Integrating Distributed Sources of Information for Construction Cost Estimating using Semantic Web and Semantic Web Service technologies

A construction project requires collaboration of several organizations such as owner, designer, contractor, and material supplier organizations. These organizations need to exchange information to enhance their teamwork. Understanding the information received from other organizations requires specialized human resources. Construction cost estimating is one of the processes that requires information from several sources including a building information model (BIM) created by designers, estimating assembly and work item information maintained by contractors, and construction material cost data provided by material suppliers. Currently, it is not easy to integrate the information necessary for cost estimating over the Internet. This paper discusses a new approach to construction cost estimating that uses Semantic Web technology. Semantic Web technology provides an infrastructure and a data modeling format that enables accessing, combining, and sharing information over the Internet in a machine processable format. The estimating approach presented in this paper relies on BIM, estimating knowledge, and construction material cost data expressed in a web ontology language. The approach presented in this paper makes the various sources of estimating data accessible as Simple Protocol and Resource Description Framework Query Language (SPARQL) endpoints or Semantic Web Services. We present an estimating application that integrates distributed information provided by project designers, contractors, and material suppliers for preparing cost estimates. The purpose of this paper is not to fully automate the estimating process but to streamline it by reducing human involvement in repetitive cost estimating activities

Enterprise application reuse: Semantic discovery of business grid services

Web services have emerged as a prominent paradigm for the development of distributed software systems as they provide the potential for software to be modularized in a way that functionality can be described, discovered and deployed in a platform independent manner over a network (e.g., intranets, extranets and the Internet). This paper examines an extension of this paradigm to encompass ‘Grid Services’, which enables software capabilities to be recast with an operational focus and support a heterogeneous mix of business software and data, termed a Business Grid - "the grid of semantic services". The current industrial representation of services is predominantly syntactic however, lacking the fundamental semantic underpinnings required to fulfill the goals of any semantically-oriented Grid. Consequently, the use of semantic technology in support of business software heterogeneity is investigated as a likely tool to support a diverse and distributed software inventory and user. Service discovery architecture is therefore developed that is (a) distributed in form, (2) supports distributed service knowledge and (3) automatically extends service knowledge (as greater descriptive precision is inferred from the operating application system). This discovery engine is used to execute several real-word scenarios in order to develop and test a framework for engineering such grid service knowledge. The examples presented comprise software components taken from a group of Investment Banking systems. Resulting from the research is a framework for engineering servic

Adaptation “in the Wild”: Ontology-Based Personalization of Open-Corpus Learning Material

Abstract. Teacher and students can use WWW as a limitless source of learning material for nearly any subject. Yet, such abundance of content comes with the problem of finding the right piece at the right time. Conventional adaptive educational systems cannot support personalized access to open-corpus learning material as they rely on manually constructed content models. This paper presents an approach to this problem that does not require intervention from a human expert. The approach has been implemented in an adaptive system that recommends students supplementary reading material and adaptively annotates it. The results of the evaluation experiment have demonstrated several significant effects of using the system on students ’ learning

Adaptation “in the Wild”: Ontology-Based Personalization of Open-Corpus Learning Material

Teacher and students can use WWW as a limitless source of learning material for nearly any subject. Yet, such abundance of content comes with the problem of finding the right piece at the right time. Conventional adaptive educational systems cannot support personalized access to open-corpus learning material as they rely on manually constructed content models. This paper presents an approach to this problem that does not require intervention from a human expert. The approach has been implemented in an adaptive system that recommends students supplementary reading material and adaptively annotates it. The results of the evaluation experiment have demonstrated several significant effects of using the system on students’ learning.\u

Technological Spaces: An Initial Appraisal

In this paper, we propose a high level view of technological spaces (TS) and relations among these spaces. A technological space is a working context with a set of associated concepts, body of knowledge, tools, required skills, and possibilities. It is often associated to a given user community with shared know-how, educational support, common literature and even workshop and conference regular meetings. Although it is difficult to give a precise definition, some TSs can be easily identified, e.g. the XML TS, the DBMS TS, the abstract syntax TS, the meta-model (OMG/MDA) TS, etc. The purpose of our work is not to define an abstract theory of technological spaces, but to figure out how to work more efficiently by using the best possibilities of each technology. To do so, we need a basic understanding of the similarities and differences between various TSs, and also of the possible operational bridges that will allow transferring the results obtained in one TS to other TS. We hope that the presented industrial vision may help us putting forward the idea that there could be more cooperation than competition among alternative technologies. Furthermore, as the spectrum of such available technologies is rapidly broadening, the necessity to offer clear guidelines when choosing practical solutions to engineering problems is becoming a must, not only for teachers but for project leaders as well

Forum Session at the First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC03)

The First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) was held in Trento, December 15-18, 2003. The focus of the conference ---Service Oriented Computing (SOC)--- is the new emerging paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing that has evolved from object-oriented and component computing to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Of the 181 papers submitted to the ICSOC conference, 10 were selected for the forum session which took place on December the 16th, 2003. The papers were chosen based on their technical quality, originality, relevance to SOC and for their nature of being best suited for a poster presentation or a demonstration. This technical report contains the 10 papers presented during the forum session at the ICSOC conference. In particular, the last two papers in the report ere submitted as industrial papers

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

IRS II: a framework and infrastructure for semantic web services

In this paper we describe IRS–II (Internet Reasoning Service) a framework and implemented infrastructure, whose main goal is to support the publication, location, composition and execution of heterogeneous web services, augmented with semantic descriptions of their functionalities. IRS–II has three main classes of features which distinguish it from other work on semantic web services. Firstly, it supports one-click publishing of standalone software: IRS–II automatically creates the appropriate wrappers, given pointers to the standalone code. Secondly, it explicitly distinguishes between tasks (what to do) and methods (how to achieve tasks) and as a result supports capability-driven service invocation; flexible mappings between services and problem specifications; and dynamic, knowledge-based service selection. Finally, IRS–II services are web service compatible – standard web services can be trivially published through the IRS–II and any IRS–II service automatically appears as a standard web service to other web service infrastructures. In the paper we illustrate the main functionalities of IRS–II through a scenario involving a distributed application in the healthcare domain

Knowledgezoom for java: A concept-based exam study tool with a zoomable open student model

This paper presents our attempt to develop a personalized exam preparation tool for Java/OOP classes based on a fine-grained concept model of Java knowledge. Our goal was to explore two most popular student model-based approaches: open student modeling and problem sequencing. The result of our work is a Java exam preparation tool, Knowledge Zoom. The tool combines an open concept-level student model component, Knowledge Explorer and a concept-based sequencing component, Knowledge Maximizer into a single interface. This paper presents both components of Knowledge Zoom, reports results of its evaluation, and discusses lessons learned. © 2013 IEEE