Feasible, Robust and Reliable Automation and Control for Autonomous Systems

The Special Issue book focuses on highlighting current research and developments in the automation and control field for autonomous systems as well as showcasing state-of-the-art control strategy approaches for autonomous platforms. The book is co-edited by distinguished international control system experts currently based in Sweden, the United States of America, and the United Kingdom, with contributions from reputable researchers from China, Austria, France, the United States of America, Poland, and Hungary, among many others. The editors believe the ten articles published within this Special Issue will be highly appealing to control-systems-related researchers in applications typified in the fields of ground, aerial, maritime vehicles, and robotics as well as industrial audiences

A Framework for Semantic Similarity Measures to enhance Knowledge Graph Quality

Precisely determining similarity values among real-world entities becomes a building block for data driven tasks, e.g., ranking, relation discovery or integration. Semantic Web and Linked Data initiatives have promoted the publication of large semi-structured datasets in form of knowledge graphs. Knowledge graphs encode semantics that describes resources in terms of several aspects or resource characteristics, e.g., neighbors, class hierarchies or attributes. Existing similarity measures take into account these aspects in isolation, which may prevent them from delivering accurate similarity values. In this thesis, the relevant resource characteristics to determine accurately similarity values are identified and considered in a cumulative way in a framework of four similarity measures. Additionally, the impact of considering these resource characteristics during the computation of similarity values is analyzed in three data-driven tasks for the enhancement of knowledge graph quality. First, according to the identified resource characteristics, new similarity measures able to combine two or more of them are described. In total four similarity measures are presented in an evolutionary order. While the first three similarity measures, OnSim, IC-OnSim and GADES, combine the resource characteristics according to a human defined aggregation function, the last one, GARUM, makes use of a machine learning regression approach to determine the relevance of each resource characteristic during the computation of the similarity. Second, the suitability of each measure for real-time applications is studied by means of a theoretical and an empirical comparison. The theoretical comparison consists on a study of the worst case computational complexity of each similarity measure. The empirical comparison is based on the execution times of the different similarity measures in two third-party benchmarks involving the comparison of semantically annotated entities. Ultimately, the impact of the described similarity measures is shown in three data-driven tasks for the enhancement of knowledge graph quality: relation discovery, dataset integration and evolution analysis of annotation datasets. Empirical results show that relation discovery and dataset integration tasks obtain better results when considering semantics encoded in semantic similarity measures. Further, using semantic similarity measures in the evolution analysis tasks allows for defining new informative metrics able to give an overview of the evolution of the whole annotation set, instead of the individual annotations like state-of-the-art evolution analysis frameworks

Monitoring oriented agile based web applications development methodology for small software firms in Jordan

Small software firms (SSF) is vital to the software industry in many countries as they provide substantial growth to their economy. In Jordan, most software companies that are involved with developing Web applications are small firms. However, the extent of applying best Web applications development and management practices in these firms is limited. Besides, the existing software development methods are still lack of monitoring the quality of process and product. As a result, the Web application being developed exceeds deadlines and budget, and not meeting user requirements. Therefore, this research aims to construct a new methodology referred as Monitoring Oriented Agile Based Web Applications Development (MOGWD) Methodology for SSF. This study introduced an Extended Agile Method by extending the Scrum method with Extreme Programming (XP) elements. The Extended Agile Method was improved by combining common steps of Web design method and incorporating the Goal Oriented Monitoring Method (GOMM). The GOMM has defined twenty goals. Each goal has one or more questions. The questions are answered through the defined metrics. There are 101 qualitative metrics for monitoring the process quality, and 37 quantitative metrics for monitoring the process and product quality. Moreover, the proposed MOGWD methodology defines four phases: Plan, Do, Check and Act. The MOGWD methodology was evaluated using expert review and case study. The evaluation results show that the MOGWD methodology has gained SSF practitioners’ satisfaction and found to be practical for the real environment. This study contributes to the field of Agile based development and Web applications measurement. It also provides SSF practitioners a development methodology that monitors the quality of the process and product for Web development

Un système de recherche d'information personnalisée basé sur la modélisation multidimensionnelle de l'utilisateur

Depuis l'explosion du Web, la Recherche d'Information (RI) s'est vue étendue et les moteurs de recherche sur le Web ont vu le jour. Les méthodes classiques de la RI, surtout destinées à des recherches textuelles simples, se sont retrouvées face à des documents de différents formats et des contenus riches. L'utilisateur, en réponse à cette avancée, est devenu plus exigeant quant aux résultats retournés par les systèmes de RI. La personnalisation tente de répondre à ces exigences en ayant pour objectif principal l'amélioration des résultats retournés à l'utilisateur en fonction de sa perception et de ses intérêts ainsi que de ses préférences. Le présent travail de thèse se situe à la croisée des différents aspects présentés et couvre cette problématique. Elle a pour objectif principal de proposer des solutions nouvelles et efficaces à cette problématique. Pour atteindre cet objectif, un système de personnalisation de la recherche spatiale et sémantique sur le Web et intégrant la modélisation de l'utilisateur, a été proposé. Ce système comprend deux volets : 1/ la modélisation de l'utilisateur ; 2/ la collaboration implicite des utilisateurs à travers la construction d'un réseau de modèles utilisateurs, construit itérativement lors des différentes recherches effectuées en ligne. Un prototype supportant le système proposé a été développé afin d'expérimenter et d'évaluer l'ensemble de la proposition. Ainsi, nous avons effectué un ensemble d'évaluation, dont les principales sont : a) l'évaluation de la qualité du modèle de l'utilisateur ; b) l'évaluation de l'efficacité de la recherche d'information ; c) l évaluation de l'efficacité de la recherche d'information intégrant les informations spatiales ; d) l'évaluation de la recherche exploitant le réseau d'utilisateurs. Les expérimentations menées montrent une amélioration de la personnalisation des résultats présentés par rapport à ceux obtenus par d'autres moteurs de recherche.The web explosion has led Information Retrieval (IR) to be extended and web search engines emergence. The conventional IR methods, usually intended for simple textual searches, faced new documents types and rich and scalable contents. The users, facing these evolutions, ask more for IR systems search results quality. In this context, the personalization main objective is improving results returned to the end user based sing on its perception and its interests and preferences. This thesis context is concerned with these different aspects. Its main objective is to propose new and effective solutions to the personalization problem. To achieve this goal, a spatial and semantic web personalization system integrating implicit user modeling is proposed. This system has two components: 1/ user modeling; /2 implicit users' collaboration through the construction of a users' models network. A system prototype was developed for the evaluation purpose that contains: a) user model quality evaluation; b) information retrieval quality evaluation; c) information retrieval quality evaluation with the spatial user model data; d) information retrieval quality evaluation with the whole user model data and the users' models network. Experiments showed amelioration in the personalized search results compared to a baseline web search.PARIS11-SCD-Bib. électronique (914719901) / SudocSudocFranceF

Combining SOA and BPM Technologies for Cross-System Process Automation

This paper summarizes the results of an industry case study that introduced a cross-system business process automation solution based on a combination of SOA and BPM standard technologies (i.e., BPMN, BPEL, WSDL). Besides discussing major weaknesses of the existing, custom-built, solution and comparing them against experiences with the developed prototype, the paper presents a course of action for transforming the current solution into the proposed solution. This includes a general approach, consisting of four distinct steps, as well as specific action items that are to be performed for every step. The discussion also covers language and tool support and challenges arising from the transformation

Legal Ontology for Nexus: Water, Energy and Food in EU Regulations

Objectives of the thesis are – (a) to identify the problems in water-energy-food nexus from ICT and Law point of view and to propose theoretically a legal knowledge framework for water-energy-food nexus in order to reduce those problems technologically, (b) to construct and implement legal ontology for nexus extracted from EU water, energy and food Regulations in OWL 2 language, which is a part of the grater work of implementing legal knowledge framework for water-energy-food nexus pro-posed through the compilation of objective (a). Considering these objectives, this thesis presents total five chapters. Chapter 1 is dedicated to fulfill the requirement of objective (a) and the rest chapters are devoted for objective (b). More particularly chapter four presents technical descriptions of the legal ontology for nexus, while chapter two and three articulate methodological aspect of it. Chapter five evaluates legal ontology for nexus. Additionally, besides the list of references, annex 1 delivers all asserted restrictions used in this ontology and annex 2 provides the links of all modules and documentations of legal ontology for nexus.Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate programme in “Law, Science and Technology

Towards Our Common Digital Future. Flagship Report.

In the report “Towards Our Common Digital Future”, the WBGU makes it clear that sustainability strategies and concepts need to be fundamentally further developed in the age of digitalization. Only if digital change and the Transformation towards Sustainability are synchronized can we succeed in advancing climate and Earth-system protection and in making social progress in human development. Without formative political action, digital change will further accelerate resource and energy consumption, and exacerbate damage to the environment and the climate. It is therefore an urgent political task to create the conditions needed to place digitalization at the service of sustainable development