Knowledge-based support in Non-Destructive Testing for health monitoring of aircraft structures

Maintenance manuals include general methods and procedures for industrial maintenance and they contain information about principles of maintenance methods. Particularly, Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) methods are important for the detection of aeronautical defects and they can be used for various kinds of material and in different environments. Conventional non-destructive evaluation inspections are done at periodic maintenance checks. Usually, the list of tools used in a maintenance program is simply located in the introduction of manuals, without any precision as regards to their characteristics, except for a short description of the manufacturer and tasks in which they are employed. Improving the identification concepts of the maintenance tools is needed to manage the set of equipments and establish a system of equivalence: it is necessary to have a consistent maintenance conceptualization, flexible enough to fit all current equipment, but also all those likely to be added/used in the future. Our contribution is related to the formal specification of the system of functional equivalences that can facilitate the maintenance activities with means to determine whether a tool can be substituted for another by observing their key parameters in the identified characteristics. Reasoning mechanisms of conceptual graphs constitute the baseline elements to measure the fit or unfit between an equipment model and a maintenance activity model. Graph operations are used for processing answers to a query and this graph-based approach to the search method is in-line with the logical view of information retrieval. The methodology described supports knowledge formalization and capitalization of experienced NDT practitioners. As a result, it enables the selection of a NDT technique and outlines its capabilities with acceptable alternatives

An Analysis of Service Ontologies

Services are increasingly shaping the world’s economic activity. Service provision and consumption have been profiting from advances in ICT, but the decentralization and heterogeneity of the involved service entities still pose engineering challenges. One of these challenges is to achieve semantic interoperability among these autonomous entities. Semantic web technology aims at addressing this challenge on a large scale, and has matured over the last years. This is evident from the various efforts reported in the literature in which service knowledge is represented in terms of ontologies developed either in individual research projects or in standardization bodies. This paper aims at analyzing the most relevant service ontologies available today for their suitability to cope with the service semantic interoperability challenge. We take the vision of the Internet of Services (IoS) as our motivation to identify the requirements for service ontologies. We adopt a formal approach to ontology design and evaluation in our analysis. We start by defining informal competency questions derived from a motivating scenario, and we identify relevant concepts and properties in service ontologies that match the formal ontological representation of these questions. We analyze the service ontologies with our concepts and questions, so that each ontology is positioned and evaluated according to its utility. The gaps we identify as the result of our analysis provide an indication of open challenges and future work

Effectiveness of Domain Ontologies to Facilitate Shared Understanding and Cross-Understanding

Shared cognition constructs such as shared understanding and cross-understanding are important factors in team performance. Although research has focused on understanding the effects of these constructs, little emphasis has been placed on improving their development. In Information Systems and related fields shared understanding of a domain is said to be facilitated by the use of a domain ontology, however there is a lack of empirical evidence to support this claim. Accordingly, in this research-in-progress paper, we report our efforts to develop a deep understanding of the benefits of domain ontology use at the group level. Specifically, we propose a model that theorizes the relationships between domain ontology use and the development of shared understanding and cross-understanding of domains. Additionally, we provide details of operationalization and empirical validation of our model, and the current state of this research

Ontologies in Cloud Computing - Review and Future Directions

Cloud computing as a technology has the capacity to enhance cooperation, scalability, accessibility, and offers discount prospects using improved and effective computing, and this capability helps organizations to stay focused. Ontologies are used to model knowledge. Once knowledge is modeled, knowledge management systems can be used to search, match, visualize knowledge, and also infer new knowledge. Ontologies use semantic analysis to define information within an environment with interconnecting relationships between heterogeneous sets. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of the existing literature on ontology in cloud computing and defines the state of the art. We applied the systematic literature review (SLR) approach and identified 400 articles; 58 of the articles were selected after further selection based on set selection criteria, and 35 articles were considered relevant to the study. The study shows that four predominant areas of cloud computing—cloud security, cloud interoperability, cloud resources and service description, and cloud services discovery and selection—have attracted the attention of researchers as dominant areas where cloud ontologies have made great impact. The proposed methods in the literature applied 30 ontologies in the cloud domain, and five of the methods are still practiced in the legacy computing environment. From the analysis, it was found that several challenges exist, including those related to the application of ontologies to enhance business operations in the cloud and multi-cloud. Based on this review, the study summarizes some unresolved challenges and possible future directions for cloud ontology researchers.publishedVersio

The Need and Requirements to a Strategy Ontology

The importance of strategy and strategy construct is not a new phenomenon. However as strategy work becomes less tangible, concerns with understanding, describing, and managing strategies develops into an increasingly complex subject. Current strategy concepts are dispersed and lack integration. Moreover, the enablement of modelling practices around strategy concepts considering the entire strategy lifecycle are also missing. Consequently, this paper focuses on issues with strategy in theory and practice, why a strategy ontology is needed and how this can be developed

Towards Semantic Interoperability for IT Governance: An Ontological Approach

In today's IT-centric environment, businesses rely more heavily on IT technologies. Organizations are often obliged to satisfy different requirements demanded and imposed by customers, business partners and legal entities. With increasing regulatory requirements, various best practices and standards are phenomenally employed to benchmark organizational adherence to different regulations. In a heterogeneous, multi-regulated, multi-disciplined and global environment, corporations are often required to consult with multiple standards. Interoperability between the standards for heterogeneous compliance management in the forms of semantic data translation and data integration is subsequently required. Semantic translation between standards allows compliance efforts established on a standard to be based on another standard. On the other hand, semantic data integration enables an integrated view of multiple standards. We present in this paper an ontology-based approach to the semantic interoperability problem in the domain of IT governance

Security and Compliance Ontology for Cloud Service Agreements

Cloud computing is a business paradigm where two important roles must be defined: provider and consumer. Providers offer services (e.g. web application, web services, and databases) and consumers pay for using them. The goal of this research is to focus on security and compliance aspects of cloud service. An ontology is introduced, which is the conceptualization of cloud domain, for analyzing different compliance aspects of cloud agreements. The terms, properties and relations are shown in a diagram. The proposed ontology can help service consumers to extract relevant data from service level agreements, to interpret compliance regulations, and to compare different contractual terms. Finally, some recommendations are presented for cloud consumers to adopt services and evaluate security risks

Continuous Process Auditing (CPA): an Audit Rule Ontology Approach to Compliance and Operational Audits

Continuous Auditing (CA) has been investigated over time and it is, somewhat, in practice within nancial and transactional auditing as a part of continuous assurance and monitoring. Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) that run their activities in the form of processes require continuous auditing of a process that invokes the action(s) speci ed in the policies and rules in a continuous manner and/or sometimes in real-time. This leads to the question: How much could continuous auditing mimic the actual auditing procedures performed by auditing professionals? We investigate some of these questions through Continuous Process Auditing (CPA) relying on heterogeneous activities of processes in the EIS, as well as detecting exceptions and evidence in current and historic databases to provide audit assurance

Ontology and Business: Creating Structure for Storing and Accessing Organizational Knowledge on Intranets

Storing organisational information on Intranets is fast becoming the norm for corporate information management, as is the provision of tools which assist locating, adding to and using organisational knowledge. The design of the storage layouts for these intranets, and the navigational principles by which the information can be found requires that the responsibility for creating and publishing information is considered, as well as the needs of others to access the information from within a variety of contexts. This article examines ways of uncovering the reality of organisational experience in order to create maps of organisational knowledge. These are derived from business process analysis to create a foundation for the design of intranets and knowledge management solutions

Innovative public governance through cloud computing: Information privacy, business models and performance measurement challenges

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyze challenges and to discuss proposed solutions for innovative public governance through cloud computing. Innovative technologies, such as federation of services and cloud computing, can greatly contribute to the provision of e-government services, through scaleable and flexible systems. Furthermore, they can facilitate in reducing costs and overcoming public information segmentation. Nonetheless, when public agencies use these technologies, they encounter several associated organizational and technical changes, as well as significant challenges. Design/methodology/approach: We followed a multidisciplinary perspective (social, behavioral, business and technical) and conducted a conceptual analysis for analyzing the associated challenges. We conducted focus group interviews in two countries for evaluating the performance models that resulted from the conceptual analysis. Findings: This study identifies and analyzes several challenges that may emerge while adopting innovative technologies for public governance and e-government services. Furthermore, it presents suggested solutions deriving from the experience of designing a related platform for public governance, including issues of privacy requirements, proposed business models and key performance indicators for public services on cloud computing. Research limitations/implications: The challenges and solutions discussed are based on the experience gained by designing one platform. However, we rely on issues and challenges collected from four countries. Practical implications: The identification of challenges for innovative design of e-government services through a central portal in Europe and using service federation is expected to inform practitioners in different roles about significant changes across multiple levels that are implied and may accelerate the challenges' resolution. Originality/value: This is the first study that discusses from multiple perspectives and through empirical investigation the challenges to realize public governance through innovative technologies. The results emerge from an actual portal that will function at a European level. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited