A Semantic-Based Information Management System to Support Innovative Product Design

International competition and the rapidly global economy, unified by improved communication and transportation, offer to the consumers an enormous choice of goods and services. The result is that companies now require quality, value, time to market and innovation to be successful in order to win the increasing competition. In the engineering sector this is traduced in need of optimization of the design process and in maximization of re-use of data and knowledge already existing in the company. The “SIMI-Pro” (Semantic Information Management system for Innovative Product design) system addresses specific deficiencies in the conceptual phase of product design when knowledge management, if applied, is often sectorial. Its main contribution is in allowing easy, fast and centralized collection of data from multiple sources and in supporting the retrieval and re-use of a wide range of data that will help stylists and engineers shortening the production cycle. SIMI-Pro will be one of the first prototypes to base its information management and its knowledge sharing system on process ontology and it will demonstrate how the use of centralized network systems, coupled with Semantic Web technologies, can improve inter-working activities and interdisciplinary knowledge sharing

Knowledge, management and intelligent decision support for protection scheme design and application in electrical power systems

The paper describes a research project carried out inconjunction with two major UK utilities, focusing on the introduction of knowledge management and intelligent decision support to the existing protection design and application processes operated within both companies. A brief overview is provided of the generic design process, and the development of the web-based Design Engineering Knowledge Application System (DEKAS). This system incorporates intelligent case based reasoning (CBR) functionality to address the knowledge management and decision support requirements of each company's design process. The perceived key benefits of DEKAS relating to the management and utilisation of the data, information and knowledge throughout the protection design process is also discussed

Enterprise engineering using semantic technologies

Modern Enterprises are facing unprecedented challenges in every aspect of their businesses: from marketing research, invention of products, prototyping, production, sales to billing. Innovation is the key to enhancing enterprise performances and knowledge is the main driving force in creating innovation. The identification and effective management of valuable knowledge, however, remains an illusive topic. Knowledge management (KM) techniques, such as enterprise process modelling, have long been recognised for their value and practiced as part of normal business. There are plentiful of KM techniques. However, what is still lacking is a holistic KM approach that enables one to fully connect KM efforts with existing business knowledge and practices already in IT systems, such as organisational memories. To address this problem, we present an integrated three-dimensional KM approach that supports innovative semantics technologies. Its automated formal methods allow us to tap into modern business practices and capitalise on existing knowledge. It closes the knowledge management cycle with user feedback loops. Since we are making use of reliable existing knowledge and methods, new knowledge can be extracted with less effort comparing with another method where new information has to be created from scratch

Knowledge management support for enterprise distributed systems

Explosion of information and increasing demands on semantic processing web applications have software systems to their limits. To address the problem we propose a semantic based formal framework (ADP) that makes use of promising technologies to enable knowledge generation and retrieval. We argue that this approach is cost effective, as it reuses and builds on existing knowledge and structure. It is also a good starting point for creating an organisational memory and providing knowledge management functions

Towards an Ontology Metadata Standard

In this poster, we present (i) a proposal for a metadata standard, known as Ontology Metadata Vocabulary (OMV) which is based on discussions in the EU IST thematic network of excellence Knowledge Web1 and (ii) two complementary reference implementations which show the benefit of such a standard in decentralized and centralized scenarios, i.e. the Oyster P2P system and the Onthology metadata portal

Web development evolution: the business perspective on security

Protection of data, information, and knowledge is a hot topic in today’s business environment. Societal, legislative and consumer pressures are forcing companies to examine business strategies, modify processes and acknowledge security to accept and defend accountability. Research indicates that a significant portion of the financial losses is due to straight forward software design errors. Security should be addressed throughout the application development process via an independent methodology containing customizable components. The methodology is designed to integrate with an organization’s existing software development processes while providing structure to implement secure applications, helping companies mitigate hard and soft costs

Using ontologies to support and critique decisions

Supporting decision making in the working environment has long being pursued by practitioners across a variety of fields, ranging from sociology and operational research to cognitive and computer scientists. A number of computer-supported systems and various technologies have been used over the years, but as we move into more global and flexible organisational structures, new technologies and challenges arise. In this paper, I argue for an ontology-based solution and present some of the early prototypes we have been developing, assess their impact on the decision making process and elaborate on the costs involved

Revisiting revisitation in computer interaction: organic bookmark management.

According to Milic-Frayling et al. (2004), there are two general ways of user browsing i.e. search (finding a website where the user has never visited before) and revisitation (returning to a website where the user has visited in the past). The issue of search is relevant to search engine technology, whilst revisitation concerns web usage and browser history mechanisms. The support for revisitation is normally through a set of functional built-in icons e.g. History, Back, Forward and Bookmarks. Nevertheless, for returning web users, they normally find it is easier and faster to re-launch an online search again, rather than spending time to find a particular web site from their personal bookmark and history records. Tauscher and Greenberg (1997) showed that revisiting web pages forms up to 58% of the recurrence rate of web browsing. Cockburn and McKenzie (2001) also stated that 81% of web pages have been previously visited by the user. According to Obendorf et al. (2007), revisitation can be divided into four classifications based on time: short-term (72.6% revisits within an hour), medium-term (12% revisits within a day and 7.8% revisits within a week), and long-term (7.6% revisits longer than a week)

JEERP: Energy Aware Enterprise Resource Planning

Ever increasing energy costs, and saving requirements, especially in enterprise contexts, are pushing the limits of Enterprise Resource Planning to better account energy, with component-level asset granularity. Using an application-oriented approach we discuss the different aspects involved in designing Energy Aware ERPs and we show a prototypical open source implementation based on the Dog Domotic Gateway and the Oratio ER

Semantic security: specification and enforcement of semantic policies for security-driven collaborations

Collaborative research can often have demands on finer-grained security that go beyond the authentication-only paradigm as typified by many e-Infrastructure/Grid based solutions. Supporting finer-grained access control is often essential for domains where the specification and subsequent enforcement of authorization policies is needed. The clinical domain is one area in particular where this is so. However it is the case that existing security authorization solutions are fragile, inflexible and difficult to establish and maintain. As a result they often do not meet the needs of real world collaborations where robustness and flexibility of policy specification and enforcement, and ease of maintenance are essential. In this paper we present results of the JISC funded Advanced Grid Authorisation through Semantic Technologies (AGAST) project (www.nesc.ac.uk/hub/projects/agast) and show how semantic-based approaches to security policy specification and enforcement can address many of the limitations with existing security solutions. These are demonstrated into the clinical trials domain through the MRC funded Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies (VOTES) project (www.nesc.ac.uk/hub/projects/votes) and the epidemiological domain through the JISC funded SeeGEO project (www.nesc.ac.uk/hub/projects/seegeo)