Ontologies in domain specific languages : a systematic literature review

The systematic literature review conducted in this paper explores the current techniques employed to leverage the development of DSLs using ontologies. Similarities and differences between ontologies and DSLs, techniques to combine DSLs with ontologies, the rationale of these techniques and challenges in the DSL approaches addressed by the used techniques have been investigated. Details about these topics have been provided for each relevant research paper that we were able to investigate in the limited amount of time of one month. At the same time, a synthesis describing the main trends in all the topics mentioned above has been done

MROS: Runtime Adaptation For Robot Control Architectures

Known attempts to build autonomous robots rely on complex control architectures, often implemented with the Robot Operating System platform (ROS). Runtime adaptation is needed in these systems, to cope with component failures and with contingencies arising from dynamic environments-otherwise, these affect the reliability and quality of the mission execution. Existing proposals on how to build self-adaptive systems in robotics usually require a major re-design of the control architecture and rely on complex tools unfamiliar to the robotics community. Moreover, they are hard to reuse across applications. This paper presents MROS: a model-based framework for run-time adaptation of robot control architectures based on ROS. MROS uses a combination of domain-specific languages to model architectural variants and captures mission quality concerns, and an ontology-based implementation of the MAPE-K and meta-control visions for run-time adaptation. The experiment results obtained applying MROS in two realistic ROS-based robotic demonstrators show the benefits of our approach in terms of the quality of the mission execution, and MROS' extensibility and re-usability across robotic applications

Towards a robot task ontology standard

Ontologies serve robotics in many ways, particularly in de- scribing and driving autonomous functions. These functions are built around robot tasks. In this paper, we introduce the IEEE Robot Task Representation Study Group, including its work plan, initial development efforts, and proposed use cases. This effort aims to develop a standard that provides a comprehensive on- tology encompassing robot task structures and reasoning across robotic domains, addressing both the relationships between tasks and platforms and the relationships between tasks and users. Its goal is to develop a knowledge representation that addresses task structure, with decomposition into subclasses, categories, and/or relations. It includes attributes, both common across tasks and specific to particular tasks and task types

Combining ontologies and workflows to design formal protocols for biological laboratories

Background Laboratory protocols in life sciences tend to be written in natural language, with negative consequences on repeatability, distribution and automation of scientific experiments. Formalization of knowledge is becoming popular in science. In the case of laboratory protocols two levels of formalization are needed: one for the entities and individuals operations involved in protocols and another one for the procedures, which can be manually or automatically executed. This study aims to combine ontologies and workflows for protocol formalization. Results A laboratory domain specific ontology and the COW (Combining Ontologies with Workflows) software tool were developed to formalize workflows built on ontologies. A method was specifically set up to support the design of structured protocols for biological laboratory experiments. The workflows were enhanced with ontological concepts taken from the developed domain specific ontology. The experimental protocols represented as workflows are saved in two linked files using two standard interchange languages (i.e. XPDL for workflows and OWL for ontologies). A distribution package of COW including installation procedure, ontology and workflow examples, is freely available from http://www.bmr-genomics.it/farm/cow webcite. Conclusions Using COW, a laboratory protocol may be directly defined by wet-lab scientists without writing code, which will keep the resulting protocol's specifications clear and easy to read and maintain

Cascading Verification: An Integrated Method for Domain-Specific Model Checking

Model checking is an established formal method for verifying the desired behavioral properties of system models. But popular model checkers tend to support low-level modeling languages that require intricate models to represent even the simplest systems. Modeling complexity arises in part from the need to encode domain knowledge, including domain objects and concepts, and their relationships, at relatively low levels of abstraction. We will demonstrate that, once formalized, domain knowledge can be reused to enhance the abstraction level of model and property specifications, and the effectiveness of probabilistic model checking. This thesis describes a novel method for domain-specific model checking called cascading verification. The method uses composite reasoning over high-level system specifications and formalized domain knowledge to synthesize both low-level system models and the behavioral properties that need to be verified with respect to those models. In particular, model builders use a high-level domain-specific language (DSL) to encode system specifications that can be analyzed with model checking. Domain knowledge is encoded in the Web Ontology Language (OWL), the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) and Prolog, which are combined to overcome their individual limitations. Synthesized models and properties are analyzed with the probabilistic model checker PRISM. Cascading verification is illustrated with a prototype system that verifies the correctness of uninhabited aerial vehicle (UAV) mission plans. An evaluation of this prototype reveals non-trivial reductions in the size and complexity of input system specifications compared to the artifacts synthesized for PRISM

Roles '07 – Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Roles and Relationships in Object Oriented Programming, Multiagent Systems, and Ontologies : workshop co-located with ECOOP 2007 Berlin, July 30 and 31, 2007

Roles are a truly ubiquitous notion: like classes, objects, and relationships, they pervade the vocabulary of all disciplines that deal with the nature of things and how these things relate to each other. In fact, it seems that roles are so fundamental a notion that they must be granted the status of an ontological primitive. The definition of roles depends on the definition of relationships. With the advent of Object Technology, however, relationships have moved out of the focus of attention, giving way to the more restricted concept of attributes or, more technically, references to other ob- jects. A reference is tied to the object holding it and as such is asymmetric – at most the target of the reference can be associated with a role. This is counter to the intuition that every role should have at least one counter-role, namely the one it interacts with. It seems that the natural role of roles in object-oriented designs can only be restored by installing relationships (collaborations, teams, etc.) as first-class programming concepts. By contrast, the relational nature of roles is already acknowl- edged in the area of Multiagent Systems, since roles are related to the interaction among agents and to communication protocols. However, in this area there is no convergence on a single definition of roles yet, and different points of view, such as agent software en- gineering, specification languages, agent communication, or agent programming languages, make different use of roles. Like its pre- decessor “Roles, an interdisciplinary perspective” (Roles’05) held at the AAAI 2005 Fall Symposium (see the website of the Symposium http://www.aaai.org/Press/Reports/Symposia/Fall/fs-05-08.php), this workshop aimed at gathering researchers from different dis- ciplines to foster interchange of knowledge and ideas concerning roles and relationships, and in particular to converge on ontolog- ically founded proposals which can be applied to programming and agent languages

RV4JaCa—Towards Runtime Verification of Multi-Agent Systems and Robotic Applications

This paper presents a Runtime Verification (RV) approach for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) using the JaCaMo framework. Our objective is to bring a layer of security to the MAS. This is achieved keeping in mind possible safety-critical uses of the MAS, such as robotic applications. This layer is capable of controlling events during the execution of the system without needing a specific implementation in the behaviour of each agent to recognise the events. In this paper, we mainly focus on MAS when used in the context of hybrid intelligence. This use requires communication between software agents and human beings. In some cases, communication takes place via natural language dialogues. However, this kind of communication brings us to a concern related to controlling the flow of dialogue so that agents can prevent any change in the topic of discussion that could impair their reasoning. The latter may be a problem and undermine the development of the software agents. In this paper, we tackle this problem by proposing and demonstrating the implementation of a framework that aims to control the dialogue flow in a MAS; especially when the MAS communicates with the user through natural language to aid decision-making in a hospital bed allocation scenario