Building an Expert System for Evaluation of Commercial Cloud Services

Commercial Cloud services have been increasingly supplied to customers in industry. To facilitate customers' decision makings like cost-benefit analysis or Cloud provider selection, evaluation of those Cloud services are becoming more and more crucial. However, compared with evaluation of traditional computing systems, more challenges will inevitably appear when evaluating rapidly-changing and user-uncontrollable commercial Cloud services. This paper proposes an expert system for Cloud evaluation that addresses emerging evaluation challenges in the context of Cloud Computing. Based on the knowledge and data accumulated by exploring the existing evaluation work, this expert system has been conceptually validated to be able to give suggestions and guidelines for implementing new evaluation experiments. As such, users can conveniently obtain evaluation experiences by using this expert system, which is essentially able to make existing efforts in Cloud services evaluation reusable and sustainable.Comment: 8 page, Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Cloud and Service Computing (CSC 2012), pp. 168-175, Shanghai, China, November 22-24, 201

Understanding research dynamics

Rexplore leverages novel solutions in data mining, semantic technologies and visual analytics, and provides an innovative environment for exploring and making sense of scholarly data. Rexplore allows users: 1) to detect and make sense of important trends in research; 2) to identify a variety of interesting relations between researchers, beyond the standard co-authorship relations provided by most other systems; 3) to perform fine-grained expert search with respect to detailed multi-dimensional parameters; 4) to detect and characterize the dynamics of interesting communities of researchers, identified on the basis of shared research interests and scientific trajectories; 5) to analyse research performance at different levels of abstraction, including individual researchers, organizations, countries, and research communities

4th international workshop on ontologies and conceptual modeling (Onto.Com)

The theme of the 4th International Workshop on Ontologies and Conceptual Modeling is foundational ontologies and their meta-ontological choices. Expert representatives of major foundational ontologies have been invited to discuss and compare their meta-ontological choices within the context of a common case study. The workshop is aimed at exploring the ways in which different meta-ontological choices impact conceptual modelling in information systems

Exploring Design Options for interactive Video with the Mnemovie hypervideo system

Mnemovie is an investigative hypervideo system for exploring design options for interactivity with digital motion picture files (video). The custom-designed software toolset is used to build a series of experimental interactive models from which three models were subsequently developed for initial user experience testing and evaluation. We compared interaction with each of the models across three groups of video file users, from expert to non-expert. Understanding participants preference for each model helps define the different dimensions of the actual user experience. We discuss how these findings and the subsequent development of persona scenarios can inform the design of hypervideo systems and the implications this has for interaction design

Concept mapping and expert systems : exploring synergies

Concept maps and expert systems are both in the soft toolbar of knowledge modelling. We have spent nearly two decades developing our expert system shell 'Doctus'. Several years ago we have seen the first concept mapping solutions and started using them very soon. Frequently we have found ourselves using both tools in a particular research or consultancy project and started to wander how the two could be combined to achieve synergies. We came up with several ideas, typically when we have faced a situation which called for one of the potential synergies. In this paper we present the first of these ideas in elaborated form of a conceptual model and we also mention few additional ideas as our plans for future research. In this first idea we combine different kinds of concept maps and our expert system in order to map organisational knowledge. The expert system here is used in machine learning mode, i.e. the resulting concept map will be capable of learning - this is our intelligent concept map

The application of expert systems techniques in the design of durable concrete

This thesis describes work done exploring the application of expert system techniques to the domain of designing durable concrete. The nature of concrete durability design is described and some problems from the domain are discussed. Some related work on expert systems in concrete durability are described. Various implementation languages are considered - PROLOG and OPS5, and rejected in favour of a shell - CRYSTAL3 (later CRYSTAL4). Criteria for useful expert system shells in the domain are discussed. CRYSTAL4 is evaluated in the light of these criteria. Modules in various sub-domains (mix-design, sulphate attack, steel-corrosion and alkali aggregate reaction) are developed and organised under a BLACKBOARD system (called DEX). Extensions to the CRYSTAL4 modules are considered for different knowledge representations. These include LOTUS123 spreadsheets implementing models incorporating some of the mathematical knowledge in the domain. Design databases are used to represent tabular design knowledge. Hypertext representations of the original building standards texts are proposed as a tool for providing a well structured and extensive justification/help facility. A standardised approach to module development is proposed using hypertext development as a structured basis for expert systems development. Some areas of deficient domain knowledge are highlighted particularly in the use of data from mathematical models and in gaps and inconsistencies in the original knowledge source Digests