Semantic Description, Publication and Discovery of Workflows in myGrid

The bioinformatics scientific process relies on in silico experiments, which are experiments executed in full in a computational environment. Scientists wish to encode the designs of these experiments as workflows because they provide minimal, declarative descriptions of the designs, overcoming many barriers to the sharing and re-use of these designs between scientists and enable the use of the most appropriate services available at any one time. We anticipate that the number of workflows will increase quickly as more scientists begin to make use of existing workflow construction tools to express their experiment designs. Discovery then becomes an increasingly hard problem, as it becomes more difficult for a scientist to identify the workflows relevant to their particular research goals amongst all those on offer. While many approaches exist for the publishing and discovery of services, there have been few attempts to address where and how authors of experimental designs should advertise the availability of their work or how relevant workflows can be discovered with minimal effort from the user. As the users designing and adapting experiments will not necessarily have a computer science background, we also have to consider how publishing and discovery can be achieved in such a way that they are not required to have detailed technical knowledge of workflow scripting languages. Furthermore, we believe they should be able to make use of others' expert knowledge (the semantics) of the given scientific domain. In this paper, we define the issues related to the semantic description, publishing and discovery of workflows, and demonstrate how the architecture created by the myGrid project aids scientists in this process. We give a walk-through of how users can construct, publish, annotate, discover and enact workflows via the user interfaces of the myGrid architecture; we then describe novel middleware protocols, making use of the Semantic Web technologies RDF and OWL to support workflow publishing and discovery

HLA-Transparent Distributed Simulation of Agent-based Systems

Applied mathematic

Distributed agent-based building evacuation simulator

The optimisation of the evacuation of a building plays a fundamental role in emergency situations. The behaviour of individuals, the directions that civilians receive, and the actions of the emergency personnel, will affect the success of the operation. We describe a simulation system that represents the individual, intelligent, and interacting agents that cooperate and compete while evacuating the building. The system also takes into account detailed information about the building and the sensory capabilities that it may contain. Since the level of detail represented in such a simulation can lead to computational needs that grow at least as a polynomial function of the number of the simulated agents, we propose an agent-oriented Distributed Building Evacuation Simulator (DBES). The DBES is integrated with a wireless sensor network which offers a closed loop representation of the evacuation procedure, including the sensed data and the emergency decision making

The Semantic Web in Federated Information Systems: A Space Physics Case Study

This paper presents a new theoretical contribution that provides a middle-of-the-road approach to formal ontologies in federated information systems. NASA’s space physics domain, like many other domains, is relatively unfamiliar with the emerging Semantic Web. This work offers a new framework that garners the benefits of formal logic yet shields participants and users from the details of the technology. Moreover, the results of a case study involving the utilization of the Semantic Web within NASA’s space physics domain are presented. A real-world search and retrieval system, relying on relational database technology, is compared against a near identical system that incorporates a formal ontology. The efficiency, efficacy, and implementation details of the Semantic Web are compared against the established relational database technology

Context Aware Computing for The Internet of Things: A Survey

As we are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of sensors deployed around the world is growing at a rapid pace. Market research has shown a significant growth of sensor deployments over the past decade and has predicted a significant increment of the growth rate in the future. These sensors continuously generate enormous amounts of data. However, in order to add value to raw sensor data we need to understand it. Collection, modelling, reasoning, and distribution of context in relation to sensor data plays critical role in this challenge. Context-aware computing has proven to be successful in understanding sensor data. In this paper, we survey context awareness from an IoT perspective. We present the necessary background by introducing the IoT paradigm and context-aware fundamentals at the beginning. Then we provide an in-depth analysis of context life cycle. We evaluate a subset of projects (50) which represent the majority of research and commercial solutions proposed in the field of context-aware computing conducted over the last decade (2001-2011) based on our own taxonomy. Finally, based on our evaluation, we highlight the lessons to be learnt from the past and some possible directions for future research. The survey addresses a broad range of techniques, methods, models, functionalities, systems, applications, and middleware solutions related to context awareness and IoT. Our goal is not only to analyse, compare and consolidate past research work but also to appreciate their findings and discuss their applicability towards the IoT.Comment: IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials Journal, 201

Delivering knowledge in the field: A telecommunications service provision and maintenance case

This paper proposes a novel approach to providing knowledge management services in a business process wherein field engineers are the main process actors, providing and maintaining telecommunications services. Cooperating multi-agents play a central role for the provision of knowledge management services by integrating heterogeneous systems to collect related knowledge for the execution of mobile tasks. The proposed system is expected to increase both the performance of the mobile workforce and customer satisfaction by supporting and encouraging knowledge sharing

The Semantic Grid: A future e-Science infrastructure

e-Science offers a promising vision of how computer and communication technology can support and enhance the scientific process. It does this by enabling scientists to generate, analyse, share and discuss their insights, experiments and results in an effective manner. The underlying computer infrastructure that provides these facilities is commonly referred to as the Grid. At this time, there are a number of grid applications being developed and there is a whole raft of computer technologies that provide fragments of the necessary functionality. However there is currently a major gap between these endeavours and the vision of e-Science in which there is a high degree of easy-to-use and seamless automation and in which there are flexible collaborations and computations on a global scale. To bridge this practice–aspiration divide, this paper presents a research agenda whose aim is to move from the current state of the art in e-Science infrastructure, to the future infrastructure that is needed to support the full richness of the e-Science vision. Here the future e-Science research infrastructure is termed the Semantic Grid (Semantic Grid to Grid is meant to connote a similar relationship to the one that exists between the Semantic Web and the Web). In particular, we present a conceptual architecture for the Semantic Grid. This architecture adopts a service-oriented perspective in which distinct stakeholders in the scientific process, represented as software agents, provide services to one another, under various service level agreements, in various forms of marketplace. We then focus predominantly on the issues concerned with the way that knowledge is acquired and used in such environments since we believe this is the key differentiator between current grid endeavours and those envisioned for the Semantic Grid