Ontologies for context-aware applications

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Scalable software framework for real-time data processing in the railway environment

Background: Ticks are obligate haematophagous ectoparasites of vertebrates and frequently parasitize avian species that can carry them across continents during their long-distance migrations. Ticks may have detrimental effects on the health state of their avian hosts, which can be either directly caused by blood-draining or mediated by microbial pathogens transmitted during the blood meal. Indeed, ticks host complex microbial communities, including bacterial pathogens and symbionts. Midichloria bacteria (Rickettsiales) are widespread tick endosymbionts that can be transmitted to vertebrate hosts during the tick bite, inducing an antibody response. Their actual role as infectious/pathogenic agents is, however, unclear. Methods: We screened for Midichloria DNA African ticks and blood samples collected from trans-Saharan migratory songbirds at their arrival in Europe during spring migration. Results: Tick infestation rate was 5.7%, with most ticks belonging to the Hyalomma marginatum species complex. Over 90% of Hyalomma ticks harboured DNA of Midichloria bacteria belonging to the monophylum associated with ticks. Midichloria DNA was detected in 43% of blood samples of avian hosts. Tick-infested adult birds were significantly more likely to test positive to the presence of Midichloria DNA than non-infested adults and second-year individuals, suggesting a long-term persistence of these bacteria within avian hosts. Tick parasitism was associated with a significantly delayed timing of spring migration of avian hosts but had no significant effects on body condition, whereas blood Midichloria DNA presence negatively affected fat deposits of tick-infested avian hosts. Conclusions: Our results show that ticks effectively transfer Midichloria bacteria to avian hosts, supporting the hypothesis that they are infectious to vertebrates. Bird infection likely enhances the horizontal spread of these bacteria across haematophagous ectoparasite populations. Moreover, we showed that Midichloria and tick parasitism have detrimental non-independent effects on avian host health during migration, highlighting the complexity of interactions involving ticks, their vertebrate hosts, and tick-borne bacteria

Scalable software framework for real-time data processing in the railway environment

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Machine learning and ontology in eCoaching for personalized activity level monitoring and recommendation generation

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A Semantic Web approach to ontology-based system: integrating, sharing and analysing IoT health and fitness data

With the rapid development of fitness industry, Internet of Things (IoT) technology is becoming one of the most popular trends for the health and fitness areas. IoT technologies have revolutionised the fitness and the sport industry by giving users the ability to monitor their health status and keep track of their training sessions. More and more sophisticated wearable devices, fitness trackers, smart watches and health mobile applications will appear in the near future. These systems do collect data non-stop from sensors and upload them to the Cloud. However, from a data-centric perspective the landscape of IoT fitness devices and wellness appliances is characterised by a plethora of representation and serialisation formats. The high heterogeneity of IoT data representations and the lack of common accepted standards, keep data isolated within each single system, preventing users and health professionals from having an integrated view of the various information collected. Moreover, in order to fully exploit the potential of the large amounts of data, it is also necessary to enable advanced analytics over it, thus achieving actionable knowledge. Therefore, due the above situation, the aim of this thesis project is to design and implement an ontology based system to (1) allow data interoperability among heterogeneous IoT fitness and wellness devices, (2) facilitate the integration and the sharing of information and (3) enable advanced analytics over the collected data (Cognitive Computing). The novelty of the proposed solution lies in exploiting Semantic Web technologies to formally describe the meaning of the data collected by the IoT devices and define a common communication strategy for information representation and exchange

Context-Aware Digital Twins to Support Software Management at the Edge

With millions of connected edge gateways, there is a pressing challenge of remote maintenance of containerised software components after the initial release. To support remote update operations, edge software providers have been increasingly adopting digital twin-based device management platforms for run-time monitoring and interaction. A common limitation of these solutions is the lack of support for modelling the multi-dimensional context of edge devices deployed in the field, which hinders the software management in a tailored and context-aware manner. This paper aims to address this lack of context-awareness in digital twins required for edge software assignment by introducing two modelling principles, which allow focusing on the device fleet as a whole and capturing the diverse cyber-physical-social context of individual devices. As part of proof of concept, these principles were incorporated in an existing digital twin platform. This prototype implementation demonstrates the viability of the proposed modelling principles via a running example in the context of a telemedicine application system.acceptedVersio

Toward an efficient ontology-based event correlation in SIEM

Cooperative intrusion detection use several intrusion detection systems (IDS) and analyzers in order to build a reliable overview of the monitored system trough a central security information and event management system (SIEM). In such environment, the definition of a shared vocabulary describing the exchanged information between tools is prominent. Since these pieces of information are structured, we propose in this paper to use an ontological representation based on Description Logics (DLs) which is a powerful tool for knowledge representation. Moreover, DLs are able to ensure a decidable reasoning. An alert correlation prototype is presented using this ontology, and an illustrative attack scenario is carried out to show the usefulness of the proposed ontolog

Semantic Matchmaking of Web Resources with Local Closed-World Reasoning

Ontology languages like OWL allow for semantically rich annotation of resources (e.g., products advertised at on-line electronic marketplaces). The description logic (DL) formalism underlying OWL provides reasoning techniques that perform match-making on such annotations. This paper identifies peculiarities in the use of DL inferences for matchmaking that derive from OWL\u27s open-world semantics, analyzes local closed-world reasoning for its applicability to matchmaking, and investigates the suitability of two nonmonotonic extensions to DL, autoepistemic DLs and DLs with circumscription, for local closed-world reasoning in the matchmaking context. An elaborate example of an electronic marketplace for PC product catalogs from the e-commerce domain demonstrates how these formalisms can be used to realize such scenarios