From XML to XML: The why and how of making the biodiversity literature accessible to researchers

We present the ABLE document collection, which consists of a set of annotated volumes of the Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History). These follow our work on automating the markup of scanned copies of the biodiversity literature, for the purpose of supporting working taxonomists. We consider an enhanced TEI XML markup language, which is used as an intermediate stage in translating from the initial XML obtained from Optical Character Recognition to the target taXMLit. The intermediate representation allows additional information from external sources such as a taxonomic thesaurus to be incorporated before the final translation into taXMLit

Reusing adaptation strategies in adaptive educational hypermedia systems

Due to the difficulty and thus effort and expenses involved in creating them, personalization strategies in learning environments have to demonstrate a higher return-on-investment (ROI), if they are to be a viable component of the learning setting of the future. One feature that can increase this ROI is the reusability of adaptation strategies in Adaptive Educational Hypermedia Systems. This research looks into various ways of enhancing this reusability. Using multiple modular adaptation strategies (MAS) with a controlling meta-strategy is proposed as a more efficient way of authoring adaptation strategies. This renders the reuse of adaptation strategies faster and easier for course authors. A method for semi-automatically breaking down complex adaptation strategies into smaller modular adaptation strategies is described. Potential problems with using multiple strategies are described and ways to solve them are discussed. Finally, some evaluation points are illustrated, conclusions are drawn and further research areas are identified

Semantically Annotating RESTful Services with SWEET

This paper presents SWEET: Semantic Web sErvices Editing Tool, the first tool developed for the semi-automatic acquisition of semantic RESTful service descriptions, aiming to support a higher level of automation of common RESTful service tasks, such as discovery and composition

Supporting the semi-automatic acquisition of semantic RESTful service descriptions

This paper presents SWEET: Semantic Web sErvices Editing Tool, the first tool developed for the semi-automatic acquisition of semantic RESTful service descriptions, aiming to support a higher level of automation of common RESTful service tasks, such as discovery and composition

Using background knowledge for ontology evolution

One of the current bottlenecks for automating ontology evolution is resolving the right links between newly arising information and the existing knowledge in the ontology. Most of existing approaches mainly rely on the user when it comes to capturing and representing new knowledge. Our ontology evolution framework intends to reduce or even eliminate user input through the use of background knowledge. In this paper, we show how various sources of background knowledge could be exploited for relation discovery. We perform a relation discovery experiment focusing on the use of WordNet and Semantic Web ontologies as sources of background knowledge. We back our experiment with a thorough analysis that highlights various issues on how to improve and validate relation discovery in the future, which will directly improve the task of automatically performing ontology changes during evolution

Hi, how can I help you?: Automating enterprise IT support help desks

Question answering is one of the primary challenges of natural language understanding. In realizing such a system, providing complex long answers to questions is a challenging task as opposed to factoid answering as the former needs context disambiguation. The different methods explored in the literature can be broadly classified into three categories namely: 1) classification based, 2) knowledge graph based and 3) retrieval based. Individually, none of them address the need of an enterprise wide assistance system for an IT support and maintenance domain. In this domain the variance of answers is large ranging from factoid to structured operating procedures; the knowledge is present across heterogeneous data sources like application specific documentation, ticket management systems and any single technique for a general purpose assistance is unable to scale for such a landscape. To address this, we have built a cognitive platform with capabilities adopted for this domain. Further, we have built a general purpose question answering system leveraging the platform that can be instantiated for multiple products, technologies in the support domain. The system uses a novel hybrid answering model that orchestrates across a deep learning classifier, a knowledge graph based context disambiguation module and a sophisticated bag-of-words search system. This orchestration performs context switching for a provided question and also does a smooth hand-off of the question to a human expert if none of the automated techniques can provide a confident answer. This system has been deployed across 675 internal enterprise IT support and maintenance projects.Comment: To appear in IAAI 201

Towards a Semantic-based Approach for Modeling Regulatory Documents in Building Industry

Regulations in the Building Industry are becoming increasingly complex and involve more than one technical area. They cover products, components and project implementation. They also play an important role to ensure the quality of a building, and to minimize its environmental impact. In this paper, we are particularly interested in the modeling of the regulatory constraints derived from the Technical Guides issued by CSTB and used to validate Technical Assessments. We first describe our approach for modeling regulatory constraints in the SBVR language, and formalizing them in the SPARQL language. Second, we describe how we model the processes of compliance checking described in the CSTB Technical Guides. Third, we show how we implement these processes to assist industrials in drafting Technical Documents in order to acquire a Technical Assessment; a compliance report is automatically generated to explain the compliance or noncompliance of this Technical Documents

A service oriented approach for guidelines-based clinical decision support using BPMN

Evidence-based medical practice requires that clinical guidelines need to be documented in such a way that they represent a clinical workflow in its most accessible form. In order to optimize clinical processes to improve clinical outcomes, we propose a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based approach for implementing clinical guidelines that can be accessed from an Electronic Health Record (EHR) application with a Web Services enabled communication mechanism with the Enterprise Service Bus. We have used Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) for modelling and presenting the clinical pathway in the form of a workflow. The aim of this study is to produce spontaneous alerts in the healthcare workflow in the diagnosis of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). The use of BPMN as a tool to automate clinical guidelines has not been previously employed for providing Clinical Decision Support (CDS)

Towards an ontology-based platform-independent framework for developing KBE systems in the aerospace industry

Aerospace engineering is considered to be one of the most complex and advanced branches of engineering. The use of knowledge based engineering (KBE) technologies has played a major role in automating routine design activities in view of supporting the cost-effective and timely development of a product. However, technologies employed within KBE systems are usually platform-specific. The nature of these platform-specific models has significantly limited knowledge abstraction and reusability in KBE systems. This research paper presents a novel approach that illustrates the use of platform-independent knowledge models for the development of KBE systems in the aerospace industry. The use of semantic technologies through the definition of generic-purposed ontologies has been employed to support the notion of independent knowledge models that strengthens knowledge reusability in KBE systems. This approach has been validated qualitatively through experts’ opinion and its benefit realised in the abstraction, reusability and maintainability of KBE systems