One of the key factors that hinders integration of distributed, heterogeneous information systems is the lack of a formal basis for modeling the complex, structured knowledge that is to be exchanged. To alleviate this situation, we present an approach based on core ontologies. Core ontologies are characterized by a high degree of axiomatization and formal precision. This is achieved by basing on a foundational ontology. In addition, core ontologies should follow a pattern-oriented design approach. By this, they are modular and extensible. Core ontologies allow for reusing the structured knowledge they define as well as integrating existing domainrnknowledge. The structured knowledge of the core ontologies is clearly separated from the domain-specific knowledge. Such core ontologies allow for both formally conceptualize their particular fields and to be flexibly combined to cover the needsrnof concrete, complex application domains. Over the last years, we have developed three independent core ontologies for events and objects, multimedia annotations, and personal information management. In this paper, we present the simultaneousrnuse and integration of our core ontologies at the example of a complex, distributed socio-technical system of emergency response. We describe our design approach for core ontologies and discuss the lessons learned in designing them. Finally, we elaborate on the beauty aspects of our core ontologies.

Modeling and publishing Linked Open Data (LOD) involves the choice of which vocabulary to use. This choice is far from trivial and poses a challenge to a Linked Data engineer. It covers the search for appropriate vocabulary terms, making decisions regarding the number of vocabularies to consider in the design process, as well as the way of selecting and combining vocabularies. Until today, there is no study that investigates the different strategies of reusing vocabularies for LOD modeling and publishing. In this paper, we present the results of a survey with 79 participants that examines the most preferred vocabulary reuse strategies of LOD modeling. Participants of our survey are LOD publishers and practitioners. Their task was to assess different vocabulary reuse strategies and explain their ranking decision. We found significant differences between the modeling strategies that range from reusing popular vocabularies, minimizing the number of vocabularies, and staying within one domain vocabulary. A very interesting insight is that the popularity in the meaning of how frequent a vocabulary is used in a data source is more important than how often individual classes and properties arernused in the LOD cloud. Overall, the results of this survey help in understanding the strategies how data engineers reuse vocabularies, and theyrnmay also be used to develop future vocabulary engineering tools.

The lack of a formal event model hinders interoperability in distributed event-based systems. Consequently, we present in this paper a formal model of events, called F. The model bases on an upper-level ontology and pro-vides comprehensive support for all aspects of events such as time and space, objects and persons involved, as well as the structural aspects, namely mereological, causal, and correlational relationships. The event model provides a flexible means for event composition, modeling of event causality and correlation, and allows for representing different interpretations of the same event. The foundational event model F is developed in a pattern-oriented approach, modularized in different ontologies, and can be easily extended by domain specifific ontologies.

Expert-driven business process management is an established means for improving efficiency of organizational knowledge work. Implicit procedural knowledge in the organization is made explicit by defining processes. This approach is not applicable to individual knowledge work due to its high complexity and variability. However, without explicitly described processes there is no analysis and efficient communication of best practices of individual knowledge work within the organization. In addition, the activities of the individual knowledge work cannot be synchronized with the activities in the organizational knowledge work.rnrnSolution to this problem is the semantic integration of individual knowledgernwork and organizational knowledge work by means of the patternbased core ontology strukt. The ontology allows for defining and managing the dynamic tasks of individual knowledge work in a formal way and to synchronize them with organizational business processes. Using the strukt ontology, we have implemented a prototype application for knowledge workers and have evaluated it at the use case of an architectural fifirm conducting construction projects.

The Multimedia Metadata Ontology (M3O) provides a generic modeling framework for representing multimedia metadata. It has been designed based on an analysis of existing metadata standards and metadata formats. The M3O abstracts from the existing metadata standards and formats and provides generic modeling solutions for annotations, decompositions, and provenance of metadata. Being a generic modeling framework, the M3O aims at integrating the existing metadata standards and metadata formats rather than replacing them. This is in particular useful as today's multimedia applications often need to combine and use more than one existing metadata standard or metadata format at the same time. However, applying and specializing the abstract and powerful M3O modeling framework in concrete application domains and integrating it with existing metadata formats and metadata standards is not always straightforward. Thus, we have developed a step-by-step alignment method that describes how to integrate existing multimedia metadata standards and metadata formats with the M3O in order to use them in a concrete application. We demonstrate our alignment method by integrating seven different existing metadata standards and metadata formats with the M3O and describe the experiences made during the integration process.