An ontology co-design method for the co-creation of a continuous care ontology

Ontology engineering methodologies tend to emphasize the role of the knowledge engineer or require a very active role of domain experts. In this paper, a participatory ontology engineering method is described that holds the middle ground between these two 'extremes'. After thorough ethnographic research, an interdisciplinary group of domain experts closely interacted with ontology engineers and social scientists in a series of workshops. Once a preliminary ontology was developed, a dynamic care request system was built using the ontology. Additional workshops were organized involving a broader group of domain experts to ensure the applicability of the ontology across continuous care settings. The proposed method successfully actively engaged domain experts in constructing the ontology, without overburdening them. Its applicability is illustrated by presenting the co-created continuous care ontology. The lessons learned during the design and execution of the approach are also presented

Use of COTS functional analysis software as an IVHM design tool for detection and isolation of UAV fuel system faults

This paper presents a new approach to the development of health management solutions which can be applied to both new and legacy platforms during the conceptual design phase. The approach involves the qualitative functional modelling of a system in order to perform an Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) design – the placement of sensors and the diagnostic rules to be used in interrogating their output. The qualitative functional analysis was chosen as a route for early assessment of failures in complex systems. Functional models of system components are required for capturing the available system knowledge used during various stages of system and IVHM design. MADe™ (Maintenance Aware Design environment), a COTS software tool developed by PHM Technology, was used for the health management design. A model has been built incorporating the failure diagrams of five failure modes for five different components of a UAV fuel system. Thus an inherent health management solution for the system and the optimised sensor set solution have been defined. The automatically generated sensor set solution also contains a diagnostic rule set, which was validated on the fuel rig for different operation modes taking into account the predicted fault detection/isolation and ambiguity group coefficients. It was concluded that when using functional modelling, the IVHM design and the actual system design cannot be done in isolation. The functional approach requires permanent input from the system designer and reliability engineers in order to construct a functional model that will qualitatively represent the real system. In other words, the physical insight should not be isolated from the failure phenomena and the diagnostic analysis tools should be able to adequately capture the experience bases. This approach has been verified on a laboratory bench top test rig which can simulate a range of possible fuel system faults. The rig is fully instrumented in order to allow benchmarking of various sensing solution for fault detection/isolation that were identified using functional analysis

Empirical analysis of impacts of instance-driven changes in ontologies

Changes in the characterization of instances in digital contents are one of the rationales to change or evolve ontologies which support the domain. These changes can impacts on one or more of interrelated ontologies. Before implementing changes, their impact on the target ontology, other dependent ontologies or dependent systems should be analysed. We investigate three concerns for the determination of impacts of changes in ontologies: representation of changes to ensure minimum impact, impact determination and integrity determination. Key elements of our solution are the operationalization of change operations to minimize impacts, a parameterization approach for the determination of impacts, a categorization scheme for identified impacts, and prioritization technique for change operations based on the severity of impacts

e-Social Science and Evidence-Based Policy Assessment : Challenges and Solutions

Peer reviewedPreprin

Ontology-based patterns for the integration of business processes and enterprise application architectures

Increasingly, enterprises are using Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) as an approach to Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). SOA has the potential to bridge the gap between business and technology and to improve the reuse of existing applications and the interoperability with new ones. In addition to service architecture descriptions, architecture abstractions like patterns and styles capture design knowledge and allow the reuse of successfully applied designs, thus improving the quality of software. Knowledge gained from integration projects can be captured to build a repository of semantically enriched, experience-based solutions. Business patterns identify the interaction and structure between users, business processes, and data. Specific integration and composition patterns at a more technical level address enterprise application integration and capture reliable architecture solutions. We use an ontology-based approach to capture architecture and process patterns. Ontology techniques for pattern definition, extension and composition are developed and their applicability in business process-driven application integration is demonstrated

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

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

Enhancing Workflow with a Semantic Description of Scientific Intent

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A Novel Approach for Learning How to Automatically Match Job Offers and Candidate Profiles

Automatic matching of job offers and job candidates is a major problem for a number of organizations and job applicants that if it were successfully addressed could have a positive impact in many countries around the world. In this context, it is widely accepted that semi-automatic matching algorithms between job and candidate profiles would provide a vital technology for making the recruitment processes faster, more accurate and transparent. In this work, we present our research towards achieving a realistic matching approach for satisfactorily addressing this challenge. This novel approach relies on a matching learning solution aiming to learn from past solved cases in order to accurately predict the results in new situations. An empirical study shows us that our approach is able to beat solutions with no learning capabilities by a wide margin.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figure