Towards an Interaction-based Integration of MKM Services into End-User Applications

The Semantic Alliance (SAlly) Framework, first presented at MKM 2012, allows integration of Mathematical Knowledge Management services into typical applications and end-user workflows. From an architecture allowing invasion of spreadsheet programs, it grew into a middle-ware connecting spreadsheet, CAD, text and image processing environments with MKM services. The architecture presented in the original paper proved to be quite resilient as it is still used today with only minor changes. This paper explores extensibility challenges we have encountered in the process of developing new services and maintaining the plugins invading end-user applications. After an analysis of the underlying problems, I present an augmented version of the SAlly architecture that addresses these issues and opens new opportunities for document type agnostic MKM services.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure

A study of existing Ontologies in the IoT-domain

Several domains have adopted the increasing use of IoT-based devices to collect sensor data for generating abstractions and perceptions of the real world. This sensor data is multi-modal and heterogeneous in nature. This heterogeneity induces interoperability issues while developing cross-domain applications, thereby restricting the possibility of reusing sensor data to develop new applications. As a solution to this, semantic approaches have been proposed in the literature to tackle problems related to interoperability of sensor data. Several ontologies have been proposed to handle different aspects of IoT-based sensor data collection, ranging from discovering the IoT sensors for data collection to applying reasoning on the collected sensor data for drawing inferences. In this paper, we survey these existing semantic ontologies to provide an overview of the recent developments in this field. We highlight the fundamental ontological concepts (e.g., sensor-capabilities and context-awareness) required for an IoT-based application, and survey the existing ontologies which include these concepts. Based on our study, we also identify the shortcomings of currently available ontologies, which serves as a stepping stone to state the need for a common unified ontology for the IoT domain.Comment: Submitted to Elsevier JWS SI on Web semantics for the Internet/Web of Thing

NFV Based Gateways for Virtualized Wireless Sensors Networks: A Case Study

Virtualization enables the sharing of a same wireless sensor network (WSN) by multiple applications. However, in heterogeneous environments, virtualized wireless sensor networks (VWSN) raises new challenges such as the need for on-the-fly, dynamic, elastic and scalable provisioning of gateways. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging paradigm that can certainly aid in tackling these new challenges. It leverages standard virtualization technology to consolidate special-purpose network elements on top of commodity hardware. This article presents a case study on NFV based gateways for VWSNs. In the study, a VWSN gateway provider, operates and manages an NFV based infrastructure. We use two different brands of wireless sensors. The NFV infrastructure makes possible the dynamic, elastic and scalable deployment of gateway modules in this heterogeneous VWSN environment. The prototype built with Openstack as platform is described

Understanding platform-based product development : a competency-based perspective

In recent years, the competition in product development and innovation has intensified through increased demand heterogeneity and shorter product life cycles. An increasingly popular strategy to meet the mentioned challenges is the use of a platform-based approach to create a successful product family for the purpose of increasing variety, shortening lead-times and reducing costs. However, unlike the wellpublished benefits of platform-based product development, a clear gap in literature still exists when it comes to understanding how to implement and manage product families and their successive platforms. We do not know enough about the key attributes of platform-based product development which can contribute to a competitive advantage, which in turn leads to the success of a platform. In addition, the impacts of a turbulent environment on platform-based product development remain largely unknown. Given these limitations, our research is directed at building a framework to better manage platform-based product development from a competency perspective and specifically, we want to addresses the following research question: How can firms improve their platform-based product development performance, from a competency-based perspective? Based on existing literature and the interviews in four leading technology-driven companies, we propose the concept of product platform competency, and identify its antecedents. We hypothesize that such competency directly affects the performance of platform-based product development. However, these effects are moderated by the turbulence of the environment. To test these hypotheses, a large-scale survey is conducted in the United States. After analyzing the data by the means of structural equation modeling using LISREL 8.7 and hierarchical multiple regression using SPSS 15.0, we find sufficient empirical evidences to support most of the hypotheses. The results lend support to the concept of product platform competency which comprises reusability of subsystems, compatibility of subsystem interfaces and extensibility of platform-based products. Our results show that a formalized development process, design knowledge dissemination across platform-based products, continuity of platform-based product development team and existence of a champion in platform-based product development significantly affect product platform competency. Additionally, our findings further suggest that in a high technologically turbulent environment, some of these factors have even greater impact on product platform competency. Based on the results of this study, product platform competency can be considered as the underlying cause of high performance of platform-based product development. Therefore, managers are strongly encouraged to apply the aforementioned four management practices to improve their product platform competency, especially in a high technologically turbulent environment. This in turn should lead to reduction in the development cost and time

Semantic Modeling of Analytic-based Relationships with Direct Qualification

Successfully modeling state and analytics-based semantic relationships of documents enhances representation, importance, relevancy, provenience, and priority of the document. These attributes are the core elements that form the machine-based knowledge representation for documents. However, modeling document relationships that can change over time can be inelegant, limited, complex or overly burdensome for semantic technologies. In this paper, we present Direct Qualification (DQ), an approach for modeling any semantically referenced document, concept, or named graph with results from associated applied analytics. The proposed approach supplements the traditional subject-object relationships by providing a third leg to the relationship; the qualification of how and why the relationship exists. To illustrate, we show a prototype of an event-based system with a realistic use case for applying DQ to relevancy analytics of PageRank and Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search (HITS).Comment: Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE 9th International Conference on Semantic Computing (IEEE ICSC 2015