CoAKTinG: Collaborative Advanced Knowledge Technologies in the Grid

Grid infrastructures coupled with semantic web linkage and reasoning open up intriguing new possibilities for scientific collaboration. In this short paper, we outline the research agenda and collaboration technologies under development within the CoAKTinG project: Collaborative Advanced Knowledge Technologies in the Grid. CoAKTinG will provide tools to assist scientific collaboration by integrating intelligent meeting spaces, ontologically annotated media streams from online meetings, decision rationale and group memory capture, meeting facilitation, issue handling, planning and coordination support, constraint satisfaction, and instant messaging/presence. Their integration is illustrated through an extended use scenario

Collaboration in the Semantic Grid: a Basis for e-Learning

The CoAKTinG project aims to advance the state of the art in collaborative mediated spaces for the Semantic Grid. This paper presents an overview of the hypertext and knowledge based tools which have been deployed to augment existing collaborative environments, and the ontology which is used to exchange structure, promote enhanced process tracking, and aid navigation of resources before, after, and while a collaboration occurs. While the primary focus of the project has been supporting e-Science, this paper also explores the similarities and application of CoAKTinG technologies as part of a human-centred design approach to e-Learning

Application of JXTA-overlay platform for secure robot control

In this paper, we present the evaluation and experimental results of secured robot control in a P2P system. The control system is based on JXTA-Overlay platform. We used secure primitives and functions of JXTA-Overlay for the secure control of the robot motors. We investigated the time of robot control for some scenarios with different number of peers connected in JXTA-Overlay network. All experiments are realised in a LAN environment. The experimental results show that with the join of other peers in the network, the average time of robot control is increased, but the difference between the secure and unsecure robot control average time is nearly the samePeer ReviewedPostprint (published version

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

LaCOLLA: A Middleware to Support Self-sufficient Collaborative Groups

In a decentralised and distributed environment, collaboration requiring the sharing and building of applications is a complex task. For this reason, we propose LaCOLLA, a fully decentralised peer-to-peer middleware that aims to simplify the process of incorporating collaborative functionalities into any application. It provides applications with certain essential collaborative functionalities: dissemination of information, storage, presence and transparency of location, management of members and groups, and execution of tasks. A distinguishing feature of LaCOLLA is that participants provide resources for the benefit of the group. This enables collaboration activities to take place in a collective environment using only the resources provided by participants in the collaboration (self-sufficiency). In this paper we present and evaluate the architecture of LaCOLLA, its API, and key aspects of its implementation

A conversation centric approach to understanding and supporting the coordination of social group-activities

Despite the widespread and large variety of communication tools available to us such as, text messaging, Skype, email, twitter, Facebook, instant messaging, GroupMe, WhatsApp, Snapchat, etc., many people still routinely find coordinating activities with our friends to be a very frustrating experience. Everyone, has at least once, encountered the difficulties involved with deciding what to do as a group. Some friends may be busy, others may have already seen the movie that the others want to see, and some do not like Mexican food. It is a challenge everyone has faced and continue to face. This is a result of system designers and researchers primarily focusing on understanding and supporting workplace coordination. This workplace bias has led to an assumption that the same technologies employed to facilitate workplace coordination can easily transfer to social coordination. This has created a divergence between how people actually communicate and coordinate for social reasons versus how the systems and technologies developed to support such coordination and communication are designed. As a result, researchers and designers are faced with dearth of knowledge about how to design and research systems that support people engaging in coordination and communication for more social reasons. This dissertation moves beyond previous work, both academic and commercial, which has either focused on providing structured and process oriented communication and coordination support or on the creation of yet another text chat. This research focuses on a narrower aspect of social communication and coordination, specifically, the problem of social group-activity coordination. Generally, this is the stuff people do to coordinate going out to dinner or the movies with a group of friends. This area has been under researched and as personal experience informs, poorly supported. This dissertation contains four main contributions. First, a diary study of 37 young adults aged 18 to 28 investigated the current social group-activity coordination practices resulting in an expansion of the knowledge about how social groups coordinate social group-activities and what technologies people use and why. Second, via iterative design and testing following a research through design methodology the design space for social group-activity coordination is explored over multiple design iterations. This results in the design and instantiation of a social group-activity coordination support tool improving understanding of the design requirements of tools that support social group-activity coordination. Third, a quantitative survey which confirmed many of the findings discovered during the dairy study. Fourth, the tool is evaluated in a laboratory study with 84 participants during 21 sessions. This study finds that using the conversation centric design perspective presented in this dissertation it is possible to reduce information overload and support consensus building. Also, the features provided are overwhelmingly desired with 91.4% of the participants desiring the ability and interface to make suggestions about important activity details (vs open chat) and two-thirds of the participants reporting they would prefer to use this tool over text messaging. The combination of all these different investigations into social group-activity coordination extends the knowledge about how to improve the support of social group-activity coordination and move beyond the process and systems oriented perspectives and towards conversation centric designs