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COE is a project whose goal is to develop an integrated suite of software tools for constructing, sharing and viewing OWL encoded ontologies based on CmapTools, a concept mapping software used in educational settings, training, and knowledge capturing. The tool renders any OWL ontologies into a graphical representation similar to concept maps using a set of formatting conventions and heuristics. Applying these conventions and heuristics result in a more restricted version of concept maps both in terms of the structure as well as the labels on the links and concepts in the map. The 'ontology maps' faithfully capture the precision of the OWL syntax to guarantee successful import and export of formal knowledge representation while retaining an intuitive reading of formally defined concepts.

Besides support for export and import of formal knowledge representation, the software supports the reuse of existing ontologies by offering search tools that assist in finding related concepts.

Integrated Intelligent Support for Knowledge Capture, Refinement, and Sharing

This project aims to design and implement methods to support domain experts in their effort to construct, navigate, share, and criticize knowledge models. The new methods combine interactive tools for concept mapping, developed at the Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC), and case-based reasoning, an approach that utilizes and adapts solutions of previous problems to solve new problems. In the combined approach, concept maps are used to capture, refine, share, and criticize knowledge models, while the case-based reasoning techniques take existing knowledge models into consideration to propose information relevant to an ongoing knowledge modeling task. This project is led by David Leake at Indiana University and Alberto Cañas at IHMC. My effort in this project is to investigate and develop indexing methods that allow fast retrieval of concept maps relevant to a given map in progress. In collaboration with my colleague, Ana Maguitman, we have developed a prototype that works with the CmapTools software. The research for this project is currently funded by NASA.

Digital Preservation

The constant evolution of software and hardware systems threatens today's digital content from becoming unavailable in the future. We addresses this urgent problem by developing a suit of software tools to automatically identify software requirements for accessing today's Microsoft Office documents. As a proof of concept, the software tools have been used to establish the requirements of 100,000 PowerPoint presentations selected from the Web to build a software system based on virtual machine technology that supports access of the presentations in the future.

Knowledge Construction & Sharing in Quorum

Project Quorum was a joint partnership between the University of West Florida and IBM Latin America to build infrastructure that would enable participating schools throughout Latin America to collaborate. As part of this infrastructure, a computer network was implemented utilizing IBM's proprietary network, software tools and curriculum material were developed to support schools in collaborative work, and teacher-training workshops were provided. My goal was to develop a software agent that would collaborate with the students in the classroom on a topic of study. The agent, called the Giant, uses simple inference techniques to reason about a subject and to present conclusions to the students. The agent was facilitated with a 'personality' suitable for capturing the students' attention. It was anticipated that by interacting with the agent, students would reflect on their own knowledge and the shared knowledge in the classroom.  The project was funded by IBM Latin America and led by Alberto Cañas from IHMC.