Contributors Total users
YePOSS [2] 6 264 169 7 -
DKN [16] 3 761 75 75 3 12
CartoDD [3] 7 ~500 ~50 ~200 ~20 -
The centralized co-construction method (Figure 2) involves the intervention of a semantic facilitator during the bootstrap phase. This method is repeatedly tested in several cases using the Knowledge-Based MarketPlace co-construction model [1] for example the Yeposs (Yellow-pages for Open Source Software) experiment [2].
Fig. 2. Centralized Co-Building Method
The conflict-based co-construction method of Figure 3 below does not require a facilitator. In the DKN SeqXAM study case [16], groups attempting to share knowledge were liable to experience cognitive conflicts [13] due to the existence of various points-of-view, semantic heterogeneity, or interpretative disagreement (see demonstration at http://tech-web-n2.utt.fr/dkn/ ).
Fig. 3. Conflict-Based Co-Building Method
Finally, the hybrid method (Figure 4) blends a centralized design with a wiki-like, bottom-up approach containing tag-clouds coming from multiple users. This method is presently used for the co-building by stake-holders of a map in the field of sustainable development [3] (see demonstration at http://tech-web-n2.utt.fr/dd/) 1
5 4 3
2
3
3
3
4
4
5
3
Fig. 4. Hybrid Co-Building Method
6 Conclusion This paper introduces methods for the collaborative construction of socio-semantic Web applications based on Hypertopic. Future works entail the integration of more compete tools for co-operation inspired by the CSCW. Of further interest is the use of topic maps in open information retrieval [3] practices.
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