Innovation Ontology

Ontology has been long used to model the nature of being and their relations. The rise of ontology building with standardized language and semantic web platform made it possible to build scalable ontologies, and conduct further analysis and inference. This study proposed and designed ontologies to model IT innovations and represent their relations with industry and academia. To understand the formulation of innovation and how it gets popular, this study also proposed to study the evolution of IT ontologies. We made two main contributions here: first, we designed the ontology to model IT innovation and main factors that influence its popularity. Second, we view ontologies as a model that evolve dynamically when new factors joining in and proposed the study of ontology evolution. Our proposed model is illustrated as below and our prototype ontology platform can be seen here.

Figure 5. Main Entities and Relationships of the Innovation Ontology

Figure 6. Example Ontology

In order to support the trend analysis on Innovations, we introduced the time dimension into the ontology. All the relationships in the ontology have time stamps that indicate the period in which the relationship is valid. For instance, an adoption of a product has a start time and an end time. Figure 7 shows the evolution of two innovation concepts along the temporal dimension. The two concepts are connected through related innovation products, people, organizations, etc, in various events.

Relevant Publication:

• Zhang, P., Qu, Y., and Huang, C., 2011, Designing an Multilayered Ontology for the Science and Technology Innovation Concept Knowledge-Base, full paper in the Proceedings of the 44th Hawai’i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), Kauai, HI, January 2011.