Automation and hypermedia technology applications

This paper represents a progress report on HyLite (Hypermedia Library technology): a research and development activity to produce a versatile system as part of NASA's technology thrusts in automation, information sciences, and communications. HyLite can be used as a system or tool to facilitate the creation and maintenance of large distributed electronic libraries. The contents of such a library may be software components, hardware parts or designs, scientific data sets or databases, configuration management information, etc. Proliferation of computer use has made the diversity and quantity of information too large for any single user to sort, process, and utilize effectively. In response to this information deluge, we have created HyLite to enable the user to process relevant information into a more efficient organization for presentation, retrieval, and readability. To accomplish this end, we have incorporated various AI techniques into the HyLite hypermedia engine to facilitate parameters and properties of the system. The proposed techniques include intelligent searching tools for the libraries, intelligent retrievals, and navigational assistance based on user histories. HyLite itself is based on an earlier project, the Encyclopedia of Software Components (ESC) which used hypermedia to facilitate and encourage software reuse

A Survey on Retrieval of Mathematical Knowledge

We present a short survey of the literature on indexing and retrieval of mathematical knowledge, with pointers to 72 papers and tentative taxonomies of both retrieval problems and recurring techniques.Comment: CICM 2015, 20 page

Integration of decision support systems to improve decision support performance

Decision support system (DSS) is a well-established research and development area. Traditional isolated, stand-alone DSS has been recently facing new challenges. In order to improve the performance of DSS to meet the challenges, research has been actively carried out to develop integrated decision support systems (IDSS). This paper reviews the current research efforts with regard to the development of IDSS. The focus of the paper is on the integration aspect for IDSS through multiple perspectives, and the technologies that support this integration. More than 100 papers and software systems are discussed. Current research efforts and the development status of IDSS are explained, compared and classified. In addition, future trends and challenges in integration are outlined. The paper concludes that by addressing integration, better support will be provided to decision makers, with the expectation of both better decisions and improved decision making processes

A Personalized System for Conversational Recommendations

Searching for and making decisions about information is becoming increasingly difficult as the amount of information and number of choices increases. Recommendation systems help users find items of interest of a particular type, such as movies or restaurants, but are still somewhat awkward to use. Our solution is to take advantage of the complementary strengths of personalized recommendation systems and dialogue systems, creating personalized aides. We present a system -- the Adaptive Place Advisor -- that treats item selection as an interactive, conversational process, with the program inquiring about item attributes and the user responding. Individual, long-term user preferences are unobtrusively obtained in the course of normal recommendation dialogues and used to direct future conversations with the same user. We present a novel user model that influences both item search and the questions asked during a conversation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in significantly reducing the time and number of interactions required to find a satisfactory item, as compared to a control group of users interacting with a non-adaptive version of the system

Quality of Service for Information Access

Information is available in many forms from different sources, in distributed locations; access to information is supported by networks of varying performance; the cost of accessing and transporting the information varies for both the source and the transport route. Users who vary in their preferences, background knowledge required to interpret the information and motivation for accessing it, gather information to perform many different tasks. This position paper outlines some of these variations in information provision and access, and explores the impact these variations have on the user’s task performance, and the possibilities they make available to adapt the user interface for the presentation of information

A Semantic-Based Information Management System to Support Innovative Product Design

International competition and the rapidly global economy, unified by improved communication and transportation, offer to the consumers an enormous choice of goods and services. The result is that companies now require quality, value, time to market and innovation to be successful in order to win the increasing competition. In the engineering sector this is traduced in need of optimization of the design process and in maximization of re-use of data and knowledge already existing in the company. The “SIMI-Pro” (Semantic Information Management system for Innovative Product design) system addresses specific deficiencies in the conceptual phase of product design when knowledge management, if applied, is often sectorial. Its main contribution is in allowing easy, fast and centralized collection of data from multiple sources and in supporting the retrieval and re-use of a wide range of data that will help stylists and engineers shortening the production cycle. SIMI-Pro will be one of the first prototypes to base its information management and its knowledge sharing system on process ontology and it will demonstrate how the use of centralized network systems, coupled with Semantic Web technologies, can improve inter-working activities and interdisciplinary knowledge sharing