Understanding analogical reasoning : viewpoints from psychology and related disciplines

Analogy and metaphor have a long history of study in linguistics, education, philosophy and psychology. Consensus over what analogy is or how analogy functions in language and thought, however, has been elusive. This paper, the first in a two part series, examines these various research traditions, attempting to bring out major lines of agreement over the role of analogy in individual human experience. As well as being a general literature review which may be helpful for newcomers to the study of analogy, this paper attempts to extract from these literatures existing theories, models and concepts which may be interesting or useful for computational studies of analogical reasoning

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

Design thinking support: information systems versus reasoning

Numerous attempts have been made to conceive and implement appropriate information systems to support architectural designers in their creative design thinking processes. These information systems aim at providing support in very diverse ways: enabling designers to make diverse kinds of visual representations of a design, enabling them to make complex calculations and simulations which take into account numerous relevant parameters in the design context, providing them with loads of information and knowledge from all over the world, and so forth. Notwithstanding the continued efforts to develop these information systems, they still fail to provide essential support in the core creative activities of architectural designers. In order to understand why an appropriately effective support from information systems is so hard to realize, we started to look into the nature of design thinking and on how reasoning processes are at play in this design thinking. This investigation suggests that creative designing rests on a cyclic combination of abductive, deductive and inductive reasoning processes. Because traditional information systems typically target only one of these reasoning processes at a time, this could explain the limited applicability and usefulness of these systems. As research in information technology is increasingly targeting the combination of these reasoning modes, improvements may be within reach for design thinking support by information systems

Argument maps as policy memories for informed deliberation: A research note

This is an eGISE network paper. A significant area within eGovernment is concerned with systems to support democratic policy formation and decision making processes. In modern government, both local and national, consultation with interested parties is an important element in maintaining the democratic process. To date online consultation tools have has used existing software tools, which are simple text based tools that were not tailored to the process. This project proposes to develop an online tool that will visualise the issues and arguments graphically as the consultation process proceeds. Using Discourse Analysis and Ontological Engineering it will create Argument Maps that will server not only to inform participants but also the archive record of the consultation – the Policy Memory. We hypothesise that such a tool would allow citizens to be come more engaged with policy formation and enhance democratic participation

RDF Querying

Reactive Web systems, Web services, and Web-based publish/ subscribe systems communicate events as XML messages, and in many cases require composite event detection: it is not sufficient to react to single event messages, but events have to be considered in relation to other events that are received over time. Emphasizing language design and formal semantics, we describe the rule-based query language XChangeEQ for detecting composite events. XChangeEQ is designed to completely cover and integrate the four complementary querying dimensions: event data, event composition, temporal relationships, and event accumulation. Semantics are provided as model and fixpoint theories; while this is an established approach for rule languages, it has not been applied for event queries before

Survey of the research of ICT Applications in the AEC Industry: a view from two mainstream journals

The application of information and communication technology (ICT) in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry has attracted much attention by researchers in recent years. However, a comprehensive review is still missing from the existing literature. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art research of ICT applications in the AEC industry. A total of 432 articles, published during 2011-2015 in two mainstream journals, namely Automation in Construction and Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering, are selected and analyzed. This review is conducted from three different views: 1) view of construction project lifecycle, aiming to investigate the distribution of research of ICT application in different stages; 2) view of ICT technologies, aiming to identify the popular ICTs in the AEC industry that researches focus on; and 3) view of ICT application areas, aiming to identify the areas in the AEC industry that ICTs are applied in. Throughout this review, the distribution of the research of ICT in four different stages (i.e., design stage, construction stage, operation & maintenance stage, and multistage) is firstly investigated. A total of 24 types of ICTs, categorized into 8 groups and 19 ICT application areas are then identified and analyzed. In additional, limitations of this review are also discussed.published_or_final_versio

An ontology-aided, natural language-based approach for multi-constraint BIM model querying

Being able to efficiently retrieve the required building information is critical for construction project stakeholders to carry out their engineering and management activities. Natural language interface (NLI) systems are emerging as a time and cost-effective way to query Building Information Models (BIMs). However, the existing methods cannot logically combine different constraints to perform fine-grained queries, dampening the usability of natural language (NL)-based BIM queries. This paper presents a novel ontology-aided semantic parser to automatically map natural language queries (NLQs) that contain different attribute and relational constraints into computer-readable codes for querying complex BIM models. First, a modular ontology was developed to represent NL expressions of Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) concepts and relationships, and was then populated with entities from target BIM models to assimilate project-specific information. Hereafter, the ontology-aided semantic parser progressively extracts concepts, relationships, and value restrictions from NLQs to fully identify constraint conditions, resulting in standard SPARQL queries with reasoning rules to successfully retrieve IFC-based BIM models. The approach was evaluated based on 225 NLQs collected from BIM users, with a 91% accuracy rate. Finally, a case study about the design-checking of a real-world residential building demonstrates the practical value of the proposed approach in the construction industry

Proceedings of QG2010: The Third Workshop on Question Generation

These are the peer-reviewed proceedings of "QG2010, The Third Workshop on Question Generation". The workshop included a special track for "QGSTEC2010: The First Question Generation Shared Task and Evaluation Challenge". QG2010 was held as part of The Tenth International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS2010)