Reason Maintenance - Conceptual Framework

This paper describes the conceptual framework for reason maintenance developed as part of WP2

SHAVING BIM: ESTABLISHING A FRAMEWORK FOR FUTURE BIM RESEARCH IN NEW ZEALAND

This paper reviews and analyses issues relating to the uptake of BIM in the NZ construction industry. There have been few BIM applications in NZ; in particular, in post-construction phases like facilities management, there is none. The paper found that the three reasons why BIM has not been widely accepted and used in New Zealand are: the slow uptake by NZ construction companies; a lack of Kiwi-focused BIM initiatives (led by the government and industry bodies); and a lack of BIM-based building life cycle considerations. Therefore, the paper concludes that there is an urgent need for a joint research programme in NZ to develop a Kiwi-oriented knowledge base on BIM. Given the fact that all major research organisations currently have development plans in their pipelines, coupled with potential developments of the Christchurch Cit after the quake, it seems an ideal time to take a BIM-based research initiative in the country. This joint BIM- focused research programme should concentrate on construction management processes, including procurement management, contract management, information management, as well as post-construction aspects such as facility management

CacophonyViz: Visualisation of Birdsong Derived Ecological Health Indicators

The purpose of this work was to create an easy to interpret visualisation of a simple index that represents the quantity and quality of bird life in New Zealand. The index was calculated from an algorithm that assigned various weights to each species of bird. This work is important as it forms a part of the ongoing work by the Cacophony Project which aims to eradicate pests that currently destroy New Zealand native birds and their habitat. The map will be used to promote the Cacophony project to a wide public audience and encourage their participation by giving relevant feedback on the effects of intervention such as planting and trapping in their communities. The Design Science methodology guided this work through the creation of a series of prototypes that through their evaluation built on lessons learnt at each stage resulting in a final artifact that successfully displayed the index at various locations across a map of New Zealand. It is concluded that the artifact is ready and suitable for deployment once the availability of real data from the automatic analysis of audio recordings from multiple locations becomes available

Ontologies and Information Extraction

This report argues that, even in the simplest cases, IE is an ontology-driven process. It is not a mere text filtering method based on simple pattern matching and keywords, because the extracted pieces of texts are interpreted with respect to a predefined partial domain model. This report shows that depending on the nature and the depth of the interpretation to be done for extracting the information, more or less knowledge must be involved. This report is mainly illustrated in biology, a domain in which there are critical needs for content-based exploration of the scientific literature and which becomes a major application domain for IE

CacophonyViz : Visualisation of birdsong derived ecological health indicators

The purpose of this work was to create an easy to interpret visualisation of a simple index that represents the quantity and quality of bird life in New Zealand. The index was calculated from an algorithm that assigned various weights to each species of bird. This work is important as it forms a part of the ongoing work by the Cacophony Project which aims to eradicate pests that currently destroy New Zealand native birds and their habitat. The map will be used to promote the Cacophony project to a wide public audience and encourage their participation by giving relevant feedback on the effects of intervention such as planting and trapping in their communities. The Design Science methodology guided this work through the creation of a series of prototypes that through their evaluation built on lessons learnt at each stage resulting in a final artifact that successfully displayed the index at various locations across a map of New Zealand. It is concluded that the artifact is ready and suitable for deployment once the availability of real data from the automatic analysis of audio recordings from multiple locations becomes available

The network effects of core values on management controls

Paper presented at American Accounting Association Management Accounting Section Conference 2013, New Orleans, 10-12 Jan 2013Simons’ (1995b, 2000) levers of control have become one of the most prominently utilised management control system frameworks in the accounting literature. In this paper we focus on core values, which guide and motivate an organisation, an area of the framework not examined in the accounting literature. Specifically we examine the process through which a new core value develops. We also show how this process is influenced by and acts upon the other levers of control. We highlight how this process initially involves few actors, little complexity and creates a descriptive definition for the core value. Based on this descriptive definition more actors become involved, resulting in more complexity and focuses on these actors trying to develop an understanding of the practical relevance of the new core value. The process of developing the core value and the search for practical relevance necessitates the creation and transformation of other management controls. These management controls in turn change the core value and other actors within the process. The process of search and discovery provides belief control through embedding elements of the core value in the management controls that were created or transformed. While the core value may be displaced its effects on other controls remain in place thus showing how and why controls embody both technical and social elements

Constructive Reasoning for Semantic Wikis

One of the main design goals of social software, such as wikis, is to support and facilitate interaction and collaboration. This dissertation explores challenges that arise from extending social software with advanced facilities such as reasoning and semantic annotations and presents tools in form of a conceptual model, structured tags, a rule language, and a set of novel forward chaining and reason maintenance methods for processing such rules that help to overcome the challenges. Wikis and semantic wikis were usually developed in an ad-hoc manner, without much thought about the underlying concepts. A conceptual model suitable for a semantic wiki that takes advanced features such as annotations and reasoning into account is proposed. Moreover, so called structured tags are proposed as a semi-formal knowledge representation step between informal and formal annotations. The focus of rule languages for the Semantic Web has been predominantly on expert users and on the interplay of rule languages and ontologies. KWRL, the KiWi Rule Language, is proposed as a rule language for a semantic wiki that is easily understandable for users as it is aware of the conceptual model of a wiki and as it is inconsistency-tolerant, and that can be efficiently evaluated as it builds upon Datalog concepts. The requirement for fast response times of interactive software translates in our work to bottom-up evaluation (materialization) of rules (views) ahead of time – that is when rules or data change, not when they are queried. Materialized views have to be updated when data or rules change. While incremental view maintenance was intensively studied in the past and literature on the subject is abundant, the existing methods have surprisingly many disadvantages – they do not provide all information desirable for explanation of derived information, they require evaluation of possibly substantially larger Datalog programs with negation, they recompute the whole extension of a predicate even if only a small part of it is affected by a change, they require adaptation for handling general rule changes. A particular contribution of this dissertation consists in a set of forward chaining and reason maintenance methods with a simple declarative description that are efficient and derive and maintain information necessary for reason maintenance and explanation. The reasoning methods and most of the reason maintenance methods are described in terms of a set of extended immediate consequence operators the properties of which are proven in the classical logical programming framework. In contrast to existing methods, the reason maintenance methods in this dissertation work by evaluating the original Datalog program – they do not introduce negation if it is not present in the input program – and only the affected part of a predicate’s extension is recomputed. Moreover, our methods directly handle changes in both data and rules; a rule change does not need to be handled as a special case. A framework of support graphs, a data structure inspired by justification graphs of classical reason maintenance, is proposed. Support graphs enable a unified description and a formal comparison of the various reasoning and reason maintenance methods and define a notion of a derivation such that the number of derivations of an atom is always finite even in the recursive Datalog case. A practical approach to implementing reasoning, reason maintenance, and explanation in the KiWi semantic platform is also investigated. It is shown how an implementation may benefit from using a graph database instead of or along with a relational database