Applying semantic web technologies to knowledge sharing in aerospace engineering

This paper details an integrated methodology to optimise Knowledge reuse and sharing, illustrated with a use case in the aeronautics domain. It uses Ontologies as a central modelling strategy for the Capture of Knowledge from legacy docu-ments via automated means, or directly in systems interfacing with Knowledge workers, via user-defined, web-based forms. The domain ontologies used for Knowledge Capture also guide the retrieval of the Knowledge extracted from the data using a Semantic Search System that provides support for multiple modalities during search. This approach has been applied and evaluated successfully within the aerospace domain, and is currently being extended for use in other domains on an increasingly large scale

CESI: Canonicalizing Open Knowledge Bases using Embeddings and Side Information

Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) methods extract (noun phrase, relation phrase, noun phrase) triples from text, resulting in the construction of large Open Knowledge Bases (Open KBs). The noun phrases (NPs) and relation phrases in such Open KBs are not canonicalized, leading to the storage of redundant and ambiguous facts. Recent research has posed canonicalization of Open KBs as clustering over manuallydefined feature spaces. Manual feature engineering is expensive and often sub-optimal. In order to overcome this challenge, we propose Canonicalization using Embeddings and Side Information (CESI) - a novel approach which performs canonicalization over learned embeddings of Open KBs. CESI extends recent advances in KB embedding by incorporating relevant NP and relation phrase side information in a principled manner. Through extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets, we demonstrate CESI's effectiveness.Comment: Accepted at WWW 201

Expert Finding by Capturing Organisational Knowledge from Legacy Documents

Organisations capitalise on their best knowledge through the improvement of shared expertise which leads to a higher level of productivity and competency. The recognition of the need to foster the sharing of expertise has led to the development of expert finder systems that hold pointers to experts who posses specific knowledge in organisations. This paper discusses an approach to locating an expert through the application of information retrieval and analysis processes to an organization’s existing information resources, with specific reference to the engineering design domain. The approach taken was realised through an expert finder system framework. It enables the relationships of heterogeneous information sources with experts to be factored in modelling individuals’ expertise. These valuable relationships are typically ignored by existing expert finder systems, which only focus on how documents relate to their content. The developed framework also provides an architecture that can be easily adapted to different organisational environments. In addition, it also allows users to access the expertise recognition logic, giving them greater trust in the systems implemented using this framework. The framework were applied to real world application and evaluated within a major engineering company

On Evaluating Commercial Cloud Services: A Systematic Review

Background: Cloud Computing is increasingly booming in industry with many competing providers and services. Accordingly, evaluation of commercial Cloud services is necessary. However, the existing evaluation studies are relatively chaotic. There exists tremendous confusion and gap between practices and theory about Cloud services evaluation. Aim: To facilitate relieving the aforementioned chaos, this work aims to synthesize the existing evaluation implementations to outline the state-of-the-practice and also identify research opportunities in Cloud services evaluation. Method: Based on a conceptual evaluation model comprising six steps, the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) method was employed to collect relevant evidence to investigate the Cloud services evaluation step by step. Results: This SLR identified 82 relevant evaluation studies. The overall data collected from these studies essentially represent the current practical landscape of implementing Cloud services evaluation, and in turn can be reused to facilitate future evaluation work. Conclusions: Evaluation of commercial Cloud services has become a world-wide research topic. Some of the findings of this SLR identify several research gaps in the area of Cloud services evaluation (e.g., the Elasticity and Security evaluation of commercial Cloud services could be a long-term challenge), while some other findings suggest the trend of applying commercial Cloud services (e.g., compared with PaaS, IaaS seems more suitable for customers and is particularly important in industry). This SLR study itself also confirms some previous experiences and reveals new Evidence-Based Software Engineering (EBSE) lessons

Exploiting tacit knowledge through knowledge management technologies

The purpose of this paper is to examine the contributions and suitability of the available knowledge management (KM) technologies, including the Web 2.0 for exploiting tacit knowledge. It proposes an integrated framework for extracting tacit knowledge in organisations, which includes Web 2.0 technologies, KM tools, organisational learning (OL) and Community of Practice (CoP). It reviews a comprehensive literature covering overview of KM theories, KM technologies and OL and identifies the current state of knowledge relating to tacit knowledge exploitation. The outcomes of the paper indicate that Internet and Web 2.0 technologies have stunning prospects for creating learning communities where tacit knowledge can be extracted from people. The author recommends that organisations should design procedures and embed them in their Web 2.0 collaborative platforms persuading employees to record their ideas and share them with other members. It is also recommended that no idea should be taken for granted in a learning community where tacit knowledge exploitation is pursued. It is envisaged that future research should adopt empirical approach involving Complex Adaptive Model for Tacit Knowledge Exploitation (CAMTaKE) and the Theory of Deferred Action in examining the effectiveness of KM technologies including Web 2.0 tools for tacit knowledge exploitation

CERN openlab Whitepaper on Future IT Challenges in Scientific Research

This whitepaper describes the major IT challenges in scientific research at CERN and several other European and international research laboratories and projects. Each challenge is exemplified through a set of concrete use cases drawn from the requirements of large-scale scientific programs. The paper is based on contributions from many researchers and IT experts of the participating laboratories and also input from the existing CERN openlab industrial sponsors. The views expressed in this document are those of the individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect the view of their organisations and/or affiliates

Los Angeles, Mexico City, Cubatao, and Ankara - Efficient environmental regulation : case studies of urban air pollution

The authors review the economic principles that should guide the efficient choice of targeted policies for environmental protection. They recommend policy instruments along three dimensions: (1) whether they use economic incentives; (2) whether they target environmental damage directly; and (3) whether they specify prices, quantities, or technologies. This distinction is helpful in guiding policy choices because many discussions in the economics literature on environmental policies mistakenly claim advantages for incentive-based instruments by showing, for instance, that direct policies of this sort are less costly than indirect non-incentive measures. After analyzing efficient responses to the air pollution problem, the authors come up with somewhat surprising results. For three of the cities (Ankara, Los Angeles, and Mexico City), the efficient instruments selected by this (admittedly limited) exercise are similar: indirect incentive-based policies. Only Cubatao differs in that direct non-incentive regulations are the efficient policy choice. But choosing indirect policy instruments is not without its problems. This category is the broadest one. For instance, while there is only a single direct incentive-based price instrument (emissions taxes), several indirect incentive-based price policies exist including taxes on inputs and on complementary and substitute products. Indirect policies also cannot simultaneously target the incentives to reduce waste generation, production efficiency, and reduce output to reduce pollution. A combination of indirect policies will then be required to control pollution. But if the regulatory costs of controlling additional variables are high they may outweigh the cost of monitoring and enforcing a single direct policy. Finally, indirect regulations may be accompanied by perverse incentives, such as new source bias or reduced marginal costs of polluting. Efforts to offset these perverse incentives by regulating additional variables may be subject to second-best problems: two regulations with opposite results can be costlier than no regulation at all. The main lesson the authors draw from the cases examined: Once decisions are made - whether to concentrate industry, to rely on private vehicles for transportation, to subsidize a particular energy source, or to use a certain environmental policy - they acquire a certain performance. Capital is invested and workers are trained under the prevailing laws, and these are costly to change. Los Angeles cannot reverse its emphasis on the automobile; Brazil cannot easily move its industrial center away from Cubatao; Mexico cannot quickly reduce the concentration in its capital city; and Turkey's development would suffer if energy subsidies were removed abruptly. For this reason, it is important to design policy with an eye toward longer-run concerns. It makes sense, for example, for cities such as Ankara to begin to enact policies to prevent mobile source pollution from worsening over the next decades. The authors also point out the dangers of ignoring intermedia substitution of pollutants. In places such as Cubatao, where air quality has been cleaned up, the improvement may have come at the expense of water quality or the accumulation of hazardous wastes.Environmental Economics&Policies,Energy and Environment,Transport and Environment,Economic Theory&Research,Water and Industry