Building a Disciplinary, World-Wide Data Infrastructure

Sharing scientific data, with the objective of making it fully discoverable, accessible, assessable, intelligible, usable, and interoperable, requires work at the disciplinary level to define in particular how the data should be formatted and described. Each discipline has its own organization and history as a starting point, and this paper explores the way a range of disciplines, namely materials science, crystallography, astronomy, earth sciences, humanities and linguistics get organized at the international level to tackle this question. In each case, the disciplinary culture with respect to data sharing, science drivers, organization and lessons learnt are briefly described, as well as the elements of the specific data infrastructure which are or could be shared with others. Commonalities and differences are assessed. Common key elements for success are identified: data sharing should be science driven; defining the disciplinary part of the interdisciplinary standards is mandatory but challenging; sharing of applications should accompany data sharing. Incentives such as journal and funding agency requirements are also similar. For all, it also appears that social aspects are more challenging than technological ones. Governance is more diverse, and linked to the discipline organization. CODATA, the RDA and the WDS can facilitate the establishment of disciplinary interoperability frameworks. Being problem-driven is also a key factor of success for building bridges to enable interdisciplinary research.Comment: Proceedings of the session "Building a disciplinary, world-wide data infrastructure" of SciDataCon 2016, held in Denver, CO, USA, 12-14 September 2016, to be published in ICSU CODATA Data Science Journal in 201

Supporting public decision making in policy deliberations: An ontological approach

This is the post-print version of the Paper. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 SpringerSupporting public decision making in policy deliberations has been a key objective of eParticipation which is an emerging area of eGovernment. EParticipation aims to enhance citizen involvement in public governance activities through the use of information and communication technologies. An innovative approach towards this objective is exploiting the potentials of semantic web technologies centred on conceptual knowledge models in the form of ontologies. Ontologies are generally defined as explicit human and computer shared views on the world of particular domains. In this paper, the potentials and benefits of using ontologies for policy deliberation processes are discussed. Previous work is then extended and synthesised to develop a deliberation ontology. The ontology aims to define the necessary semantics in order to structure and interrelate the stages and various activities of deliberation processes with legal information, participant stakeholders and their associated arguments. The practical implications of the proposed framework are illustrated.This work is funded by the European Commission under the 2006/1 eParticipation call

Secure data sharing and processing in heterogeneous clouds

The extensive cloud adoption among the European Public Sector Players empowered them to own and operate a range of cloud infrastructures. These deployments vary both in the size and capabilities, as well as in the range of employed technologies and processes. The public sector, however, lacks the necessary technology to enable effective, interoperable and secure integration of a multitude of its computing clouds and services. In this work we focus on the federation of private clouds and the approaches that enable secure data sharing and processing among the collaborating infrastructures and services of public entities. We investigate the aspects of access control, data and security policy languages, as well as cryptographic approaches that enable fine-grained security and data processing in semi-trusted environments. We identify the main challenges and frame the future work that serve as an enabler of interoperability among heterogeneous infrastructures and services. Our goal is to enable both security and legal conformance as well as to facilitate transparency, privacy and effectivity of private cloud federations for the public sector needs. © 2015 The Authors

Designing and managing Organizational Interoperability with organizational capabilities and roadmaps

This paper discusses organizational interoperability issues in through the study of two cases. Then it presents a framework which can help to design and manage this interoperability, by driving the development of “organizational capabilities”.Organization learning, Functional interoperability

Semantic query languages for knowledge-based web services in a construction context

Since the early 2000s, different frameworks were set up to enable web-based collaboration in building projects. Unfortunately, none of these initiatives was granted a long life. Recently, however, the use of web technologies in the building industry has been gaining momentum again, considered some promising technologies for reaching a more interoperable BIM practice. Specifically, this relates to (1) Linked Data and Semantic Web technologies, and (2) cloud-based applications. In order to combine these into a network of interlinked applications and datastores, an agreed-upon mechanism for automatic communication and data retrieval needs to be used. Apart from the W3C standard SPARQL, often considered too high a threshold for developers to implement, there are some recent GraphQL-based solutions that simplify the querying process and its implementation into web services. In this paper, we review two recent open source technologies based on GraphQL, that enable to query Linked Data on the web: GraphQL-LD and HyperGraphQL

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Specifications and Development of Interoperability Solution dedicated to Multiple Expertise Collaboration in a Design Framework

This paper describes the specifications of an interoperability platform based on the PPO (Product Process Organization) model developed by the French community IPPOP in the context of collaborative and innovative design. By using PPO model as a reference, this work aims to connect together heterogonous tools used by experts easing data and information exchanges. After underlining the growing needs of collaborative design process, this paper focuses on interoperability concept by describing current solutions and their limits. Then a solution based on the flexibility of the PPO model adapted to the philosophy of interoperability is proposed. To illustrate these concepts, several examples are more particularly described (robustness analysis, CAD and Product Lifecycle Management systems connections)

Towards an interoperable healthcare information infrastructure - working from the bottom up

Historically, the healthcare system has not made effective use of information technology. On the face of things, it would seem to provide a natural and richly varied domain in which to target benefit from IT solutions. But history shows that it is one of the most difficult domains in which to bring them to fruition. This paper provides an overview of the changing context and information requirements of healthcare that help to explain these characteristics.First and foremost, the disciplines and professions that healthcare encompasses have immense complexity and diversity to deal with, in structuring knowledge about what medicine and healthcare are, how they function, and what differentiates good practice and good performance. The need to maintain macro-economic stability of the health service, faced with this and many other uncertainties, means that management bottom lines predominate over choices and decisions that have to be made within everyday individual patient services. Individual practice and care, the bedrock of healthcare, is, for this and other reasons, more and more subject to professional and managerial control and regulation.One characteristic of organisations shown to be good at making effective use of IT is their capacity to devolve decisions within the organisation to where they can be best made, for the purpose of meeting their customers' needs. IT should, in this context, contribute as an enabler and not as an enforcer of good information services. The information infrastructure must work effectively, both top down and bottom up, to accommodate these countervailing pressures. This issue is explored in the context of infrastructure to support electronic health records.Because of the diverse and changing requirements of the huge healthcare sector, and the need to sustain health records over many decades, standardised systems must concentrate on doing the easier things well and as simply as possible, while accommodating immense diversity of requirements and practice. The manner in which the healthcare information infrastructure can be formulated and implemented to meet useful practical goals is explored, in the context of two case studies of research in CHIME at UCL and their user communities.Healthcare has severe problems both as a provider of information and as a purchaser of information systems. This has an impact on both its customer and its supplier relationships. Healthcare needs to become a better purchaser, more aware and realistic about what technology can and cannot do and where research is needed. Industry needs a greater awareness of the complexity of the healthcare domain, and the subtle ways in which information is part of the basic contract between healthcare professionals and patients, and the trust and understanding that must exist between them. It is an ideal domain for deeper collaboration between academic institutions and industry

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications