A domain-specific visual approach to semantically describe shared datasets in business ecosystems

Abstract

This thesis explores using a domain-specific visual approach to facilitate creating and maintaining ontologies for data shared in digital business ecosystems. The research addresses the challenge of semantically describing data and improving the understanding and collaboration among stakeholders involved in data-sharing activities. The study includes a comprehensive literature review on data-sharing, ontologies, and related technologies. It highlights the importance of data-sharing in the industry and the benefits of ontologies in facilitating semantic integration. However, it also acknowledges the expertise required for ontology engineering and the limitations of existing standards and tools. A Design Science methodology is employed to prototype a domain-specific visual approach for ontology engineering and data-sharing. The prototype enables users to create, import, edit, and link ontologies tailored to their domain in a graphical environment. It also provides visual exploration capabilities for an enhanced understanding of the dataset.