Report on the EHCR (Deliverable 26.2)

This deliverable is the second for Workpackage 26. The first, submitted after Month 12, summarised the areas of research that the partners had identified as being relevant to the semantic indexing of the EHR. This second one reports progress on the key threads of work identified by the partners during the project to contribute towards semantically interoperable and processable EHRs. This report provides a set of short summaries on key topics that have emerged as important, and to which the partners are able to make strong contributions. Some of these are also being extended via two new EU Framework 6 proposals that include WP26 partners: this is also a measure of the success of this Network of Excellence

Towards the realisation of an integratated decision support environment for organisational decision making

Traditional decision support systems are based on the paradigm of a single decision maker working at a stand‐alone computer or terminal who has a specific decision to make with a specific goal in mind. Organizational decision support systems aim to support decision makers at all levels of an organization (from executive, middle management managers to operators), who have a variety of decisions to make, with different priorities, often in a distributed and dynamic environment. Such systems need to be designed and developed with extra functionality to meet the challenges such as collaborative working. This paper proposes an Integrated Decision Support Environment (IDSE) for organizational decision making. The IDSE distinguishes itself from traditional decision support systems in that it can flexibly configure and re‐configure its functions to support various decision applications. IDSE is an open software platform which allows its users to define their own decision processes and choose their own exiting decision tools to be integrated into the platform. The IDSE is designed and developed based on distributed client/server networking, with a multi‐tier integration framework for consistent information exchange and sharing, seamless process co‐ordination and synchronisation, and quick access to packaged and legacy systems. The prototype of the IDSE demonstrates good performance in agile response to fast changing decision situations

Demo: A community based approach for managing ontology alignments

The Semantic Web is rapidly becoming a defacto distributed repository for semantically represented data, thus leveraging on the added on value of the network effect. Various ontology mapping techniques and tools have been devised to facilitate the bridging and integration of distributed data repositories. Nevertheless, ontology mapping can benefit from human supervision to increase accuracy of results. The spread of Web 2.0 approaches demonstrate the possibility of using collaborative techniques for reaching consensus. While a number of prototypes for collaborative ontology construction are being developed, collaborative ontology mapping is not yet well investigated. In this paper, we describe aprototype that combines off-the-shelf ontology mapping tools with social software techniques to enable users to collaborate on mapping ontologies. Emphasis is put on the reuse of user generated mappings to improve the accuracy of automatically generated ones

UK utility data integration: overcoming schematic heterogeneity

In this paper we discuss syntactic, semantic and schematic issues which inhibit the integration of utility data in the UK. We then focus on the techniques employed within the VISTA project to overcome schematic heterogeneity. A Global Schema based architecture is employed. Although automated approaches to Global Schema definition were attempted the heterogeneities of the sector were too great. A manual approach to Global Schema definition was employed. The techniques used to define and subsequently map source utility data models to this schema are discussed in detail. In order to ensure a coherent integrated model, sub and cross domain validation issues are then highlighted. Finally the proposed framework and data flow for schematic integration is introduced

Semantic web learning technology design: addressing pedagogical challenges and precarious futures

Semantic web technologies have the potential to extend and transform teaching and learning, particularly in those educational settings in which learners are encouraged to engage with ‘authentic’ data from multiple sources. In the course of the ‘Ensemble’ project, teachers and learners in different disciplinary contexts in UK Higher Education worked with educational researchers and technologists to explore the potential of such technologies through participatory design and rapid prototyping. These activities exposed some of the barriers to the development and adoption of emergent learning technologies, but also highlighted the wide range of factors, not all of them technological or pedagogical, that might contribute to enthusiasm for and adoption of such technologies. This suggests that the scope and purpose of research and design activities may need to be broadened and the paper concludes with a discussion of how the tradition of operaismo or ‘workers’ enquiry’ may help to frame such activities. This is particularly relevant in a period when the both educational institutions and the working environments for which learners are being prepared are becoming increasingly fractured, and some measure of ‘precarity’ is increasingly the norm

Text categorization and similarity analysis: similarity measure, literature review

Document classification and provenance has become an important area of computer science as the amount of digital information is growing significantly. Organisations are storing documents on computers rather than in paper form. Software is now required that will show the similarities between documents (i.e. document classification) and to point out duplicates and possibly the history of each document (i.e. provenance). Poor organisation is common and leads to situations like above. There exists a number of software solutions in this area designed to make document organisation as simple as possible. I'm doing my project with Pingar who are a company based in Auckland who aim to help organise the growing amount of unstructured digital data. This reports analyses the existing literature in this area with the aim to determine what already exists and how my project will be different from existing solutions

Demo: A Community Based Approach for Managing Ontology Alignments

The Semantic Web is rapidly becoming a defacto distributed repository for semantically represented data, thus leveraging on the added on value of the network effect. Various ontology mapping techniques and tools have been devised to facilitate the bridging and integration of distributed data repositories. Nevertheless, ontology mapping can benefit from human supervision to increase accuracy of results. The spread of Web 2.0 approaches demonstrate the possibility of using collaborative techniques for reaching consensus. While a number of prototypes for collaborative ontology construction are being developed, collaborative ontology mapping is not yet well investigated. In this paper, we describe a prototype that combines off-the-shelf ontology mapping tools with social software techniques to enable users to collaborate on mapping ontologies. Emphasis is put on the reuse of user generated mappings to improve the accuracy of automatically generated ones

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