Knowledge formalization in experience feedback processes : an ontology-based approach

Because of the current trend of integration and interoperability of industrial systems, their size and complexity continue to grow making it more difficult to analyze, to understand and to solve the problems that happen in their organizations. Continuous improvement methodologies are powerful tools in order to understand and to solve problems, to control the effects of changes and finally to capitalize knowledge about changes and improvements. These tools involve suitably represent knowledge relating to the concerned system. Consequently, knowledge management (KM) is an increasingly important source of competitive advantage for organizations. Particularly, the capitalization and sharing of knowledge resulting from experience feedback are elements which play an essential role in the continuous improvement of industrial activities. In this paper, the contribution deals with semantic interoperability and relates to the structuring and the formalization of an experience feedback (EF) process aiming at transforming information or understanding gained by experience into explicit knowledge. The reuse of such knowledge has proved to have significant impact on achieving themissions of companies. However, the means of describing the knowledge objects of an experience generally remain informal. Based on an experience feedback process model and conceptual graphs, this paper takes domain ontology as a framework for the clarification of explicit knowledge and know-how, the aim of which is to get lessons learned descriptions that are significant, correct and applicable

Linked Data for Transaction Based Enterprise Interoperability

Interoperability is of major importance in B2B environments. Starting with EDI in the ‘80s, currently interoperability relies heavily on XML-based standards. Although having great impact, still issues remain to be solved for improving B2B interoperability. These issues include lack of dynamics, cost of implementations, adoption and cross-industry exchange. Linked Data (part of the Semantic Web) technology, although originally not intended for the B2B domain, holds the promise of overcoming some of these issues. This paper explores the potential of linked data technology within a B2B context by introducing and studying six scenarios for combining from light to heavy weight ‘traditional’ standards with Linked Data technology. This research shows that using Linked Data technology has most potential for specifying semantics formally. This provides the ‘best of both worlds’ solution, in which legacy systems remain unaltered, and developers are supported in (semi) automated generation of transformation schema’s to overcome different standards

Application-Layer Connector Synthesis

International audienceThe heterogeneity characterizing the systems populating the Ubiquitous Computing environment prevents their seamless interoperability. Heterogeneous protocols may be willing to cooperate in order to reach some common goal even though they meet dynamically and do not have a priori knowledge of each other. Despite numerous e orts have been done in the literature, the automated and run-time interoperability is still an open challenge for such environment. We consider interoperability as the ability for two Networked Systems (NSs) to communicate and correctly coordinate to achieve their goal(s). In this chapter we report the main outcomes of our past and recent research on automatically achieving protocol interoperability via connector synthesis. We consider application-layer connectors by referring to two conceptually distinct notions of connector: coordinator and mediator. The former is used when the NSs to be connected are already able to communicate but they need to be speci cally coordinated in order to reach their goal(s). The latter goes a step forward representing a solution for both achieving correct coordination and enabling communication between highly heterogeneous NSs. In the past, most of the works in the literature described e orts to the automatic synthesis of coordinators while, in recent years the focus moved also to the automatic synthesis of mediators. Within the Connect project, by considering our past experience on automatic coordinator synthesis as a baseline, we propose a formal theory of mediators and a related method for automatically eliciting a way for the protocols to interoperate. The solution we propose is the automated synthesis of emerging mediating connectors (i.e., mediators for short)

Reassembling the Republic of Letters - A Linked Data Approach

Peer reviewe

Methodology for collaborative enterprise reference ontology building

Dissertation presented at Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia of Universidade Nova de Lisboa to obtain the Master degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer ScienceIn the actual competitive world, doing business globally has become critical to the survival of most enterprises. It is becoming each day more and more difficult for small enterprises to grow by operating alone in the market. Hence, most companies started feeling the need for joining collaborative environments becoming easier to manage their products and services, and where they can offer better products with low production costs. To achieve this, enterprises require the establishment of cooperation agreements among each other with the idea of expanding their business networks. Consequently there is a demand for intelligent solutions capable of reinforcing partnerships and collaborations between enterprises, organised groups or singular people. However, due to the worldwide diversity of communities, a high number of knowledge representation elements, such as ontologies, which are not semantically coincident, have appeared representing the same segment of reality. Even operating in the same domain, enterprises do not understand each other, making the communication among various systems parties more difficult and sometimes impracticable. This dissertation responds to the needs identified above, proposing a collaborative methodology for ontology building, enriched with qualitative information collection methods, to effectively improve the approach to elicit knowledge from business domain experts, towards interoperable intelligent systems. This methodology allows different individuals from enterprises or organisations working on the same field or area, to join a collaborative environment for building a common ontology specific to their ―Domain of Discourse‖. To accomplish this, several steps are taken including terms and definitions gathering, glossary and thesaurus building, and ontology mapping

Preventing interoperability problems instead of solving them

Abstract A major source of interoperability problems on the Semantic Web is the different vocabularies used in metadata descriptions. This paper argues that instead of solving interoperability problems we should focus more effort on avoiding the problems in the first place, in the spirit of Albert Einstein's quote "Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them". For this purpose, coordinated collaborative development of open source vocabularies and centralized publication of them as public vocabulary services are proposed. Methods, guidelines, and tools to facilitate this have been developed on a national level in the Finnish FinnONTO initiative, and are now in pilot use with applications and promising first results

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017