Semantic web services for simulation component reuse and interoperability: An ontology approach

Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) Simulation Packages (CSPs) are widely used in industry primarily due to economic factors associated with developing proprietary software platforms. Regardless of their widespread use, CSPs have yet to operate across organizational boundaries. The limited reuse and interoperability of CSPs are affected by the same semantic issues that restrict the inter-organizational use of software components and web services. The current representations of Web components are predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinning required to support discovery on the emerging Semantic Web. The authors present new research that partially alleviates the problem of limited semantic reuse and interoperability of simulation components in CSPs. Semantic models, in the form of ontologies, utilized by the authors’ Web service discovery and deployment architecture provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved through a simulation component ontology that is used to identify required components at varying levels of granularity (i.e. including both abstract and specialized components). Selected simulation components are loaded into a CSP, modified according to the requirements of the new model and executed. The research presented here is based on the development of an ontology, connector software, and a Web service discovery architecture. The ontology is extracted from simulation scenarios involving airport, restaurant and kitchen service suppliers. The ontology engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter-organizational simulation, by adopting a less intrusive interface between participants Although specific to CSPs this work has wider implications for the simulation community. The reason being that the community as a whole stands to benefit through from an increased awareness of the state-of-the-art in Software Engineering (for example, ontology-supported component discovery and reuse, and service-oriented computing), and it is expected that this will eventually lead to the development of a unique Software Engineering-inspired methodology to build simulations in future

J-Park Simulator: An ontology-based platform for cross-domain scenarios in process industry

The J-Park Simulator (JPS) acts as a continuously growing platform for integrating real-time data, knowledge, models, and tools related to process industry. It aims at simulation and optimization in cross-domain and multi-level scenarios and relies heavily on ontologies and semantic technologies. In this paper, we demonstrate the interoperability between different applications in JPS, introduce new domain ontologies into the JPS, and integrate live data. For this, we utilize a knowledge graph to store and link semantically described data and models and create agents wrapping the applications and updating the data in the knowledge graph dynamically. We present a comprehensive industrial air pollution scenario, which has been implemented as part of the JPS, to show how knowledge graphs and modular domain ontologies support the interoperability between agents. We show that the architecture of JPS increases the interoperability and flexibility in cross-domain scenarios and conclude that the potential of ontologies outweighs additional wrapping efforts.National Research Foundation (NRF)Accepted versionThis project is funded by the National Research Foundation (NRF), Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore under its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) programme. MK gratefully acknowledges the support of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation

Interoperability between Multimedia Collections for Content and Metadata-Based Searching

Artiste is a European project developing a cross-collection search system for art galleries and museums. It combines image content retrieval with text based retrieval and uses RDF mappings in order to integrate diverse databases. The test sites of the Louvre, Victoria and Albert Museum, Uffizi Gallery and National Gallery London provide their own database schema for existing metadata, avoiding the need for migration to a common schema. The system will accept a query based on one museum’s fields and convert them, through an RDF mapping into a form suitable for querying the other collections. The nature of some of the image processing algorithms means that the system can be slow for some computations, so the system is session-based to allow the user to return to the results later. The system has been built within a J2EE/EJB framework, using the Jboss Enterprise Application Server

Service-Oriented Architecture for Space Exploration Robotic Rover Systems

Currently, industrial sectors are transforming their business processes into e-services and component-based architectures to build flexible, robust, and scalable systems, and reduce integration-related maintenance and development costs. Robotics is yet another promising and fast-growing industry that deals with the creation of machines that operate in an autonomous fashion and serve for various applications including space exploration, weaponry, laboratory research, and manufacturing. It is in space exploration that the most common type of robots is the planetary rover which moves across the surface of a planet and conducts a thorough geological study of the celestial surface. This type of rover system is still ad-hoc in that it incorporates its software into its core hardware making the whole system cohesive, tightly-coupled, more susceptible to shortcomings, less flexible, hard to be scaled and maintained, and impossible to be adapted to other purposes. This paper proposes a service-oriented architecture for space exploration robotic rover systems made out of loosely-coupled and distributed web services. The proposed architecture consists of three elementary tiers: the client tier that corresponds to the actual rover; the server tier that corresponds to the web services; and the middleware tier that corresponds to an Enterprise Service Bus which promotes interoperability between the interconnected entities. The niche of this architecture is that rover's software components are decoupled and isolated from the rover's body and possibly deployed at a distant location. A service-oriented architecture promotes integrate-ability, scalability, reusability, maintainability, and interoperability for client-to-server communication.Comment: LACSC - Lebanese Association for Computational Sciences, http://www.lacsc.org/; International Journal of Science & Emerging Technologies (IJSET), Vol. 3, No. 2, February 201