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

Structured Review of the Evidence for Effects of Code Duplication on Software Quality

This report presents the detailed steps and results of a structured review of code clone literature. The aim of the review is to investigate the evidence for the claim that code duplication has a negative effect on code changeability. This report contains only the details of the review for which there is not enough place to include them in the companion paper published at a conference (Hordijk, Ponisio et al. 2009 - Harmfulness of Code Duplication - A Structured Review of the Evidence)

AUTOMATED PLANNING OF PROCESS MODELS: THE CONSTRUCTION OF SIMPLE MERGES

Business processes evolve dynamically with changing business demands. Because of these fast changes, traditional process improvement techniques have to be adapted and extended since they often require a high degree of manual work. To reduce this degree of manual work, the automated planning of process models is proposed. In this context, we present a novel approach for an automated construction of the control flow structure simple merge (XOR join). This accounts for a necessary step towards an auto-mated planning of entire process models. Here we build upon a planning domain, which gives us a general and formal basis to apply our approach independently from a specific process modeling lan-guage. To analyze the feasibility of our method, we mathematically evaluate the approach in terms of key properties like termination and completeness. Moreover, we implement the approach in a process planning software and apply it to several real-world processes

Äriprotsessimudelite ühildamine

Väitekirja elektrooniline versioon ei sisalda publikatsioone.Ettevõtted, kellel on aastatepikkune kogemus äriprotsesside haldamises, omavad sageli protsesside repositooriumeid, mis võivad endas sisaldada sadu või isegi tuhandeid äriprotsessimudeleid. Need mudelid pärinevad erinevatest allikatest ja need on loonud ning neid on muutnud erinevad osapooled, kellel on erinevad modelleerimise oskused ning praktikad. üheks sagedaseks praktikaks on uute mudelite loomine, kasutades olemasolevaid mudeleid, kopeerides neist fragmente ning neid seejärel muutes. See omakorda loob olukorra, kus protsessimudelite repositoorium sisaldab mudeleid, milles on identseid mudeli fragmente, mis viitavad samale alamprotsessile. Kui sellised fragmendid jätta konsolideerimata, siis võib see põhjustada repositooriumis ebakõlasid -- üks ja sama alamprotsess võib olla erinevates protsessides erinevalt kirjeldatud. Sageli on ettevõtetel mudelid, millel on sarnased eesmärgid, kuid mis on mõeldud erinevate klientide, toodete, äriüksuste või geograafiliste regioonide jaoks. Näiteks on äriprotsessid kodukindlustuse ja autokindlustuse jaoks sama ärilise eesmärgiga. Loomulikult sisaldavad nende protsesside mudelid mitmeid identseid alamfragmente (nagu näiteks poliisi andmete kontrollimine), samas on need protsessid mitmes punktis erinevad. Nende protsesside eraldi haldamine on ebaefektiivne ning tekitab liiasusi. Doktoritöös otsisime vastust küsimusele: kuidas identifitseerida protsessimudelite repositooriumis korduvaid mudelite fragmente, ning üldisemalt -- kuidas leida ning konsolideerida sarnasusi suurtes äriprotsessimudelite repositooriumites? Doktoritöös on sisse toodud kaks üksteist täiendavat meetodit äriprotsessimudelite konsolideerimiseks, täpsemalt protsessimudelite ühildamine üheks mudeliks ning mudelifragmentide ekstraktimine. Esimene neist võtab sisendiks kaks või enam protsessimudelit ning konstrueerib neist ühe konsolideeritud protsessimudeli, mis sisaldab kõikide sisendmudelite käitumist. Selline lähenemine võimaldab analüütikutel hallata korraga tervet perekonda sarnaseid mudeleid ning neid muuta sünkroniseeritud viisil. Teine lähenemine, alamprotsesside ekstraktimine, sisaldab endas sagedasti esinevate fragmentide identifitseerimist (protsessimudelites kloonide leidmist) ning nende kapseldamist alamprotsessideks

A Survey of Symbolic Execution Techniques

Many security and software testing applications require checking whether certain properties of a program hold for any possible usage scenario. For instance, a tool for identifying software vulnerabilities may need to rule out the existence of any backdoor to bypass a program's authentication. One approach would be to test the program using different, possibly random inputs. As the backdoor may only be hit for very specific program workloads, automated exploration of the space of possible inputs is of the essence. Symbolic execution provides an elegant solution to the problem, by systematically exploring many possible execution paths at the same time without necessarily requiring concrete inputs. Rather than taking on fully specified input values, the technique abstractly represents them as symbols, resorting to constraint solvers to construct actual instances that would cause property violations. Symbolic execution has been incubated in dozens of tools developed over the last four decades, leading to major practical breakthroughs in a number of prominent software reliability applications. The goal of this survey is to provide an overview of the main ideas, challenges, and solutions developed in the area, distilling them for a broad audience. The present survey has been accepted for publication at ACM Computing Surveys. If you are considering citing this survey, we would appreciate if you could use the following BibTeX entry: http://goo.gl/Hf5FvcComment: This is the authors pre-print copy. If you are considering citing this survey, we would appreciate if you could use the following BibTeX entry: http://goo.gl/Hf5Fv

StoryDroid: Automated Generation of Storyboard for Android Apps

Mobile apps are now ubiquitous. Before developing a new app, the development team usually endeavors painstaking efforts to review many existing apps with similar purposes. The review process is crucial in the sense that it reduces market risks and provides inspiration for app development. However, manual exploration of hundreds of existing apps by different roles (e.g., product manager, UI/UX designer, developer) in a development team can be ineffective. For example, it is difficult to completely explore all the functionalities of the app in a short period of time. Inspired by the conception of storyboard in movie production, we propose a system, StoryDroid, to automatically generate the storyboard for Android apps, and assist different roles to review apps efficiently. Specifically, StoryDroid extracts the activity transition graph and leverages static analysis techniques to render UI pages to visualize the storyboard with the rendered pages. The mapping relations between UI pages and the corresponding implementation code (e.g., layout code, activity code, and method hierarchy) are also provided to users. Our comprehensive experiments unveil that StoryDroid is effective and indeed useful to assist app development. The outputs of StoryDroid enable several potential applications, such as the recommendation of UI design and layout code