28 research outputs found
Governance of Autonomous Agents on the Web: Challenges and Opportunities
International audienceThe study of autonomous agents has a long tradition in the Multiagent System and the Semantic Web communities, with applications ranging from automating business processes to personal assistants. More recently, the Web of Things (WoT), which is an extension of the Internet of Things (IoT) with metadata expressed in Web standards, and its community provide further motivation for pushing the autonomous agents research agenda forward. Although representing and reasoning about norms, policies and preferences is crucial to ensuring that autonomous agents act in a manner that satisfies stakeholder requirements, normative concepts, policies and preferences have yet to be considered as first-class abstractions in Web-based multiagent systems. Towards this end, this paper motivates the need for alignment and joint research across the Multiagent Systems, Semantic Web, and WoT communities, introduces a conceptual framework for governance of autonomous agents on the Web, and identifies several research challenges and opportunities
Peer-to-peer, multi-agent interaction adapted to a web architecture
The Internet and Web have brought in a new era of information sharing and opened
up countless opportunities for people to rethink and redefine communication. With
the development of network-related technologies, a Client/Server architecture has become
dominant in the application layer of the Internet. Nowadays network nodes
are behind firewalls and Network Address Translations, and the centralised design of
the Client/Server architecture limits communication between users on the client side.
Achieving the conflicting goals of data privacy and data openness is difficult and in
many cases the difficulty is compounded by the differing solutions adopted by different
organisations and companies. Building a more decentralised or distributed environment
for people to freely share their knowledge has become a pressing challenge
and we need to understand how to adapt the pervasive Client/Server architecture to this
more fluid environment.
This thesis describes a novel framework by which network nodes or humans can interact
and share knowledge with each other through formal service-choreography specifications
in a decentralised manner. The platform allows peers to publish, discover
and (un)subscribe to those specifications in the form of Interaction Models (IMs). Peer
groups can be dynamically formed and disbanded based on the interaction logs of
peers. IMs are published in HTML documents as normal Web pages indexable by
search engines and associated with lightweight annotations which semantically enhance
the embedded IM elements and at the same time make IM publications comply
with the Linked Data principles. The execution of IMs is decentralised on each peer via
conventional Web browsers, potentially giving the system access to a very large user
community. In this thesis, after developing a proof-of-concept implementation, we
carry out case studies of the resulting functionality and evaluate the implementation
across several metrics.
An increasing number of service providers have began to look for customers proactively,
and we believe that in the near future we will not search for services but rather
services will find us through our peer communities. Our approaches show how a
peer-to-peer architecture for this purpose can be obtained on top of a conventional
Client/Server Web infrastructure
Ways of walking: understanding walking's implications for the design of handheld technology via a humanistic ethnographic approach
It seems logical to argue that mobile computing technologies are intended for use âon-the-go.â However, on closer inspection, the use of mobile technologies pose a number of challenges for users who are mobile, particularly moving around on foot. In engaging with such mobile technologies and their envisaged development, we argue that interaction designers must increasingly consider a multitude of perspectives that relate to walking in order to frame design problems appropriately. In this paper, we consider a number of perspectives on walking, and we discuss how these may inspire the design of mobile technologies. Drawing on insights from non-representational theory, we develop a partial vocabulary with which to engage with qualities of pedestrian mobility, and we outline how taking more mindful approaches to walking may enrich and inform the design space of handheld technologies
Orchestrating standard web services to produce thematic maps in a geoportal of a spatial data infrastructure
Cartography is the science and art of making maps and thematic cartography is a subsection that deals with the production of thematic maps. A thematic map portrays the distribution of features, incidents or classifications related to a specific topic. With the rapidly increasing volumes of data, thematic maps allow users to efficiently analyse data and identify trends quicker. A spatial data infrastructure (SDI) focuses on making data available and ensures data interoperability through a geoportal and associated web services for discovery, display, editing, and analysis. Implementations of web service standards by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), and the ISO/TC211, Geographic information/Geomatics enable the display, query and custom visualisation of spatial data in a geoportal. In the past, sophisticated cartographic methods have been mainly available on desktop applications, but with the advances in web mapping technology these methods have become increasingly popular on the Web. Currently, producing thematic maps using web services is a manual process that requires quite a lot of custom programming. The orchestrations of standard web services automate the process to produce thematic maps in a geoportal. It is preferable to use standard web services as opposed to customised programming; the standards provide flexibility, interoperability, and standard protocols, to name a few benefits. The goal of this research was to determine how standard OGC web services could be orchestrated to produce thematic maps within the geoportal of an SDI. To achieve this goal, an orchestrated thematic web service, named ThematicWS, was constructed from existing implementations of individual standard OGC web services, which are monolithic and interchangeable. The thematic cartographic process for producing choropleth and proportional symbol maps was investigated to model the process and obtain a set of steps. Experiments were performed to determine which existing web service standards could be used in the process. ThematicWS was developed using existing implementations of the following standards: WFS to retrieve the attribute data, WPS for the wrapping of custom functionalities (statistical processing and SLD generation), and a WMS to produce the thematic map image. The 52° North and ZOO project frameworksâ orchestration capabilities were evaluated for to determine the suitability for producing thematic maps. The evaluation showed that orchestration is possible in both frameworks. However, there are limitations in both frameworks for automatic orchestration such as the lack of semantic information and poor usability of the framework. The use of WPS services to wrap custom functionalities and to provide a standard interface has proved to be useful for the orchestration of standard web services. ThematicWS was successfully implemented based on standard web service implementations using both workflow scripting and workflow modelling. The orchestrated ThematicWS can be called and consumed by a geoportal of an SDI to produce thematic maps according to user defined parameters.Dissertation (MSc)--University of Pretoria, 2013.Geography, Geoinformatics and MeteorologyUnrestricte
Design of a Linked Data-enabled Microservice Platform for the Industrial Internet of Things
WĂ€hrend der aktuelle Trend in Richtung hochgradig digitalisierter Smart Factories fĂŒr die Fertigungsindustrie betrĂ€chtliches Potential zur Steigerung von LeistungsfĂ€higkeit, FlexibilitĂ€t und ProduktivitĂ€t birgt, tun sich Unternehmen im Allgemeinen noch immer schwer, entsprechende Technologie einzufĂŒhren. Ein Kernproblem ist der Mangel an einheitlichen, standardisierten Lösungen, die auf dem Hallenboden ohne spezifisches Expertenwissen und einen hohen Zeit- und Kostenaufwand integriert werden können. Im Hinblick darauf prĂ€sentiert diese Arbeit sowohl Architektur, als auch konkrete Implementierung einer Internet of Things Softwareplattform mit Fokus auf technologische Einheitlichkeit und unkomplizierte Integration und Benutzung. Als Richtlinie hierfĂŒr wird in Kooperation mit Industriepartnern ein praxisnaher Anwendungsfall erarbeitet. DesWeiteren wird prĂ€sentiert, wie universelleWebtechnologie gewinnbringend mit neusten Software-Design Trends, mĂ€chtigen Techniken der Maschine-zu-Maschine Interaktion und allgemein verstĂ€ndlichen Konzepten im Bereich User Experience kombiniert werden kann. Dabei wird ausfĂŒhrlich auf Struktur der Software, Möglichkeiten zur Echtzeitkommunikation und Machine-zu-Maschine Interaktion, sowie auf einheitliche Datenintegration und Benutzerfreundlichkeit eingegangen. Am Ende des Prozesses steht eine fertige Softwarelösung als Proof-of-Concept, sowie eine Sammlung von VorschlĂ€gen und Best Practices zur Integration von smarter Technologie auf dem Hallenboden. In einer abschlieĂenden Evaluierung wird die LeistungsfĂ€higkeit und Tauglichkeit der Softwareplattform fĂŒr bestimmte praktische AnwendungsfĂ€lle untersucht. Zudem werden abschlieĂend noch offene Fragen und weiterhin benötigte Entwicklungsschritte bis hin zu einem fertigen Produkt aufgezeigt
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A Framework for Grid-Enabling Scientific Workflow Systems. Architecture and application case studies on interoperability and heterogeneity in support for Grid workflow automation.
Since the early 2000s, Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) have played a key role in the development of complex applications within a virtual organization (VO) context. Grids and workflows have emerged as vital technologies for addressing the (SOA) paradigm. Given the variety of Grid middleware, scientific workflow systems and Grid workflows available, bringing the two technologies together in a flexible, reusable and generalized way has been largely overlooked, particularly from a scientific end user perspective. The lack of domain focus in this area has led to a slow uptake of Grid technologies.
This thesis aims to design a framework for Grid-enabling workflows, which identifies the essential technological components, how these components fit together in layered architecture and the interactions between them. To produce such a framework, this thesis first investigates the definition of a Grid-workflow architecture and mapping Grid functionality to workflow nodes, focusing on striking a balance between performance, usability and the Grid functionality supported. Next, it presents an examination of framework extensions for supporting various forms of Grid heterogeneity, essential for
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VO based collaboration. Given the complex nature of Grid technologies, the work presented here investigates abstracting Grid based workflows through high-level definitions and resolution using semantic technologies. Finally, this thesis presents a way to resolves abstract Grid workflows using semantic technologies and intelligent, autonomous agents.
The frameworks presented in this thesis are tested and evaluated within the context of domain-based case studies defined in the SIMDAT, BRIDGE and ARGUGRID EU funded research projects
Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns
Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse