Semantic web technologies for video surveillance metadata

Video surveillance systems are growing in size and complexity. Such systems typically consist of integrated modules of different vendors to cope with the increasing demands on network and storage capacity, intelligent video analytics, picture quality, and enhanced visual interfaces. Within a surveillance system, relevant information (like technical details on the video sequences, or analysis results of the monitored environment) is described using metadata standards. However, different modules typically use different standards, resulting in metadata interoperability problems. In this paper, we introduce the application of Semantic Web Technologies to overcome such problems. We present a semantic, layered metadata model and integrate it within a video surveillance system. Besides dealing with the metadata interoperability problem, the advantages of using Semantic Web Technologies and the inherent rule support are shown. A practical use case scenario is presented to illustrate the benefits of our novel approach

Change Support in Process-Aware Information Systems - A Pattern-Based Analysis

In today's dynamic business world the economic success of an enterprise increasingly depends on its ability to react to changes in its environment in a quick and flexible way. Process-aware information systems (PAIS) offer promising perspectives in this respect and are increasingly employed for operationally supporting business processes. To provide effective business process support, flexible PAIS are needed which do not freeze existing business processes, but allow for loosely specified processes, which can be detailed during run-time. In addition, PAIS should enable authorized users to flexibly deviate from the predefined processes if required (e.g., by allowing them to dynamically add, delete, or move process activities) and to evolve business processes over time. At the same time PAIS must ensure consistency and robustness. The emergence of different process support paradigms and the lack of methods for comparing existing change approaches have made it difficult for PAIS engineers to choose the adequate technology. In this paper we suggest a set of changes patterns and change support features to foster the systematic comparison of existing process management technology with respect to process change support. Based on these change patterns and features, we provide a detailed analysis and evaluation of selected systems from both academia and industry. The identified change patterns and change support features facilitate the comparison of change support frameworks, and consequently will support PAIS engineers in selecting the right technology for realizing flexible PAIS. In addition, this work can be used as a reference for implementing more flexible PAIS

Holistic Statistical Open Data Integration Based On Integer Linear Programming

International audienceIntegrating several Statistical Open Data (SOD) tables is a very promising issue. Various analysis scenarios are hidden behind these statistical data, which makes it important to have a holistic view of them. However, as these data are scattered in several tables, it is a slow and costly process to use existing pairwise schema matching approaches to integrate several schemas of the tables. Hence, we need automatic tools that rapidly converge to a holistic integrated view of data and give a good matching quality. In order to accomplish this objective, we propose a new 0-1 linear program, which automatically resolves the problem of holistic OD integration. It performs global optimal solutions maximizing the profit of similarities between OD graphs. The program encompasses different constraints related to graph structures and matching setup, in particular 1:1 matching. It is solved using a standard solver (CPLEX) and experiments show that it can handle several input graphs and good matching quality compared to existing tools

WDC Products: A Multi-Dimensional Entity Matching Benchmark

The difficulty of an entity matching task depends on a combination of multiple factors such as the amount of corner-case pairs, the fraction of entities in the test set that have not been seen during training, and the size of the development set. Current entity matching benchmarks usually represent single points in the space along such dimensions or they provide for the evaluation of matching methods along a single dimension, for instance the amount of training data. This paper presents WDC Products, an entity matching benchmark which provides for the systematic evaluation of matching systems along combinations of three dimensions while relying on real-word data. The three dimensions are (i) amount of corner-cases (ii) generalization to unseen entities, and (iii) development set size. Generalization to unseen entities is a dimension not covered by any of the existing benchmarks yet but is crucial for evaluating the robustness of entity matching systems. WDC Products is based on heterogeneous product data from thousands of e-shops which mark-up products offers using schema.org annotations. Instead of learning how to match entity pairs, entity matching can also be formulated as a multi-class classification task that requires the matcher to recognize individual entities. WDC Products is the first benchmark that provides a pair-wise and a multi-class formulation of the same tasks and thus allows to directly compare the two alternatives. We evaluate WDC Products using several state-of-the-art matching systems, including Ditto, HierGAT, and R-SupCon. The evaluation shows that all matching systems struggle with unseen entities to varying degrees. It also shows that some systems are more training data efficient than others

Development of a Software Library for Performant and Consistent CPACS Data Processing

The Common Parametric Aircraft Configuration Schema (CPACS) is increasingly used as a standard for data exchange in collaborative aircraft design projects involving many heterogeneous disciplines and expert knowledge. CPACS provides a hierarchical parametrization of fixed-wing aircraft and rotorcraft spanning from a detailed component level up to the interaction of the vehicle and its peripheral aviation system such as airline operations. Following the CPACS paradigm - data must be unique and explicit - all parameters are uniquely specified using an XML Schema Definition (XSD) which allows for a robust syntactic interpretation of the data. The transformation of this data (e.g., unit transformations of physical quantities) or the inference of additional information (e.g., interpolation of aerodynamic coefficients) usually requires rules and assumptions which are specified in a human interpretable format within the CPACS documentation. However, practical experience shows that even whilst having comprehensive documentation available, there is a potential source for inconsistency if such rules and assumptions are not available as standardized software implementations. While the TiGL geometry library serves as common software library for geometry data, other disciplines are lacking standardized approaches on how to infer knowledge from CPACS data. The present paper therefore introduces a software library called cpacsLibrary aiming to ensure consistent data handling in large collaborative aircraft design projects, and to enable an easier entrance into connecting models to CPACS as well as re-using implementations across disciplines. As it is tightly coupled to the development of CPACS itself and closely aligned with TiGL, \cpacsLibrary intends to complete the CPACS eco-system by providing standardized methods for non-geometric data handling. A detailed description of the software architecture comprises the implementation of low- and high-level methodologies in C++, test-driven development, version control, bindings to Python as well as data visualization strategies. The practical application of the library is demonstrated by the interpolation of irregular, multidimensional performance maps (aerodynamic and engine) stemming from disciplinary analysis tools in automated aircraft design processes applying Radial Basis Functions (RBF). The paper concludes by describing the future development roadmap, including opportunities for collaboration