A Web Services Component Discovery and Deployment Architecture for Simulation Model Reuse

CSPs are widely used in industry, although have yet to operate across organizational boundaries. Reuse across organizations is restricted by the same semantic issues that restrict the inter-organization use of web services. The current representations of web components are predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinning required to support discovery on the emerging semantic web. Semantic models, in the form of ontology, utilized by web service discovery and deployment architecture provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved through the use of simulation component ontology to identify required components at varying levels of granularity (including both abstract and specialized components). Selected simulation components are loaded into a CSP, modified according to the requirements of the new model and executed. The paper presents the development carried out within CSPI-PDG and Fluidity Group at Brunel University, of an ontology, connector software and web service discovery architecture. The ontology is extracted from simulation scenarios involving airport, restaurant and kitchen service suppliers. The ontology engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter-organization simulation, adopting a less intrusive interface between participants. Although specific to CSPs the work has wider implications for the simulation community

Semantic web service architecture for simulation model reuse

COTS simulation packages (CSPs) have proved popular in an industrial setting with a number of software vendors. In contrast, options for re-using existing models seem more limited. Re-use of simulation component models by collaborating organizations is restricted by the same semantic issues however that restrict the inter-organization use of web services. The current representations of web components are predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinning required to support discovery on the emerging semantic web. Semantic models, in the form of ontology, utilized by web service discovery and deployment architecture provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved through the use of simulation component ontology to identify required components at varying levels of granularity (including both abstract and specialized components). Selected simulation components are loaded into a CSP, modified according to the requirements of the new model and executed. The paper presents the development of ontology, connector software and web service discovery architecture in order to understand how such ontology are created, maintained and subsequently used for simulation model reuse. The ontology is extracted from health service simulation - comprising hospitals and the National Blood Service. The ontology engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter- organization simulation, uncovering domain semantics and adopting a less intrusive interface between participants. Although specific to CSPs the work has wider implications for the simulation community

Ontology engineering for simulation component reuse

Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) simulation packages (CSPs) are widely used in industry, although they have yet to operate across organizational boundaries. Reuse across organizations is restricted by the same semantic issues that restrict the inter-organizational use of web services. The current representations of web components are predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinning required to support discovery on the emerging semantic web. Semantic models, in the form of ontology, utilized by web service discovery and deployment architectures provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved through the use of simulation component ontologies to identify required components at varying levels of granularity (including both abstract and specialized components). Selected simulation components are loaded into a CSP, modified according to the requirements of the new model and executed. The paper presents the development of an ontology, connector software and web service discovery architecture. The ontology is extracted from simulation scenarios involving airport, restaurant and kitchen service suppliers. The ontology engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter-organizational simulation, adopting a less intrusive interface between participants. Although specific to CSPs the work has wider implications for the simulation community

Modelling Discourse-related terminology in OntoLingAnnot’s ontologies

Recently, computational linguists have shown great interest in discourse annotation in an attempt to capture the internal relations in texts. With this aim, we have formalized the linguistic knowledge associated to discourse into different linguistic ontologies. In this paper, we present the most prominent discourse-related terms and concepts included in the ontologies of the OntoLingAnnot annotation model. They show the different units, values, attributes, relations, layers and strata included in the discourse annotation level of the OntoLingAnnot model, within which these ontologies are included, used and evaluated

Semantic web services for simulation component reuse and interoperability: An ontology approach

Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) Simulation Packages (CSPs) are widely used in industry primarily due to economic factors associated with developing proprietary software platforms. Regardless of their widespread use, CSPs have yet to operate across organizational boundaries. The limited reuse and interoperability of CSPs are affected by the same semantic issues that restrict the inter-organizational use of software components and web services. The current representations of Web components are predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinning required to support discovery on the emerging Semantic Web. The authors present new research that partially alleviates the problem of limited semantic reuse and interoperability of simulation components in CSPs. Semantic models, in the form of ontologies, utilized by the authors’ Web service discovery and deployment architecture provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved through a simulation component ontology that is used to identify required components at varying levels of granularity (i.e. including both abstract and specialized components). Selected simulation components are loaded into a CSP, modified according to the requirements of the new model and executed. The research presented here is based on the development of an ontology, connector software, and a Web service discovery architecture. The ontology is extracted from simulation scenarios involving airport, restaurant and kitchen service suppliers. The ontology engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter-organizational simulation, by adopting a less intrusive interface between participants Although specific to CSPs this work has wider implications for the simulation community. The reason being that the community as a whole stands to benefit through from an increased awareness of the state-of-the-art in Software Engineering (for example, ontology-supported component discovery and reuse, and service-oriented computing), and it is expected that this will eventually lead to the development of a unique Software Engineering-inspired methodology to build simulations in future

Magpie: towards a semantic web browser

Web browsing involves two tasks: finding the right web page and then making sense of its content. So far, research has focused on supporting the task of finding web resources through ‘standard’ information retrieval mechanisms, or semantics-enhanced search. Much less attention has been paid to the second problem. In this paper we describe Magpie, a tool which supports the interpretation of web pages. Magpie offers complementary knowledge sources, which a reader can call upon to quickly gain access to any background knowledge relevant to a web resource. Magpie automatically associates an ontologybased semantic layer to web resources, allowing relevant services to be invoked within a standard web browser. Hence, Magpie may be seen as a step towards a semantic web browser. The functionality of Magpie is illustrated using examples of how it has been integrated with our lab’s web resources

Ontology-based information extraction from learning management systems

In this work we present a system for information extraction from Learning Management Systems. This system is ontology-based. It retrieves information according to the structure of the ontology to populate the ontology. We graphically present statistics about the ontology data. These statistics present latent knowledge which is difficult to see in the traditional Learning Management System. To answer questions about the ontology, a question answering system was developed using Natural Language Processing in the conversion of the natural language question into an ontology query language; Sumário: Extração de Informação de Sistemas de Gestão para Educação Usando Ontologias Neste dissertação apresentamos um sistema de extracção de informação de sistemas de gestão para educação (Learning Management Systems). Este sistema é baseado em ontologias e extrai informação de acordo com a estrutura da ontologia para a popular. Também permite apresentar graficamente algumas estatísticas sobre os dados da ontologia. Estas estatísticas revelam o conhecimento latente que é difícil de ver num sistema tradicional de gestão para a educação. Para poder responder a perguntas sobre os dados da ontologia, um sistema de resposta automática a perguntas em língua natural foi desenvolvido usando Processamento de Língua Natural para converter as perguntas para linguagem de interrogação de ontologias

Linking Discourse Marker Inventories

The paper describes the first comprehensive edition of machine-readable discourse marker lexicons. Discourse markers such as and, because, but, though or thereafter are essential communicative signals in human conversation, as they indicate how an utterance relates to its communicative context. As much of this information is implicit or expressed differently in different languages, discourse parsing, context-adequate natural language generation and machine translation are considered particularly challenging aspects of Natural Language Processing. Providing this data in machine-readable, standard-compliant form will thus facilitate such technical tasks, and moreover, allow to explore techniques for translation inference to be applied to this particular group of lexical resources that was previously largely neglected in the context of Linguistic Linked (Open) Data

Linking discourse marker inventories

The paper describes the first comprehensive edition of machine-readable discourse marker lexicons. Discourse markers such as and, because, but, though or thereafter are essential communicative signals in human conversation, as they indicate how an utterance relates to its communicative context. As much of this information is implicit or expressed differently in different languages, discourse parsing, context-adequate natural language generation and machine translation are considered particularly challenging aspects of Natural Language Processing. Providing this data in machine-readable, standard-compliant form will thus facilitate such technical tasks, and moreover, allow to explore techniques for translation inference to be applied to this particular group of lexical resources that was previously largely neglected in the context of Linguistic Linked (Open) Data

Introduction: Modeling, Learning and Processing of Text-Technological Data Structures

Researchers in many disciplines, sometimes working in close cooperation, have been concerned with modeling textual data in order to account for texts as the prime information unit of written communication. The list of disciplines includes computer science and linguistics as well as more specialized disciplines like computational linguistics and text technology. What many of these efforts have in common is the aim to model textual data by means of abstract data types or data structures that support at least the semi-automatic processing of texts in any area of written communication