ISURF: RFID Enabled Collaborative Supply Chain Planning Environment

To be able to cope with the requirements of today’s competitive and demanding digital world of business, companies, especially SMEs, need to be more agile, and be ready to react to the changing requirements of the sector. This requires a better view and a more comprehensive analysis of the whole marketplace which can be achieved through a knowledge oriented collaborative supply chain planning initiative. The parties also need to be capable of monitoring the supply chain visibility in a real time fashion, which can be enabled through the use of RFID devices. RFID enabled collaborative supply chain planning has been achieved by big industry players in well defined restricted business circumstances through some selected standard message schemes. However, SMEs are still far behind in this process due to their small IT budgets. In iSURF Project we address this problem by providing a set of open source tools to enable seamless collection of supply chain visibility, synchronizing this with master data, exchanging supply chain visibility and other planning data with each other through a service oriented supply chain planning environment which also handles the interoperability of the messages exchanged

Semantic Web applications: a framework for industry and business exploitation – What is needed for the adoption of the Semantic Web from the market and industry

In recent years, Semantic Web (SW) research has resulted in significant outcomes. Various industries have adopted SW technologies, while the ‘deep web’ is still pursuing the critical transformation point, in which the majority of data found on the deep web will be exploited through SW value layers. In this article we analyse the SW applications from a ‘market’ perspective. We are setting the key requirements for real-world information systems that are SW-enabled and we discuss the major difficulties for the SW uptake that has been delayed. This article contributes to the literature of SW and knowledge management providing a context for discourse towards best practices on SW-based information systems

User Experience Modeling Method for a Vision of Knowledge Graph-based Process Automation

This research proposes a User Experience modelling method which is an early-stage component of a research project’s vision of innovating Robotic Process Automation with the help of Knowledge Graphs and Natural Language Processing. The core idea is to integrate, in RDF graphs, a representation of the user experience and contextual information about the organization and relevant data sources for that experience. Existing RPA tools use workflow repositories that employ XML-based descriptions for both processes and UI elements. They also provide built-in workflow designers that are not tailored for design-time analysis (e.g., model queries, reporting, reasoning) but instead are just raising the abstraction level of traditional scripting – from writing code to visually connecting pre-programmed pieces of functionality. The proposal detailed in this paper makes use of Domain-Specific Modeling Language engineering to repurpose an open source BPMN implementation for describing User Experience. We rely on a metamodeling platform to ensure that the resulting diagrams are also machine-readable and take advantage of an existing plug-in to make them available as RDF graphs that can be used by other components of an automation architecture. The paper focuses on the modelling method and tool as one of the early steps of the project’s vision

Recovery within long running transactions

As computer systems continue to grow in complexity, the possibilities of failure increase. At the same time, the increase in computer system pervasiveness in day-to-day activities brought along increased expectations on their reliability. This has led to the need for effective and automatic error recovery techniques to resolve failures. Transactions enable the handling of failure propagation over concurrent systems due to dependencies, restoring the system to the point before the failure occurred. However, in various settings, especially when interacting with the real world, reversal is not possible. The notion of compensations has been long advocated as a way of addressing this issue, through the specification of activities which can be executed to undo partial transactions. Still, there is no accepted standard theory; the literature offers a plethora of distinct formalisms and approaches. In this survey, we review the compensations from a theoretical point of view by: (i) giving a historic account of the evolution of compensating transactions; (ii) delineating and describing a number of design options involved; (iii) presenting a number of formalisms found in the literature, exposing similarities and differences; (iv) comparing formal notions of compensation correctness; (v) giving insights regarding the application of compensations in practice; and (vi) discussing current and future research trends in the area.peer-reviewe

Rapid neural processing of grammatical tone in second language learners

The present dissertation investigates how beginner learners process grammatical tone in a second language and whether their processing is influenced by phonological transfer. Paper I focuses on the acquisition of Swedish grammatical tone by beginner learners from a non-tonal language, German. Results show that non-tonal beginner learners do not process the grammatical regularities of the tones but rather treat them akin to piano tones. A rightwards-going spread of activity in response to pitch difference in Swedish tones possibly indicates a process of tone sensitisation. Papers II to IV investigate how artificial grammatical tone, taught in a word-picture association paradigm, is acquired by German and Swedish learners. The results of paper II show that interspersed mismatches between grammatical tone and picture referents evoke an N400 only for the Swedish learners. Both learner groups produce N400 responses to picture mismatches related to grammatically meaningful vowel changes. While mismatch detection quickly reaches high accuracy rates, tone mismatches are least accurately and most slowly detected in both learner groups. For processing of the grammatical L2 words outside of mismatch contexts, the results of paper III reveal early, preconscious and late, conscious processing in the Swedish learner group within 20 minutes of acquisition (word recognition component, ELAN, LAN, P600). German learners only produce late responses: a P600 within 20 minutes and a LAN after sleep consolidation. The surprisingly rapid emergence of early grammatical ERP components (ELAN, LAN) is attributed to less resource-heavy processing outside of violation contexts. Results of paper IV, finally, indicate that memory trace formation, as visible in the word recognition component at ~50 ms, is only possible at the highest level of formal and functional similarity, that is, for words with falling tone in Swedish participants. Together, the findings emphasise the importance of phonological transfer in the initial stages of second language acquisition and suggest that the earlier the processing, the more important the impact of phonological transfer

Proceedings of the 4th Workshop of the MPM4CPS COST Action

Proceedings of the 4th Workshop of the MPM4CPS COST Action with the presentations delivered during the workshop and papers with extended versions of some of them