Roles '07 – Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Roles and Relationships in Object Oriented Programming, Multiagent Systems, and Ontologies : workshop co-located with ECOOP 2007 Berlin, July 30 and 31, 2007

Roles are a truly ubiquitous notion: like classes, objects, and relationships, they pervade the vocabulary of all disciplines that deal with the nature of things and how these things relate to each other. In fact, it seems that roles are so fundamental a notion that they must be granted the status of an ontological primitive. The definition of roles depends on the definition of relationships. With the advent of Object Technology, however, relationships have moved out of the focus of attention, giving way to the more restricted concept of attributes or, more technically, references to other ob- jects. A reference is tied to the object holding it and as such is asymmetric – at most the target of the reference can be associated with a role. This is counter to the intuition that every role should have at least one counter-role, namely the one it interacts with. It seems that the natural role of roles in object-oriented designs can only be restored by installing relationships (collaborations, teams, etc.) as first-class programming concepts. By contrast, the relational nature of roles is already acknowl- edged in the area of Multiagent Systems, since roles are related to the interaction among agents and to communication protocols. However, in this area there is no convergence on a single definition of roles yet, and different points of view, such as agent software en- gineering, specification languages, agent communication, or agent programming languages, make different use of roles. Like its pre- decessor “Roles, an interdisciplinary perspective” (Roles’05) held at the AAAI 2005 Fall Symposium (see the website of the Symposium http://www.aaai.org/Press/Reports/Symposia/Fall/fs-05-08.php), this workshop aimed at gathering researchers from different dis- ciplines to foster interchange of knowledge and ideas concerning roles and relationships, and in particular to converge on ontolog- ically founded proposals which can be applied to programming and agent languages

Tools for enterprises collaboration in virtual enterprises

Virtual Enterprise (VE) is an organizational collaboration concept which provides a competitive edge in the globalized business environment. The life cycle of a VE consists of four stages i.e. opportunity identification (Pre-Creation), partner selection (Creation), operation and dissolution. The success of VEs depends upon the efficient execution of their VE-lifecycles along with knowledge enhancement for the partner enterprises to facilitate the future formation of efficient VEs. This research aims to study the different issues which occur in the VE lifecycle and provides a platform for the formation of high performance enterprises and VEs. In the pre-creation stage, enterprises look for suitable partners to create their VE and to exploit a market opportunity. This phase requires explicit and implicit information extraction from enterprise data bases (ECOS-ontology) for the identification of suitable partners. A description logic (DL) based query system is developed to extract explicit and implicit information and to identify potential partners for the creation of the VE. In the creation phase, the identified partners are analysed using different risks paradigms and a cooperative game theoretic approach is used to develop a revenue sharing mechanism based on enterprises inputs and risk minimization for optimal partner selection. In the operation phases, interoperability remains a key issue for seamless transfer of knowledge information and data. DL-based ontology mapping is applied in this research to provide interoperability in the VE between enterprises with different domains of expertise. In the dissolution stage, knowledge acquired in the VE lifecycle needs to be disseminated among the enterprises to enhance their competitiveness. A DL-based ontology merging approach is provided to accommodate new knowledge with existing data bases with logical consistency. Finally, the proposed methodologies are validated using the case study. The results obtained in the case study illustrate the applicability and effectiveness of proposed methodologies in each stage of the VE life cycle

Metadata for user-centred, inclusive access to digital resources: realising the theory of AccessForAll Accessibility

To be inclusive, the Web needs published resources to be matched to individual users’ needs and preferences for their perception and control. In a decade, this has not been achieved and many cannot make use of resources despite having appropriate facilities. This thesis argues that the necessary management of resources can be achieved with well-designed metadata. Demonstration and explanation of the accessibility problems, efforts to solve them and the current state of inaccessibility of Web resources, any resource that is available through the World Wide Web, is fundamental to the research. The author relies heavily on Dublin Core metadata as it is relatively easy to use; is probably the most populous metadata; can be managed with free software systems, and for commercial reasons. The research investigated what makes DC metadata, so apparently simple, powerful enough to be the most popular metadata because there is very little available that explains this. The thesis then documents the scientific view of metadata upon which effective use of metadata can be based in the context of accessibility. It argues, at a practical level, that metadata is essential and integral to any shift to an on-going process approach to accessibility. It contributes to the science of metadata in as much as it analyses, synthesizes, and articulates the characteristics of an essential infrastructure for a new approach to accessibility. The author argues in favour of an on-going process approach to accessibility of resources that supports continuous improvement of any given resource, not necessarily by the author of the resource, and not necessarily by design or with knowledge of the original author, by contributors who may be distributed globally. The thesis argues that the current dependence on production guidelines and post-production evaluation of resources as either universally accessible or otherwise, does not adequately provide for either the accessibility necessary for individuals or the continuous or evolutionary approach possible within the current Web environment. It argues that a distributed, social-networking view of the Web as interactive, combined with a social model of disability, given the management tools of machine-readable, interoperable AccessForAll metadata, as developed, can achieve the desired goals. It raises issues regarding its implementation in the distributed environment of the Web

Ubiquitous Computing

The aim of this book is to give a treatment of the actively developed domain of Ubiquitous computing. Originally proposed by Mark D. Weiser, the concept of Ubiquitous computing enables a real-time global sensing, context-aware informational retrieval, multi-modal interaction with the user and enhanced visualization capabilities. In effect, Ubiquitous computing environments give extremely new and futuristic abilities to look at and interact with our habitat at any time and from anywhere. In that domain, researchers are confronted with many foundational, technological and engineering issues which were not known before. Detailed cross-disciplinary coverage of these issues is really needed today for further progress and widening of application range. This book collects twelve original works of researchers from eleven countries, which are clustered into four sections: Foundations, Security and Privacy, Integration and Middleware, Practical Applications

Semantic Systems. In the Era of Knowledge Graphs

This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Semantic Systems, SEMANTiCS 2020, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in September 2020. The conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic

A proposal for a global task planning architecture using the RoboEarth cloud based framework

As robotic systems become more and more capable of assisting in human domains, methods are sought to compose robot executable plans from abstract human instructions. To cope with the semantically rich and highly expressive nature of human instructions, Hierarchical Task Network planning is often being employed along with domain knowledge to solve planning problems in a pragmatic way. Commonly, the domain knowledge is specific to the planning problem at hand, impeding re-use. Therefore this paper conceptualizes a global planning architecture, based on the worldwide accessible RoboEarth cloud framework. This architecture allows environmental state inference and plan monitoring on a global level. To enable plan re-use for future requests, the RoboEarth action language has been adapted to allow semantic matching of robot capabilities with previously composed plans