60 research outputs found

    Reasoning with concept diagrams about antipatterns

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    Ontologies are notoriously hard to define, express and reason about. Many tools have been developed to ease the debugging and the reasoning process with ontologies, however they often lack accessibility and formalisation. A visual representation language, concept diagrams, was developed for expressing and reasoning about ontologies in an accessible way. Indeed, empirical studies show that concept diagrams are cognitively more accessible to users in ontology debugging tasks. In this paper we answer the question of “ How can concept diagrams be used to reason about inconsistencies and incoherence of ontologies?”. We do so by formalising a set of inference rules for concept diagrams that enables stepwise verification of the inconsistency and/or incoherence of a set of ontology axioms. The design of inference rules is driven by empirical evidence that concise (merged) diagrams are easier to comprehend for users than a set of lower level diagrams that offer a one-to-one translation of OWL ontology axioms into concept diagrams. We prove that our inference rules are sound, and exemplify how they can be used to reason about inconsistencies and incoherence. Finally, we indicate how our rules can serve as a foundation for new rules required when representing ontologies in diverse new domains

    Performance assessment of an architecture with adaptative interfaces for people with special needs

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    People in industrial societies carry more and more portable electronic devices (e.g., smartphone or console) with some kind of wireles connectivity support. Interaction with auto-discovered target devices present in the environment (e.g., the air conditioning of a hotel) is not so easy since devices may provide inaccessible user interfaces (e.g., in a foreign language that the user cannot understand). Scalability for multiple concurrent users and response times are still problems in this domain. In this paper, we assess an interoperable architecture, which enables interaction between people with some kind of special need and their environment. The assessment, based on performance patterns and antipatterns, tries to detect performance issues and also tries to enhance the architecture design for improving system performance. As a result of the assessment, the initial design changed substantially. We refactorized the design according to the Fast Path pattern and The Ramp antipattern. Moreover, resources were correctly allocated. Finally, the required response time was fulfilled in all system scenarios. For a specific scenario, response time was reduced from 60 seconds to less than 6 seconds

    Visualizing ALC Using Concept Diagrams

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    This paper addresses the problem of how to visualize axiomsfrom ALC using concept diagrams. We establish that 66.4% of OWL axioms defined for ontologies in the Manchester corpus are formulated over ALC, demonstrating the significance of considering how to visualize this relatively simple description logic. Our solution to the problem involves providing a general translation from ALC axioms into concept diagrams, which is sufficient to establish that all of ALC can be expressed. However, the translation itself is not designed to give optimally readable diagrams, which is particularly challenging to achieve in the general case. As such, we also improve the translations for a selected category of ALC axioms, to illustrate that more effective diagrams can be produced

    Towards a Visual SPARQL-DL Query Builder

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    Querying ontologies is an every-day activity that users need. This interaction will improve when the query is more expressive and easier to develop. For this purpose, a visual query language is an ideal mean for users and ontology engineers for creating queries taking advantage of the easy-to-understand and low time and cost characteristics, specially, for users which does not know textual query languages. On the other side, SPARQL-DL is a powerful and expressive textual query language for OWL-DL based ontologies that can combine TBox/ABox/RBox queries. Considering the advantage of both, we present in this work a visual query language that can be interpreted as SPARQL-DL sentences and thus being used for querying ontologies for its structure and/or instance information. Altogether, we use this idea to create a modified version of crowd, a Web modelling tool with reasoning support, that enables to implement and tests the presented graphical language along with the needed SPARQL-DL support for solving queries with the user’s provided OWL 2 ontologies in any of its linearisations.X Workshop Innovación en Sistemas de Software (WISS)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

    Towards a Visual SPARQL-DL Query Builder

    Get PDF
    Querying ontologies is an every-day activity that users need. This interaction will improve when the query is more expressive and easier to develop. For this purpose, a visual query language is an ideal mean for users and ontology engineers for creating queries taking advantage of the easy-to-understand and low time and cost characteristics, specially, for users which does not know textual query languages. On the other side, SPARQL-DL is a powerful and expressive textual query language for OWL-DL based ontologies that can combine TBox/ABox/RBox queries. Considering the advantage of both, we present in this work a visual query language that can be interpreted as SPARQL-DL sentences and thus being used for querying ontologies for its structure and/or instance information. Altogether, we use this idea to create a modified version of crowd, a Web modelling tool with reasoning support, that enables to implement and tests the presented graphical language along with the needed SPARQL-DL support for solving queries with the user’s provided OWL 2 ontologies in any of its linearisations.X Workshop Innovación en Sistemas de Software (WISS)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

    Accessible reasoning with diagrams: From cognition to automation

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    High-tech systems are ubiquitous and often safety and se- curity critical: reasoning about their correctness is paramount. Thus, precise modelling and formal reasoning are necessary in order to convey knowledge unambiguously and accurately. Whilst mathematical mod- elling adds great rigour, it is opaque to many stakeholders which leads to errors in data handling, delays in product release, for example. This is a major motivation for the development of diagrammatic approaches to formalisation and reasoning about models of knowledge. In this paper, we present an interactive theorem prover, called iCon, for a highly expressive diagrammatic logic that is capable of modelling OWL 2 ontologies and, thus, has practical relevance. Significantly, this work is the first to design diagrammatic inference rules using insights into what humans find accessible. Specifically, we conducted an experiment about relative cognitive benefits of primitive (small step) and derived (big step) inferences, and use the results to guide the implementation of inference rules in iCon

    Towards a Visual SPARQL-DL Query Builder

    Get PDF
    Querying ontologies is an every-day activity that users need. This interaction will improve when the query is more expressive and easier to develop. For this purpose, a visual query language is an ideal mean for users and ontology engineers for creating queries taking advantage of the easy-to-understand and low time and cost characteristics, specially, for users which does not know textual query languages. On the other side, SPARQL-DL is a powerful and expressive textual query language for OWL-DL based ontologies that can combine TBox/ABox/RBox queries. Considering the advantage of both, we present in this work a visual query language that can be interpreted as SPARQL-DL sentences and thus being used for querying ontologies for its structure and/or instance information. Altogether, we use this idea to create a modified version of crowd, a Web modelling tool with reasoning support, that enables to implement and tests the presented graphical language along with the needed SPARQL-DL support for solving queries with the user’s provided OWL 2 ontologies in any of its linearisations.X Workshop Innovación en Sistemas de Software (WISS)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

    Software Perfomance Assessment at Architectural Level: A Methodology and its Application

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    Las arquitecturas software son una valiosa herramienta para la evaluación de las propiedades cualitativas y cuantitativas de los sistemas en sus primeras fases de desarrollo. Conseguir el diseño adecuado es crítico para asegurar la bondad de dichas propiedades. Tomar decisiones tempranas equivocadas puede implicar considerables y costosos cambios en un futuro. Dichas decisiones afectarían a muchas propiedades del sistema, tales como su rendimiento, seguridad, fiabilidad o facilidad de mantenimiento. Desde el punto de vista del rendimiento software, la ingeniería del rendimiento del software (SPE) es una disciplina de investigación madura y comúnmente aceptada que propone una evaluación basada en modelos en las primeras fases del ciclo de vida de desarrollo software. Un problema en este campo de investigación es que las metodologías hasta ahora propuestas no ofrecen una interpretación de los resultados obtenidos durante el análisis del rendimiento, ni utilizan dichos resultados para proponer alternativas para la mejora de la propia arquitectura software. Hasta la fecha, esta interpretación y mejora requiere de la experiencia y pericia de los ingenieros software, en especial de expertos en ingeniería de prestaciones. Además, a pesar del gran número de propuestas para evaluar el rendimiento de sistemas software, muy pocos de estos estudios teóricos son posteriormente aplicados a sistemas software reales. El objetivo de esta tesis es presentar una metodología para el asesoramiento de decisiones arquitecturales para la mejora, desde el punto de vista de las prestaciones, de las sistemas software. La metodología hace uso del Lenguaje Unificado de Modelado (UML) para representar las arquitecturas software y de métodos formales, concretamente redes de Petri, como modelo de prestaciones. El asesoramiento, basado en patrones y antipatrones, intenta detectar los principales problemas que afectan a las prestaciones del sistema y propone posibles mejoras para mejoras dichas prestaciones. Como primer paso, estudiamos y analizamos los resultados del rendimiento de diferentes estilos arquitectónicos. A continuación, sistematizamos los conocimientos previamente obtenidos para proponer una metodología y comprobamos su aplicabilidad asesorando un caso de estudio real, una arquitectura de interoperabilidad para adaptar interfaces a personas con discapacidad conforme a sus capacidades y preferencias. Finalmente, se presenta una herramienta para la evaluación del rendimiento como un producto derivado del propio ciclo de vida software
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