20,929 research outputs found
Combining information seeking services into a meta supply chain of facts
The World Wide Web has become a vital supplier of information that allows organizations to carry on such tasks as business intelligence, security monitoring, and risk assessments. Having a quick and reliable supply of correct facts from perspective is often mission critical. By following design science guidelines, we have explored ways to recombine facts from multiple sources, each with possibly different levels of responsiveness and accuracy, into one robust supply chain. Inspired by prior research on keyword-based meta-search engines (e.g., metacrawler.com), we have adapted the existing question answering algorithms for the task of analysis and triangulation of facts. We present a first prototype for a meta approach to fact seeking. Our meta engine sends a user's question to several fact seeking services that are publicly available on the Web (e.g., ask.com, brainboost.com, answerbus.com, NSIR, etc.) and analyzes the returned results jointly to identify and present to the user those that are most likely to be factually correct. The results of our evaluation on the standard test sets widely used in prior research support the evidence for the following: 1) the value-added of the meta approach: its performance surpasses the performance of each supplier, 2) the importance of using fact seeking services as suppliers to the meta engine rather than keyword driven search portals, and 3) the resilience of the meta approach: eliminating a single service does not noticeably impact the overall performance. We show that these properties make the meta-approach a more reliable supplier of facts than any of the currently available stand-alone services
The role of ontologies in creating and maintaining corporate knowledge: a case study from the aero industry
The Designersâ Workbench is a system, developed to support designers in large organizations, such as Rolls-Royce, by making sure that the design is consistent with the specification for the particular design as well as with the companyâs design rule book(s). The evolving design is described against a jet engine ontology. Currently, to capture the constraint information, a domain expert (design engineer) has to work with a knowledge engineer to identify the constraints, and it is then the task of the knowledge engineer to encode these into the Workbenchâs knowledge base (KB). This is an error prone and time consuming task. It is highly desirable to relieve the knowledge engineer of this task, and so we have developed a tool, ConEditor+ that enables domain experts themselves to capture and maintain these constraints. The tool allows the user to combine selected entities from the domain ontology with keywords and operators of a constraint language to form a constraint expression. Further, we hypothesize that to apply constraints appropriately, it is necessary to understand the context in which each constraint is applicable. We refer to this as âapplication conditionsâ. We show that an explicit representation of application conditions, in a machine interpretable format, along with the constraints and the domain ontology can be used to support the verification and maintenance of constraints
Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping: Towards the Robust-Perception Age
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)consists in the concurrent
construction of a model of the environment (the map), and the estimation of the
state of the robot moving within it. The SLAM community has made astonishing
progress over the last 30 years, enabling large-scale real-world applications,
and witnessing a steady transition of this technology to industry. We survey
the current state of SLAM. We start by presenting what is now the de-facto
standard formulation for SLAM. We then review related work, covering a broad
set of topics including robustness and scalability in long-term mapping, metric
and semantic representations for mapping, theoretical performance guarantees,
active SLAM and exploration, and other new frontiers. This paper simultaneously
serves as a position paper and tutorial to those who are users of SLAM. By
looking at the published research with a critical eye, we delineate open
challenges and new research issues, that still deserve careful scientific
investigation. The paper also contains the authors' take on two questions that
often animate discussions during robotics conferences: Do robots need SLAM? and
Is SLAM solved
Requirements modelling and formal analysis using graph operations
The increasing complexity of enterprise systems requires a more advanced
analysis of the representation of services expected than is currently possible.
Consequently, the specification stage, which could be facilitated by formal
verification, becomes very important to the system life-cycle. This paper presents
a formal modelling approach, which may be used in order to better represent
the reality of the system and to verify the awaited or existing systemâs properties,
taking into account the environmental characteristics. For that, we firstly propose
a formalization process based upon properties specification, and secondly we
use Conceptual Graphs operations to develop reasoning mechanisms of verifying
requirements statements. The graphic visualization of these reasoning enables us
to correctly capture the system specifications by making it easier to determine if
desired properties hold. It is applied to the field of Enterprise modelling
Users' trust in information resources in the Web environment: a status report
This study has three aims; to provide an overview of the ways in which trust is either assessed or asserted in relation to the use and provision of resources in the Web environment for research and learning; to assess what solutions might be worth further investigation and whether establishing ways to assert trust in academic information resources could assist the development of information literacy; to help increase understanding of how perceptions of trust influence the behaviour of information users
Knowledge society arguments revisited in the semantic technologies era
In the light of high profile governmental and international efforts to realise the knowledge society, I review the arguments made for and against it from a technology standpoint. I focus on advanced knowledge technologies with applications on a large scale and in open- ended environments like the World Wide Web and its ambitious extension, the Semantic Web. I argue for a greater role of social networks in a knowledge society and I explore the recent developments in mechanised trust, knowledge certification, and speculate on their blending with traditional societal institutions. These form the basis of a sketched roadmap for enabling technologies for a knowledge society
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Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL
Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N
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