WEBCON AN ONTOLOGY ENGINE BASED CONFERENCE ORGANISER

Abstract

The Internet and other open connectivity environments create a strong demand for the sharing of data semantics. Emerging ontologies are increasingly becoming essential for computer science applications. Organizations are looking towards them as vital machine-processable semantics for many application areas. Ontology in general, is an agreed understanding of a certain domain, axiomatized and represented formally as logical theory in a computer resource. By sharing ontology, autonomous and distributed applications can meaningfully communicate to exchange data and make transactions interoperate independently of their internal technologies. Conference management is a service that is offered by event management organizations to clients wishing to run large scale conferences. These services are often not cost effective and require an expert maintenance team. The next wave of improvement would be to leverage on the capabilities of World Wide Web and Web Semantics The main goal of this dissertation is to meet the above-mentioned possibilities by developing a conference management tool using ontology functionality. Ontology provides diverse capabilities in terms of functionalities and flexibility. Defining detailed conference specifications via ontology allows easy, seamless access and passing of information. This dissertation proposes the concept of synergizing ontology and conference management in order to elevate conference management to another level. iv Firstly, an in-depth investigation is done on ontologies to discover all the challenges, strengths and weaknesses. Past inventions using ontologies are researched to identify the flexibility, reusability and compatibility with current technology and requirements. Based on in-depth research and findings, the right programming language and ontology concept is selected that will ensure robustness in the functionality of the system. Secondly, data collected from the Web is identified using the metadata elements and mapped against the ontology schema. Once mapped, the elements are then stored in the database for future use. Finally, the system is deployed and tested to confirm that requirements are met. An evaluation is done to gauge the user’s acceptance towards the system. The results obtained from the evaluation will reinforce whether the initial system requirements were met and how far the system needs improvement in the future. This dissertation is aimed to contribute especially in the implementation of the next generation Web technologies, Dublin Core ontology and Resource Description Framework, in developing conference management tools. WebCon successfully shows the benefit of developing a Web application based on DC and RDF plus how data representation is expressed in a machine understandable form.