AKT Research Map:The AKT Research Map describes research activities that have been carried out within the AKT project and the progress and relevant information about these activities.

AKT Research Map fact-file

What's the Problem?

• The web is very good in advertising the result of research work, such as publications and white papers, however, it is very poor in publishing the in-depth knowledge about how such research results were produced. This information, however, is valuable for other researchers who have similar interests and would like to learn more about them and/or conduct similar steps.
• Today's research work is often resulted from collaborative efforts of multiple researchers, tools and projects. It will therefore be interesting to have a higher level view of how the different researchers, tools and projects are collaborated and inter-related. For instance, how a certain tool has been used to provide support to one another, what kind of research activities may lead to certain results, who has been involved in what activities and is therefore capable of conducting what activities. Such information can not be easily nor reliably derived from the Web.

Towards a Solution

To address the above gap for the need and provide more reliable information, an AKT Research Map has been developed [4]. It is an informal modelling method that is based on a specialisation of Entity Relational Data Modelling method [10]. AKTors (members of AKT project) have been interviewed during knowledge acquisition sessions to develop their own individual AKT maps. Those individual maps are inter-related with each other that they share common nodes and have links related to each others through nodes on maps. The AKT map is consists of all of the individual maps.

The development process of the AKT map is principally conducted and based on an adaptation of IBM's Business Modelling methodology [9]. The developed AKT research map and the ontology that it uses has been automatically tested and corrected using KBST-EM's verification facilities [2][8]. The two knowledge models have also been crossed verified. The below section gives more information about the map itself.

An Introduction to The AKT Research Map (v2.0)

The AKT Research Map describes research activities that have been carried out within the AKT
project and the progress and relevant information about these activities. The AKT project comprises five universities: The University of Aberdeen, The University of Edinburgh, The Open University, the University of Sheffield and the University of Southampton.

The building of the AKT map is an on-going effort. It was initially carried out by a modeller who plays the role of a facilitator with the help of members of AKT who act as domain experts to supply relevant research information for their activities. It is the plan that every AKT member will take ownership of their own individual maps and can update the map as they wish with or without the help of a modeller.

An introduction to the notations that has been used to construct AKT research map is given in the "Introducing Notations of the AKT Research Map". An UML class diagram depicts the class hierarchy of the notation, "UML Class Diagram for Notations for AKT Research Map."

The AKT Research Map is composed of many individual maps. An individual map normally describes one researcher's activity, but it may describe one or more researcher's activities when appropriate. Individual maps are connected through nodes and relationships between the nodes in them. Those individual maps when viewed together tells the story of AKT activities and constituents of the AKT project.

The AKT Research Map is in respect to the AKT Reference Ontology. Concepts that are relevant to the AKT Map are included in the Ontology for the map, e.g. the Research Area and Publication sub-trees and other relevant concepts such as data types, relations and temporal concepts.  The AKT Reference Ontology includes two parts:

• The AKT Support Ontology
• The AKTive Portal Ontology

The ontology that is included is up to date. It includes The AKT Support Ontology v1.0 and The AKTive Portal Ontology v2.0.  The AKT Reference Ontology has also been extended by AKT members when it is needed to describe their research in more accurate terms. They often appear as new research areas as specialised sub-research areas.

Appreciation and thanks go to many of the AKT research fellows and professors who are very kind to offer their time and support to help build the AKT Research Map. Their names are appeared on the title of each of the individual map and therefore not listed here.

Take a Guided Tour

• KBST-EM and AKT Research Map (Zipped Quick Time Movie, 7 minutes, 24 Mbytes) [8]
• The Entire AKT Research Map on-line: http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~jessicac/project/akt-map-html/top-level.html.

Example Applications

• Knowledge Elicitation/Acquisition
• Knowledge Representation
• Knowledge Refinement and Inconsistency Checking 
• Visualisation of Knowledge
• Derivation of Inferred Knowledge

Further Reading

Key documents:

• [1] Yun-Heh Chen-Burger. Formal Support for an Informal Business Modelling Method. Ph.D. Thesis, The University of Edinburgh, 2000.
• [2] Yun-Heh Chen-Burger. Knowledge Sharing and Inconsistency Checking on Multiple Enterprise Models. The 17th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI, Knowledge Management and Organizational Memories Workshop and its proceedings at Seattle, Washington, August 2001.
• [3] Yun-Heh Chen-Burger. Knowledge Based Multi-Perspective Framework For Enterprise Modelling. Informatics Report Series, University of Edinburgh, EDI-INF-RR-0036, Feb. 2001.
• [4] Yun-Heh Chen-Burger, The AKT Research Map: http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~jessicac/project/akt-map-html/top-level.html.
• [5] Yun-Heh Chen-Burger. Sharing and Checking Organisation Knowledge. Chapter of book: Knowledge Management and Organizational Memories. Editors: Rose Dieng-Kuntz, Nada Matta. Publisher: Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston Hard bound, ISBN 0-7923-7659-5, July 2002.
• [6] Yun-Heh Chen-Burger, Dave Robertson, Jussi Stader. A Case-Based Reasoning Framework for Enterprise Model Building, Sharing and Reusing. European Conference of Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Management and Organizational Memories Workshop, Berlin, ECAI 2000 and is published on the web and in its proceedings.
• [7] Yun-Heh Chen-Burger, Dave Robertson, Jussi Stader (AIAI). Formal Support for an Informal Business Modeling Method. The International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, IJSEKE February, 2000. World Scientific Publishing Company.
• [8] Yun-Heh Chen-Burger, Multi-Perspective Modelling and Workflow AKT Technology Profile, February 2003.
• [9] IBM, Business System Development Method: Business Mapping, Part I and Part II, May 1992. IBM, UK.
• [10] Bernhard Thalheim, Entity-Relationship Modeling - Foundations of Database Technology, Springer Verlag, May 2000.

Semantic representation

View in the AKT Triplestore Browser or as RDF.

Also available in DOAP RDF (Description Of A Project)