Factors shaping the evolution of electronic documentation systems

The main goal is to prepare the space station technical and managerial structure for likely changes in the creation, capture, transfer, and utilization of knowledge. By anticipating advances, the design of Space Station Project (SSP) information systems can be tailored to facilitate a progression of increasingly sophisticated strategies as the space station evolves. Future generations of advanced information systems will use increases in power to deliver environmentally meaningful, contextually targeted, interconnected data (knowledge). The concept of a Knowledge Base Management System is emerging when the problem is focused on how information systems can perform such a conversion of raw data. Such a system would include traditional management functions for large space databases. Added artificial intelligence features might encompass co-existing knowledge representation schemes; effective control structures for deductive, plausible, and inductive reasoning; means for knowledge acquisition, refinement, and validation; explanation facilities; and dynamic human intervention. The major areas covered include: alternative knowledge representation approaches; advanced user interface capabilities; computer-supported cooperative work; the evolution of information system hardware; standardization, compatibility, and connectivity; and organizational impacts of information intensive environments

HYPERMEDIA, INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND ORGANIZATIONS: A RESEARCH AGENDA

Although hypermedia systems are becoming more sophisticated and readily available as of thee shelf products, there are few hypermedia applications within business and industrial organizations. This paper argues that this phenomena is rooted in the concept of hypermedia applications as standalone programs. Larger acceptance of hypermedia within organizations will occur once this technology is better integrated with other organizational systems and applied to carefully selected tasks. The paper identifies three areas for research in this context: the tasks perspective, which deals with selecting tasks for which to develop hypermedia applications, the knowledge perspective, which deals with representing and managing the knowledge processed by organizations, and the integration perspective, which deals with technical issues in software integration. This paper suggests that solutions to the problems presented will prompt the acceptance of hypermedia technology within organizations.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web

HYPERMEDIA, INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND ORGANIZATIONS: A RESEARCH AGENDA

Although hypermedia systems are becoming more sophisticated and readily available as of thee shelf products, there are few hypermedia applications within business and industrial organizations. This paper argues that this phenomena is rooted in the concept of hypermedia applications as standalone programs. Larger acceptance of hypermedia within organizations will occur once this technology is better integrated with other organizational systems and applied to carefully selected tasks. The paper identifies three areas for research in this context: the tasks perspective, which deals with selecting tasks for which to develop hypermedia applications, the knowledge perspective, which deals with representing and managing the knowledge processed by organizations, and the integration perspective, which deals with technical issues in software integration. This paper suggests that solutions to the problems presented will prompt the acceptance of hypermedia technology within organizations.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

A Survey of Applications and Research in Integrated Design Systems Technology

The initial part of the study was begun with a combination of literature searches, World Wide Web searches, and contacts with individuals and companies who were known to members of our team to have an interest in topics that seemed to be related to our study. There is a long list of such topics, such as concurrent engineering, design for manufacture, life-cycle engineering, systems engineering, systems integration, systems design, design systems, integrated product and process approaches, enterprise integration, integrated product realization, and similar terms. These all capture, at least in part, the flavor of what we describe here as integrated design systems. An inhibiting factor in this inquiry was the absence of agreed terminology for the study of integrated design systems. It is common for the term to be applied to what are essentially augmented Computer-Aided Design (CAD) systems, which are integrated only to the extent that agreements have been reached to attach proprietary extensions to proprietary CAD programs. It is also common for some to use the term integrated design systems to mean a system that applies only, or mainly, to the design phase of a product life cycle. It is likewise common for many of the terms listed earlier to be used as synonyms for integrated design systems. We tried to avoid this ambiguity by adopting the definition of integrated design systems that is implied in the introductory notes that we provided to our contacts, cited earlier. We thus arrived at this definition: Integrated Design Systems refers to the integration of the different tools and processes that comprise the engineering, of complex systems. It takes a broad view of the engineering of systems, to include consideration of the entire product realization process and the product life cycle. An important aspect of integrated design systems is the extent to which they integrate existing, "islands of automation" into a comprehensive design and product realization environment. As the study progressed, we relied increasingly upon a networking approach to lead us to new information. The departure point for such searches often was a government-sponsored project or a company initiative. The advantage of this approach was that short conversations with knowledgeable persons would usually cut through confusion over differences of terminology, thereby somewhat reducing the search space of the study. Even so, it was not until late in our eight-month inquiry that we began to see signs of convergence of the search, in the sense that a number of the latest inquiries began to turn up references to earlier contacts. As suggested above, this convergence often occurred with respect to particular government or company projects

EXPRESS: Resource-oriented and RESTful Semantic Web services

This thesis investigates an approach that simplifies the development of Semantic Web services (SWS) by removing the need for additional semantic descriptions.The most actively researched approaches to Semantic Web services introduce explicit semantic descriptions of services that are in addition to the existing semantic descriptions of the service domains. This increases their complexity and design overhead. The need for semantically describing the services in such approaches stems from their foundations in service-oriented computing, i.e. the extension of already existing service descriptions. This thesis demonstrates that adopting a resource-oriented approach based on REST will, in contrast to service-oriented approaches, eliminate the need for explicit semantic service descriptions and service vocabularies. This reduces the development efforts while retaining the significant functional capabilities.The approach proposed in this thesis, called EXPRESS (Expressing RESTful Semantic Services), utilises the similarities between REST and the Semantic Web, such as resource realisation, self-describing representations, and uniform interfaces. The semantics of a service is elicited from a resource’s semantic description in the domain ontology and the semantics of the uniform interface, hence eliminating the need for additional semantic descriptions. Moreover, stub-generation is a by-product of the mapping between entities in the domain ontology and resources.EXPRESS was developed to test the feasibility of eliminating explicit service descriptions and service vocabularies or ontologies, to explore the restrictions placed on domain ontologies as a result, to investigate the impact on the semantic quality of the description, and explore the benefits and costs to developers. To achieve this, an online demonstrator that allows users to generate stubs has been developed. In addition, a matchmaking experiment was conducted to show that the descriptions of the services are comparable to OWL-S in terms of their ability to be discovered, while improving the efficiency of discovery. Finally, an expert review was undertaken which provided evidence of EXPRESS’s simplicity and practicality when developing SWS from scratch

Overview of Digital Library Components and Developments

Digital libraries are being built upon a firm foundation of prior work as the high-end information systems of the future. A component architecture approach is becoming popular, with well established support for key components like the repository, especially through the Open Archives Initiative. We consider digital objects, metadata, harvesting, indexing, searching, browsing, rights management, linking, and powerful interfaces. Flexible interaction will be possible through a variety of architectures, using buses, agents, and other technologies. The field as a whole is undergoing rapid growth, supported by advances in storage, processing, networking, algorithms, and interaction. There are many initiatives and developments, including those supporting education, and these will certainly be of benefit in Latin America

Highly Interactive Web-Based Courseware

Zukünftige Lehr-/Lernprogramme sollen als vernetzte Systeme die Lernenden befähigen, Lerninhalte zu erforschen und zu konstruieren, sowie Verständnisschwierigkeiten und Gedanken in der Lehr-/Lerngemeinschaft zu kommunizieren. Lehrmaterial soll dabei in digitale Lernobjekte übergeführt, kollaborativ von Programmierern, Pädagogen und Designern entwickelt und in einer Datenbank archiviert werden, um von Lehrern und Lernenden eingesetzt, angepasst und weiterentwickelt zu werden. Den ersten Schritt in diese Richtung machte die Lerntechnologie, indem sie Wiederverwendbarkeit und Kompabilität für hypermediale Kurse spezifizierte. Ein größeres Maß an Interaktivität wird bisher allerdings noch nicht in Betracht gezogen. Jedes interaktive Lernobjekt wird als autonome Hypermedia-Einheit angesehen, aufwändig in der Erstellung, und weder mehrstufig verschränk- noch anpassbar, oder gar adäquat spezifizierbar. Dynamische Eigenschaften, Aussehen und Verhalten sind fest vorgegeben. Die vorgestellte Arbeit konzipiert und realisiert Lerntechnologie für hypermediale Kurse unter besonderer Berücksichtigung hochgradig interaktiver Lernobjekte. Innovativ ist dabei zunächst die mehrstufige, komponenten-basierte Technologie, die verschiedenste strukturelle Abstufungen von kompletten Lernobjekten und Werkzeugsätzen bis hin zu Basiskomponenten und Skripten, einzelnen Programmanweisungen, erlaubt. Zweitens erweitert die vorgeschlagene Methodik Kollaboration und individuelle Anpassung seitens der Teilnehmer eines hypermedialen Kurses auf die Software-Ebene. Komponenten werden zu verknüpfbaren Hypermedia-Objekten, die in der Kursdatenbank verwaltet und von allen Kursteilnehmern bewertet, mit Anmerkungen versehen und modifiziert werden. Neben einer detaillierten Beschreibung der Lerntechnologie und Entwurfsmuster für interaktive Lernobjekte sowie verwandte hypermediale Kurse wird der Begriff der Interaktivität verdeutlicht, indem eine kombinierte technologische und symbolische Definition von Interaktionsgraden vorgestellt und daraus ein visuelles Skriptschema abgeleitet wird, welches Funktionalität übertragbar macht. Weiterhin wird die Evolution von Hypermedia und Lehr-/Lernprogrammen besprochen, um wesentliche Techniken für interaktive, hypermediale Kurse auszuwählen. Die vorgeschlagene Architektur unterstützt mehrsprachige, alternative Inhalte, bietet konsistente Referenzen und ist leicht zu pflegen, und besitzt selbst für interaktive Inhalte Online-Assistenten. Der Einsatz hochgradiger Interaktivität in Lehr-/Lernprogrammen wird mit hypermedialen Kursen im Bereich der Computergraphik illustriert.The grand vision of educational software is that of a networked system enabling the learner to explore, discover, and construct subject matters and communicate problems and ideas with other community members. Educational material is transformed into reusable learning objects, created collaboratively by developers, educators, and designers, preserved in a digital library, and utilized, adapted, and evolved by educators and learners. Recent advances in learning technology specified reusability and interoperability in Web-based courseware. However, great interactivity is not yet considered. Each interactive learning object represents an autonomous hypermedia entity, laborious to create, impossible to interlink and to adapt in a graduated manner, and hard to specify. Dynamic attributes, the look and feel, and functionality are predefined. This work designs and realizes learning technology for Web-based courseware with special regard to highly interactive learning objects. The innovative aspect initially lies in the multi-level, component-based technology providing a graduated structuring. Components range from complex learning objects to toolkits to primitive components and scripts. Secondly, the proposed methodologies extend community support in Web-based courseware – collaboration and personalization – to the software layer. Components become linkable hypermedia objects and part of the courseware repository, rated, annotated, and modified by all community members. In addition to a detailed description of technology and design patterns for interactive learning objects and matching Web-based courseware, the thesis clarifies the denotation of interactivity in educational software formulating combined levels of technological and symbolical interactivity, and deduces a visual scripting metaphor for transporting functionality. Further, it reviews the evolution of hypermedia and educational software to extract substantial techniques for interactive Web-based courseware. The proposed framework supports multilingual, alternative content, provides link consistency and easy maintenance, and includes state-driven online wizards also for interactive content. The impact of great interactivity in educational software is illustrated with courseware in the Computer Graphics domain

A Virtual University Infrastructure For Orthopaedic Surgical Training With Integrated Simulation

This thesis pivots around the fulcrum of surgical, educational and technological factors. Whilst there is no single conclusion drawn, it is a multidisciplinary thesis exploring the juxtaposition of different academic domains that have a significant influence upon each other. The relationship centres on the engineering and computer science factors in learning technologies for surgery. Following a brief introduction to previous efforts developing surgical simulation, this thesis considers education and learning in orthopaedics, the design and building of a simulator for shoulder surgery. The thesis considers the assessment of such tools and embedding into a virtual learning environment. It explains how the performed experiments clarified issues and their actual significance. This leads to discussion of the work and conclusions are drawn regarding the progress of integration of distributed simulation within the healthcare environment, suggesting how future work can proceed