Past, present and future of information and knowledge sharing in the construction industry: Towards semantic service-based e-construction

The paper reviews product data technology initiatives in the construction sector and provides a synthesis of related ICT industry needs. A comparison between (a) the data centric characteristics of Product Data Technology (PDT) and (b) ontology with a focus on semantics, is given, highlighting the pros and cons of each approach. The paper advocates the migration from data-centric application integration to ontology-based business process support, and proposes inter-enterprise collaboration architectures and frameworks based on semantic services, underpinned by ontology-based knowledge structures. The paper discusses the main reasons behind the low industry take up of product data technology, and proposes a preliminary roadmap for the wide industry diffusion of the proposed approach. In this respect, the paper stresses the value of adopting alliance-based modes of operation

Practitioner requirements for integrated Knowledge-Based Engineering in Product Lifecycle Management.

The effective management of knowledge as capital is considered essential to the success of engineering product/service systems. As Knowledge Management (KM) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) practice gain industrial adoption, the question of functional overlaps between both the approaches becomes evident. This article explores the interoperability between PLM and Knowledge-Based Engineering (KBE) as a strategy for engineering KM. The opinion of key KBE/PLM practitioners are systematically captured and analysed. A set of ranked business functionalities to be fulfiled by the KBE/PLM systems integration is elicited. The article provides insights for the researchers and the practitioners playing both the user and development roles on the future needs for knowledge systems based on PLM

DT4BP: a Business Process Modelling Language for Dependable Time-Constrained Business Processes

Today, numerous organisations rely on information software systems to run their businesses. The effectiveness of the information software system then, depends largely on the degree to which the organisation's business is accurately captured in the business model. The business model is an abstract description of the way an organisation's functions. Thus, the more precise the business model, the more accurate the requirement definition of the information software system to be engineered.There are an abundance of tools and notations available today to support the development of many types of business process. Many of these artifacts rely on the concept of a business process to describe a business model. A business process is commonly known as a set of one or more linked procedures or activities which collectively realise a business objective or policy goal, normally within the context of an organisational structure defining functional roles and relationships". This thesis is concerned with modelling business processes as a means to accurately capture an organisation's activities and thus, the requirements of the software system that supports these activities.Among the infinite set of possible business processes, this thesis targets only those characterized by the qualities of dependability, collaboration and time. Business processes having these specific dimensions are referred to as Dependable, Collaborative and Time-Constrained (DCTC) business processes. A dependable business process is one whose failures or the number of occurrences in which business process misses its goal are not unacceptably frequent or severe (from certain viewpoint). A collaborative business process is one that requires the interaction of multiple participants to attain its goal. A time-constrained business process is one that owns at least one property expressed in terms of an upper or lower time bound. This thesis investigates how DCTC business processes can be described such that the resulting model captures all the relevant aspects of each dimension of interest. In addition, the business model must be comprehensible to the stakeholders involved not only in its definition, but also in its further use throughout the software development life cycle.A revision and analysis of notations that exist for modelling business processes conducted in this thesis have revealed that today there does not exist any modelling language that provides comprehensible, suitable and sufficiently expressive support for the characteristics of dependability, collaboration and time in an integrated manner. Hence, a significant part of this thesis is devoted to the definition of a new business process modelling language named DT4BP. The aim of this new modelling language is to be comprehensible, suitable and expressive enough to describe DCTC business processes. The definition of this new modelling language implies that a concrete syntax, an abstract syntax, a semantic domain and a semantic mapping is provided. The definition of this new modelling language is given following the Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) approach, and in particular the metamodelling principles. Thus, meta-models and model transformations are used to precisely specify the abstract syntax and semantic mapping elements of the language definition, respectively. Since DT4BP is a textual modelling language, its concrete syntax is specified by a context-free grammar. The Coordinated Atomic Actions conceptual framework with real-time extensions (Timed-CaaFWrk) is used as the semantic domain as it covers a large part of the abstractions included in dependable collaborative time-constrained business processes. The formalisation of this semantic domain according to the metamodelling principles is also part of the material presented in this thesis. Since the business model is considered as a representation of the requirement document the software system to be developed, it is crucial to validate whether it captures the requirements as intended by the stakeholder before going further in the software development process. Hence, besides the comprehensibility, suitability and expressiveness of the modelling language with respect to the domain of interest, it is of special interest to provide a mechanism that allows modellers to ensure that the business model is correct with respect to the stakeholder's expectations. One way of achieving this goal is to provide the modelling language with an executable semantics. In this manner, any business model can be executed on sample input data, and its dynamic behaviour observed. The observation of the dynamic behaviour of the model may be considered as a simulation of the model based on the sample input data. By performing several simulations of the model, the modeller, in cooperation with the stakeholder, can judge whether the business model is correct. This thesis provides an executable semantics for Timed-CaaFWrk that, used in combination with the model transformation that defines the semantic mapping element of the language definition, allows DT4BP models to be validated by simulation. In this manner, the dynamic behaviour of a particular DT4BP model for a given sample input data can be observed by transforming it into a Timed-CaaFWrk model, which is then run thanks to the given executable semantics

Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web

Towards a pivotal-based approach for business process alignment.

This article focuses on business process engineering, especially on alignment between business analysis and implementation. Through a business process management approach, different transformations interfere with process models in order to make them executable. To keep the consistency of process model from business model to IT model, we propose a pivotal metamodel-centric methodology. It aims at keeping or giving all requisite structural and semantic data needed to perform such transformations without loss of information. Through this we can ensure the alignment between business and IT. This article describes the concept of pivotal metamodel and proposes a methodology using such an approach. In addition, we present an example and the resulting benefits

Specifications and Development of Interoperability Solution dedicated to Multiple Expertise Collaboration in a Design Framework

This paper describes the specifications of an interoperability platform based on the PPO (Product Process Organization) model developed by the French community IPPOP in the context of collaborative and innovative design. By using PPO model as a reference, this work aims to connect together heterogonous tools used by experts easing data and information exchanges. After underlining the growing needs of collaborative design process, this paper focuses on interoperability concept by describing current solutions and their limits. Then a solution based on the flexibility of the PPO model adapted to the philosophy of interoperability is proposed. To illustrate these concepts, several examples are more particularly described (robustness analysis, CAD and Product Lifecycle Management systems connections)