Analogy Queries in Information Systems -A New Challenge -Pre-Publication Copy -to appear in JIKM volume 12 issue 3

Abstract Besides the tremendous progress in Web-related technologies, interfaces to access the Web or large information systems have largely stayed at the level of keyword searches and categorical browsing. This paper introduces analogy queries as one of the essential techniques required to bridge the gap between today's interfaces and future interaction paradigms. The intuitive concept of analogies is directly derived from human cognition and communication practices, and is in fact often considered to be the core concept of human cognition. In brief, analogies form abstract relationships between concepts, which can be used to efficiently exchange information and knowledge needs or transmit even complex concepts including important connotations in a strictly humancentered and natural fashion. Building analogy-enabled information systems opens up a number of interesting scientific challenges, e.g., how does communication using analogies work? How can this process be represented? How can information systems understand what a user provided analogy actually means? How can analogies be discovered? This paper aims at discussing some of these questions and is intended as a corner stone of future research efforts

Adaptive User Interfaces for Intelligent E-Learning: Issues and Trends

Adaptive User Interfaces have a long history rooted in the emergence of such eminent technologies as Artificial Intelligence, Soft Computing, Graphical User Interface, JAVA, Internet, and Mobile Services. More specifically, the advent and advancement of the Web and Mobile Learning Services has brought forward adaptivity as an immensely important issue for both efficacy and acceptability of such services. The success of such a learning process depends on the intelligent context-oriented presentation of the domain knowledge and its adaptivity in terms of complexity and granularity consistent to the learner’s cognitive level/progress. Researchers have always deemed adaptive user interfaces as a promising solution in this regard. However, the richness in the human behavior, technological opportunities, and contextual nature of information offers daunting challenges. These require creativity, cross-domain synergy, cross-cultural and cross-demographic understanding, and an adequate representation of mission and conception of the task. This paper provides a review of state-of-the-art in adaptive user interface research in Intelligent Multimedia Educational Systems and related areas with an emphasis on core issues and future directions

Earth‐Observation Data Access: A Knowledge Discovery Concept for Payload Ground Segments

In recent years the ability to store large quantities of Earth Observation (EO) satellite images has greatly surpassed the ability to access and meaningfully extract information from it. The state-of-the-art of operational systems for Remote Sensing data access (in particular for images) allows queries by geographical location, time of acquisition or type of sensor. Nevertheless, this information is often less relevant than the content of the scene (e.g. specific scattering properties, structures, objects, etc.). Moreover, the continuous increase in the size of the archives and in the variety and complexity of EO sensors require new methodologies and tools - based on a shared knowledge - for information mining and management, in support of emerging applications (e.g.: change detection, global monitoring, disaster and risk management, image time series, etc.). In addition, the current Payload Ground Segments (PGS) are mainly designed for Long Term Data Preservation (LTDP), in this article we propose an alternative solution for enhancing the access to the data content. Our solution presents a knowledge discovery concept, whose intention is to implement a communication channel between the PGS (EO data sources) and the end-user who receives the content of the data sources coded in an understandable format associated with semantics and ready for the exploitation. The first implemented concepts were presented in Knowledge driven content based Image Information Mining (KIM) and Geospatial Information Retrieval and Indexing (GeoIRIS) system as examples of data mining systems. Our new concept is developed in a modular system composed of the following components 1) the data model generation implementing methods for extracting relevant descriptors (low-level features) of the sources (EO images), analyzing their metadata in order to complement the information, and combining with vector data sources coming from Geographical Information Systems. 2) A database management system, where the database structure supports the knowledge management, feature computation, and visualization tools because of the modules for analysis, indexing, training and retrieval are resolved into the database. 3) Data mining and knowledge discovery tools allowing the end-user to perform advanced queries and to assign semantic annotations to the image content. The low-level features are complemented with semantic annotations giving meaning to the image information. The semantic description is based on semi-supervised learning methods for spatio-temporal and contextual pattern discovery. 4) Scene understanding counting on annotation tools for helping the user to create scenarios using EO images as for example change detection analysis, etc. 5) Visual data mining providing Human-Machine Interfaces for navigating and browsing the archive using 2D or 3D representation. The visualization techniques perform an interactive loop in order to optimize the visual interaction with huge volumes of data of heterogeneous nature and the end-user

Integration of business intelligence based on three-level ontology services

Usually, integration of business intelligence (BI) from realistic telecom enterprise is by packing data warehouse (DW), OLAP, data mining and reporting from different vendors together. As a result, BI system users are transferred to a reporting system with reports, data models, dimensions and measures predefined by system designers. As a result of survey, 85% of DW projects failed to meet their intended objectives. In this paper, we investigate how to integrate BI packages into an adaptive and flexible knowledge portal by constructing an internal link and communication channel from top-level business concepts to underlying enterprise information systems (EIS). An approach of three-level ontology services is developed, which implements unified naming, directory and transport of ontology services, and ontology mapping and query parsing among conceptual view, analytical view and physical view from user interfaces through DW to EIS. Experiments on top of real telecom EIS shows that our solution for integrating BI presents much stronger power to support operational decision making more user-friendly and adoptively compared with those simply combining BI products presently available together. © 2004 IEEE

Factors Affecting the Accessibility of IT Artifacts: A Systematic Review

Accessibility awareness and development have improved in the past two decades, but many users still encounter accessibility barriers when using information technology (IT) artifacts (e.g., user interfaces and websites). Current research in information systems and human-computer interaction disciplines explores methods, techniques, and factors affecting the accessibility of IT artifacts for a particular population and provides solutions to address these barriers. However, design realized in one solution should be used to provide accessibility to the widest range of users, which requires an integration of solutions. To identify the factors that cause accessibility barriers and the solutions for users with different needs, a systematic literature review was conducted. This paper contributes to the existing body of knowledge by revealing (1) management- and development-level factors, and (2) user perspective factors affecting accessibility that address different accessibility barriers to different groups of population (based on the International Classification of Functioning by the World Health Organization). Based on these findings, we synthesize and illustrate the factors and solutions that need to be addressed when creating an accessible IT artifact

Learning from AI : new trends in database technology

Recently some researchers in the areas of database data modelling and knowledge representations in artificial intelligence have recognized that they share many common goals. In this survey paper we show the relationship between database and artificial intelligence research. We show that there has been a tendency for data models to incorporate more modelling techniques developed for knowledge representations in artificial intelligence as the desire to incorporate more application oriented semantics, user friendliness, and flexibility has increased. Increasing the semantics of the representation is the key to capturing the "reality" of the database environment, increasing user friendliness, and facilitating the support of multiple, possibly conflicting, user views of the information contained in a database

Evaluation of Cognitive Architectures for Cyber-Physical Production Systems

Cyber-physical production systems (CPPS) integrate physical and computational resources due to increasingly available sensors and processing power. This enables the usage of data, to create additional benefit, such as condition monitoring or optimization. These capabilities can lead to cognition, such that the system is able to adapt independently to changing circumstances by learning from additional sensors information. Developing a reference architecture for the design of CPPS and standardization of machines and software interfaces is crucial to enable compatibility of data usage between different machine models and vendors. This paper analysis existing reference architecture regarding their cognitive abilities, based on requirements that are derived from three different use cases. The results from the evaluation of the reference architectures, which include two instances that stem from the field of cognitive science, reveal a gap in the applicability of the architectures regarding the generalizability and the level of abstraction. While reference architectures from the field of automation are suitable to address use case specific requirements, and do not address the general requirements, especially w.r.t. adaptability, the examples from the field of cognitive science are well usable to reach a high level of adaption and cognition. It is desirable to merge advantages of both classes of architectures to address challenges in the field of CPPS in Industrie 4.0