TGVizTab: An ontology visualisation extension for Protégé

Ontologies are gaining a lot of interest and many are being developed to provide a variety of knowledge services. There is an increasing need for tools to graphically and in-teractively visualise such modelling structures to enhance their clarification, verification and analysis. Protégé 2000 is one of the most popular ontology modelling tools currently available. This paper introduces TGVizTab; a new Protégé plugin based on TouchGraph technology to graphically visualise Protégé?s ontologies

Towards Rapid Generation and Visualisation of Large 3D Urban Landscapes for Mobile Device Navigation

In this paper a procedural 3D modelling solution for mobile devices is presented based on scripting algorithms allowing for both the automatic and also semi-automatic creation of photorealistic quality virtual urban content. The combination of aerial images, GIS data, 2D ground maps and terrestrial photographs as input data coupled with a user-friendly customized interface permits the automatic and interactive generation of large-scale, accurate, georeferenced and fully-textured 3D virtual city content, content that can be specially optimized for use with mobile devices but also with navigational tasks in mind. Furthermore, a user-centred mobile virtual reality (VR) visualisation and interaction tool operating on PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) for pedestrian navigation is also discussed. Via this engine, the import and display of various navigational file formats (2D and 3D) is supported, including a comprehensive front-end user-friendly graphical user interface providing immersive virtual 3D navigation

Semantic learning webs

By 2020, microprocessors will likely be as cheap and plentiful as scrap paper,scattered by the millions into the environment, allowing us to place intelligent systems everywhere. This will change everything around us, including the nature of commerce, the wealth of nations, and the way we communicate, work, play, and live. This will give us smart homes, cars, TVs , jewellery, and money. We will speak to our appliances, and they will speak back. Scientists also expect the Internet will wire up the entire planet and evolve into a membrane consisting of millions of computer networks, creating an “intelligent planet.” The Internet will eventually become a “Magic Mirror” that appears in fairy tales, able to speak with the wisdom of the human race. Michio Kaku, Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the Twenty - First Century, 1998 If the semantic web needed a symbol, a good one to use would be a Navaho dream-catcher: a small web, lovingly hand-crafted, [easy] to look at, and rumored to catch dreams; but really more of a symbol than a reality. Pat Hayes, Catching the Dreams, 2002 Though it is almost impossible to envisage what the Web will be like by the end of the next decade, we can say with some certainty that it will have continued its seemingly unstoppable growth. Given the investment of time and money in the Semantic Web (Berners-Lee et al., 2001), we can also be sure that some form of semanticization will have taken place. This might be superficial - accomplished simply through the addition of loose forms of meta-data mark-up, or more principled – grounded in ontologies and formalised by means of emerging semantic web standards, such as RDF (Lassila and Swick, 1999) or OWL (Mc Guinness and van Harmelen, 2003). Whatever the case, the addition of semantic mark-up will make at least part of the Web more readily accessible to humans and their software agents and will facilitate agent interoperability. If current research is successful there will also be a plethora of e-learning platforms making use of a varied menu of reusable educational material or learning objects. For the learner, the semanticized Web will, in addition, offer rich seams of diverse learning resources over and above the course materials (or learning objects) specified by course designers. For instance, the annotation registries, which provide access to marked up resources, will enable more focussed, ontologically-guided (or semantic) search. This much is already in development. But we can go much further. Semantic technologies make it possible not only to reason about the Web as if it is one extended knowledge base but also to provide a range of additional educational semantic web services such as summarization, interpretation or sense-making, structure-visualization, and support for argumentation

Collaboration in the Semantic Grid: a Basis for e-Learning

The CoAKTinG project aims to advance the state of the art in collaborative mediated spaces for the Semantic Grid. This paper presents an overview of the hypertext and knowledge based tools which have been deployed to augment existing collaborative environments, and the ontology which is used to exchange structure, promote enhanced process tracking, and aid navigation of resources before, after, and while a collaboration occurs. While the primary focus of the project has been supporting e-Science, this paper also explores the similarities and application of CoAKTinG technologies as part of a human-centred design approach to e-Learning

Development of a client interface for a methodology independent object-oriented CASE tool : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science at Massey University

The overall aim of the research presented in this thesis is the development of a prototype CASE Tool user interface that supports the use of arbitrary methodology notations for the construction of small-scale diagrams. This research is part of the larger CASE Tool project, MOOT (Massey's Object Oriented Tool). MOOT is a meta-system with a client-server architecture that provides a framework within which the semantics and syntax of methodologies can be described. The CASE Tool user interface is implemented in Java so it is as portable as possible and has a consistent look and feel. It has been designed as a client to the rest of the MOOT system (which acts as a server). A communications protocol has been designed to support the interaction between the CASE Tool client and a MOOT server. The user interface design of MOOT must support all possible graphical notations. No assumptions about the types of notations that a software engineer may use can be made. MOOT therefore provides a specification language called NDL for the definition of a methodology's syntax. Hence, the MOOT CASE Tool client described in this thesis is a shell that is parameterised by NDL specifications. The flexibility provided by such a high level of abstraction presents significant challenges in terms of designing effective human-computer interaction mechanisms for the MOOT user interface. Functional and non-functional requirements of the client user interface have been identified and applied during the construction of the prototype. A notation specification that defines the syntax for Coad and Yourdon OOA/OOD has been written in NDL and used as a test case. The thesis includes the iterative evaluation and extension of NDL resulting from the prototype development. The prototype has shown that the current approach to NDL is efficacious, and that the syntax and semantics of a methodology description can successfully be separated. The developed prototype has shown that it is possible to build a simple, non-intrusive, and efficient, yet flexible, useable, and helpful interface for meta-CASE tools. The development of the CASE Tool client, through its generic, methodology independent design, has provided a pilot with which future ideas may be explored

Genisa: A web-based interactive learning environment for teaching simulation modelling

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) provide students with adaptive instruction and can facilitate the acquisition of problem solving skills in an interactive environment. This paper discusses the role of pedagogical strategies that have been implemented to facilitate the development of simulation modelling knowledge. The learning environment integrates case-based reasoning with interactive tools to guide tutorial remediation. The evaluation of the system shows that the model for pedagogical activities is a useful method for providing efficient simulation modelling instruction

Interpreting the Object Constraint Language

The Object Constraint Language (OCL), which forms part of the UML 1.1. set of modelling notations is a precise, textual language for expressing constraints that cannot be shown in the standard diagrammatic notation used in UML. A semantics for OCL lays the foundation for building CASE tools that support integrity checking of the whole UML models, not just the component expressed using OCL. This paper provides a semantics for OCL, at the same time providing a semantics for classes, associations, attributes and states