Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web

Cautiously Optimistic Program Analyses for Secure and Reliable Software

Modern computer systems still have various security and reliability vulnerabilities. Well-known dynamic analyses solutions can mitigate them using runtime monitors that serve as lifeguards. But the additional work in enforcing these security and safety properties incurs exorbitant performance costs, and such tools are rarely used in practice. Our work addresses this problem by constructing a novel technique- Cautiously Optimistic Program Analysis (COPA). COPA is optimistic- it infers likely program invariants from dynamic observations, and assumes them in its static reasoning to precisely identify and elide wasteful runtime monitors. The resulting system is fast, but also ensures soundness by recovering to a conservatively optimized analysis when a likely invariant rarely fails at runtime. COPA is also cautious- by carefully restricting optimizations to only safe elisions, the recovery is greatly simplified. It avoids unbounded rollbacks upon recovery, thereby enabling analysis for live production software. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Cautiously Optimistic Program Analyses in three areas: Information-Flow Tracking (IFT) can help prevent security breaches and information leaks. But they are rarely used in practice due to their high performance overhead (>500% for web/email servers). COPA dramatically reduces this cost by eliding wasteful IFT monitors to make it practical (9% overhead, 4x speedup). Automatic Garbage Collection (GC) in managed languages (e.g. Java) simplifies programming tasks while ensuring memory safety. However, there is no correct GC for weakly-typed languages (e.g. C/C++), and manual memory management is prone to errors that have been exploited in high profile attacks. We develop the first sound GC for C/C++, and use COPA to optimize its performance (16% overhead). Sequential Consistency (SC) provides intuitive semantics to concurrent programs that simplifies reasoning for their correctness. However, ensuring SC behavior on commodity hardware remains expensive. We use COPA to ensure SC for Java at the language-level efficiently, and significantly reduce its cost (from 24% down to 5% on x86). COPA provides a way to realize strong software security, reliability and semantic guarantees at practical costs.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/170027/1/subarno_1.pd

Platform-level protection for interacting mobile apps

In a modern mobile platform, apps are mutually distrustful, but they share the same device and frequently interact with each other. This dissertation shows how existing platforms, like Android and iOS, often fail to support important data protection scenarios, and describes two systems to improve platform-level security. First, many data leaks in existing platforms are due to the lack of information flow control for inter-app data exchanges. For example, a document viewer that opens an attachment from an email client often further discloses the attachment to other apps or to the network. To prevent such leaks, we need strict information flow confinement, but a challenge to enforce such confinement in existing platforms is the potential disruptions to confined apps. We present Maxoid, a system that uses context-aware custom views of apps' storage state to make information flow enforcement backward compatible. Second, apps' abstraction of data has diverged from platforms' abstraction of data. Modern mobile apps heavily rely on structured data, and relational databases have become the hub for apps' internal data management. However, in existing platforms, protection mechanisms are coarse-grained and have no visibility to the structures of apps' data. In these platforms, access control is a mixture of coarse-grained mechanisms and many ad hoc user-level checks, making data protection unprincipled and error-prone. We present Earp, a new mobile platform that combines simple object-level permissions and capability relationships among objects to naturally protect structured data for mobile apps. It achieves a uniform abstraction for storing, sharing and efficiently protecting structured data, for both storage and inter-app services.Computer Science

Proceedings of the 2004 ONR Decision-Support Workshop Series: Interoperability

In August of 1998 the Collaborative Agent Design Research Center (CADRC) of the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly), approached Dr. Phillip Abraham of the Office of Naval Research (ONR) with the proposal for an annual workshop focusing on emerging concepts in decision-support systems for military applications. The proposal was considered timely by the ONR Logistics Program Office for at least two reasons. First, rapid advances in information systems technology over the past decade had produced distributed collaborative computer-assistance capabilities with profound potential for providing meaningful support to military decision makers. Indeed, some systems based on these new capabilities such as the Integrated Marine Multi-Agent Command and Control System (IMMACCS) and the Integrated Computerized Deployment System (ICODES) had already reached the field-testing and final product stages, respectively. Second, over the past two decades the US Navy and Marine Corps had been increasingly challenged by missions demanding the rapid deployment of forces into hostile or devastate dterritories with minimum or non-existent indigenous support capabilities. Under these conditions Marine Corps forces had to rely mostly, if not entirely, on sea-based support and sustainment operations. Particularly today, operational strategies such as Operational Maneuver From The Sea (OMFTS) and Sea To Objective Maneuver (STOM) are very much in need of intelligent, near real-time and adaptive decision-support tools to assist military commanders and their staff under conditions of rapid change and overwhelming data loads. In the light of these developments the Logistics Program Office of ONR considered it timely to provide an annual forum for the interchange of ideas, needs and concepts that would address the decision-support requirements and opportunities in combined Navy and Marine Corps sea-based warfare and humanitarian relief operations. The first ONR Workshop was held April 20-22, 1999 at the Embassy Suites Hotel in San Luis Obispo, California. It focused on advances in technology with particular emphasis on an emerging family of powerful computer-based tools, and concluded that the most able members of this family of tools appear to be computer-based agents that are capable of communicating within a virtual environment of the real world. From 2001 onward the venue of the Workshop moved from the West Coast to Washington, and in 2003 the sponsorship was taken over by ONR’s Littoral Combat/Power Projection (FNC) Program Office (Program Manager: Mr. Barry Blumenthal). Themes and keynote speakers of past Workshops have included: 1999: ‘Collaborative Decision Making Tools’ Vadm Jerry Tuttle (USN Ret.); LtGen Paul Van Riper (USMC Ret.);Radm Leland Kollmorgen (USN Ret.); and, Dr. Gary Klein (KleinAssociates) 2000: ‘The Human-Computer Partnership in Decision-Support’ Dr. Ronald DeMarco (Associate Technical Director, ONR); Radm CharlesMunns; Col Robert Schmidle; and, Col Ray Cole (USMC Ret.) 2001: ‘Continuing the Revolution in Military Affairs’ Mr. Andrew Marshall (Director, Office of Net Assessment, OSD); and,Radm Jay M. Cohen (Chief of Naval Research, ONR) 2002: ‘Transformation ... ’ Vadm Jerry Tuttle (USN Ret.); and, Steve Cooper (CIO, Office ofHomeland Security) 2003: ‘Developing the New Infostructure’ Richard P. Lee (Assistant Deputy Under Secretary, OSD); and, MichaelO’Neil (Boeing) 2004: ‘Interoperability’ MajGen Bradley M. Lott (USMC), Deputy Commanding General, Marine Corps Combat Development Command; Donald Diggs, Director, C2 Policy, OASD (NII

The Origin of Data: Enabling the Determination of Provenance in Multi-institutional Scientific Systems through the Documentation of Processes

The Oxford English Dictionary defines provenance as (i) the fact of coming from some particular source or quarter; origin, derivation. (ii) the history or pedigree of a work of art, manuscript, rare book, etc.; concr., a record of the ultimate derivation and passage of an item through its various owners. In art, knowing the provenance of an artwork lends weight and authority to it while providing a context for curators and the public to understand and appreciate the work’s value. Without such a documented history, the work may be misunderstood, unappreciated, or undervalued. In computer systems, knowing the provenance of digital objects would provide them with greater weight, authority, and context just as it does for works of art. Specifically, if the provenance of digital objects could be determined, then users could understand how documents were produced, how simulation results were generated, and why decisions were made. Provenance is of particular importance in science, where experimental results are reused, reproduced, and verified. However, science is increasingly being done through large-scale collaborations that span multiple institutions, which makes the problem of determining the provenance of scientific results significantly harder. Current approaches to this problem are not designed specifically for multi-institutional scientific systems and their evolution towards greater dynamic and peer-to-peer topologies. Therefore, this thesis advocates a new approach, namely, that through the autonomous creation, scalable recording, and principled organisation of documentation of systems’ processes, the determination of the provenance of results produced by complex multi-institutional scientific systems is enabled. The dissertation makes four contributions to the state of the art. First is the idea that provenance is a query performed over documentation of a system’s past process. Thus, the problem is one of how to collect and collate documentation from multiple distributed sources and organise it in a manner that enables the provenance of a digital object to be determined. Second is an open, generic, shared, principled data model for documentation of processes, which enables its collation so that it provides high-quality evidence that a system’s processes occurred. Once documentation has been created, it is recorded into specialised repositories called provenance stores using a formally specified protocol, which ensures documentation has high-quality characteristics. Furthermore, patterns and techniques are given to permit the distributed deployment of provenance stores. The protocol and patterns are the third contribution. The fourth contribution is a characterisation of the use of documentation of process to answer questions related to the provenance of digital objects and the impact recording has on application performance. Specifically, in the context of a bioinformatics case study, it is shown that six different provenance use cases are answered given an overhead of 13% on experiment run-time. Beyond the case study, the solution has been applied to other applications including fault tolerance in service-oriented systems, aerospace engineering, and organ transplant management

Knowledge, programming, and programming cultures: LISP, C, and Ada

The results of research 'Ada as an implementation language for knowledge based systems' are presented. The purpose of the research was to compare Ada to other programming languages. The report focuses on the programming languages Ada, C, and Lisp, the programming cultures that surround them, and the programming paradigms they support