Enterprise application reuse: Semantic discovery of business grid services

Web services have emerged as a prominent paradigm for the development of distributed software systems as they provide the potential for software to be modularized in a way that functionality can be described, discovered and deployed in a platform independent manner over a network (e.g., intranets, extranets and the Internet). This paper examines an extension of this paradigm to encompass ‘Grid Services’, which enables software capabilities to be recast with an operational focus and support a heterogeneous mix of business software and data, termed a Business Grid - "the grid of semantic services". The current industrial representation of services is predominantly syntactic however, lacking the fundamental semantic underpinnings required to fulfill the goals of any semantically-oriented Grid. Consequently, the use of semantic technology in support of business software heterogeneity is investigated as a likely tool to support a diverse and distributed software inventory and user. Service discovery architecture is therefore developed that is (a) distributed in form, (2) supports distributed service knowledge and (3) automatically extends service knowledge (as greater descriptive precision is inferred from the operating application system). This discovery engine is used to execute several real-word scenarios in order to develop and test a framework for engineering such grid service knowledge. The examples presented comprise software components taken from a group of Investment Banking systems. Resulting from the research is a framework for engineering servic

Nonlocality, Bell's Ansatz and Probability

Quantum Mechanics lacks an intuitive interpretation, which is the cause of a generally formalistic approach to its use. This in turn has led to a certain insensitivity to the actual meaning of many words used in its description and interpretation. Herein, we analyze carefully the possible mathematical meanings of those terms used in analysis of EPR's contention, that Quantum Mechanics is incomplete, as well as Bell's work descendant therefrom. As a result, many inconsistencies and errors in contemporary discussions of nonlocality, as well as in Bell's Ansatz with respect to the laws of probability, are identified. Evading these errors precludes serious conflicts between Quantum Mechanics and both Special Relativity and Philosophy.Comment: 8&1/2 pages revtex; v2: many corrections, clairifications & extentions, all small; v3: editorial scru

The Divine Action Project, 1988–2003

This article explores the state of the art in theories of special divine action by means of a study of the Divine Action Project (DAP) co-sponsored by the Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley. The basic aim is to introduce the DAP and to summarize its results, especially as these were compiled in the final “capstone” meeting of the DAP, and drawing on the published output of the project where possible. The subsidiary aim is to evaluate criticisms of theories of special divine action developed within the DAP.ye

The Generative Programs Framework

Recently there has been significant interest in using causal modelling techniques to understand the structure of physical theories. However, the notion of `causation' is limiting - insisting that a physical theory must involve causal structure already places significant constraints on the form that theory may take. Thus in this paper, we aim to set out a more general structural framework. We argue that any quantitative physical theory can be represented in the form of a generative program, i.e. a list of instructions showing how to generate the empirical data; the information-processing structure associated with this program can be represented by a directed acyclic graph (DAG). We suggest that these graphs can be interpreted as encoding relations of `ontological priority,' and that ontological priority is a suitable generalisation of causation which applies even to theories that don't have a natural causal structure. We discuss some applications of our framework to philosophical questions about realism, operationalism, free will, locality and fine-tuning.Comment: 42 pages, 15 figures, 19 pages of supplementary materia

How Can Brains in Vats Experience a Spatial World? A Puzzle for Internalists

In this chapter, Pautz raises a puzzle about spatial experience for phenomenal internalists like Ned Block. If an accidental, lifelong brain-in-the-void (BIV) should have all the same experiences as you, it would have an experience as of items having various shapes, and be able to acquire concepts of those shapes, despite being cut off from real things with the shapes. Internalists cannot explain this by saying that BIV is presented with Peacocke-style visual field regions having various shapes, because these would have to be non-physical sense data. They might instead explain this by saying that BIV “phenomenally represents” various shape properties. But since BIV lacks any interesting physical relations to shapes, this would imply that phenomenally representation is an irreducible relation

Conceptual spatial representations for indoor mobile robots

We present an approach for creating conceptual representations of human-made indoor environments using mobile robots. The concepts refer to spatial and functional properties of typical indoor environments. Following findings in cognitive psychology, our model is composed of layers representing maps at different levels of abstraction. The complete system is integrated in a mobile robot endowed with laser and vision sensors for place and object recognition. The system also incorporates a linguistic framework that actively supports the map acquisition process, and which is used for situated dialogue. Finally, we discuss the capabilities of the integrated system

Achieving interoperability through semantics-based technologies: the instant messaging case

The success of pervasive computing depends on the ability to compose a multitude of networked applications dynamically in order to achieve user goals. However, applications from different providers are not able to interoperate due to incompatible interaction protocols or disparate data models. Instant messaging is a representative example of the current situation, where various competing applications keep emerging. To enforce interoperability at runtime and in a non-intrusive manner, mediators are used to perform the necessary translations and coordination between the heterogeneous applications. Nevertheless, the design of mediators requires considerable knowledge about each application as well as a substantial development effort. In this paper we present an approach based on ontology reasoning and model checking in order to generate correct-by-construction mediators automatically. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach through a prototype tool and show that it synthesises mediators that achieve efficient interoperation of instant messaging applications