Strategies for Managing Linked Enterprise Data

Data, information and knowledge become key assets of our 21st century economy. As a result, data and knowledge management become key tasks with regard to sustainable development and business success. Often, knowledge is not explicitly represented residing in the minds of people or scattered among a variety of data sources. Knowledge is inherently associated with semantics that conveys its meaning to a human or machine agent. The Linked Data concept facilitates the semantic integration of heterogeneous data sources. However, we still lack an effective knowledge integration strategy applicable to enterprise scenarios, which balances between large amounts of data stored in legacy information systems and data lakes as well as tailored domain specific ontologies that formally describe real-world concepts. In this thesis we investigate strategies for managing linked enterprise data analyzing how actionable knowledge can be derived from enterprise data leveraging knowledge graphs. Actionable knowledge provides valuable insights, supports decision makers with clear interpretable arguments, and keeps its inference processes explainable. The benefits of employing actionable knowledge and its coherent management strategy span from a holistic semantic representation layer of enterprise data, i.e., representing numerous data sources as one, consistent, and integrated knowledge source, to unified interaction mechanisms with other systems that are able to effectively and efficiently leverage such an actionable knowledge. Several challenges have to be addressed on different conceptual levels pursuing this goal, i.e., means for representing knowledge, semantic data integration of raw data sources and subsequent knowledge extraction, communication interfaces, and implementation. In order to tackle those challenges we present the concept of Enterprise Knowledge Graphs (EKGs), describe their characteristics and advantages compared to existing approaches. We study each challenge with regard to using EKGs and demonstrate their efficiency. In particular, EKGs are able to reduce the semantic data integration effort when processing large-scale heterogeneous datasets. Then, having built a consistent logical integration layer with heterogeneity behind the scenes, EKGs unify query processing and enable effective communication interfaces for other enterprise systems. The achieved results allow us to conclude that strategies for managing linked enterprise data based on EKGs exhibit reasonable performance, comply with enterprise requirements, and ensure integrated data and knowledge management throughout its life cycle

Linking Classroom Learning and Research to Advance Ideas about Social-Ecological Resilience

There is an increasing demand in higher education institutions for training in complex environmental problems. Such training requires a careful mix of conventional methods and innovative solutions, a task not always easy to accomplish. In this paper we review literature on this theme, highlight relevant advances in the pedagogical literature, and report on some examples resulting from our recent efforts to teach complex environmental issues. The examples range from full credit courses in sustainable development and research methods to project-based and in-class activity units. A consensus from the literature is that lectures are not sufficient to fully engage students in these issues. A conclusion from the review of examples is that problem-based and project-based, e.g., through case studies, experiential learning opportunities, or real-world applications, learning offers much promise. This could greatly be facilitated by online hubs through which teachers, students, and other members of the practitioner and academic community share experiences in teaching and research, the way that we have done here

Faceted Id/Entity : managing representation in a digital world

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2002.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 113-118).In this thesis, i articulate a theory of how and why individuals use context to convey only a facet of their identity in social interactions. Through this lens, i discuss current issues in digital identity management. In this discussion, i focus on the role of design in affecting an individual's ability to maintain control of personal representation and identity information. I argue that the architecture of current digital environments has altered our notions of context, motivating users to develop new mechanisms for managing their presentation. I take the stance that users should have the ability to control their digital identity for the same reasons that they seek to control their physical identity, most notably to present themselves in an appropriate manner in relation to the current situation. From this perspective, i argue for a design approach that will aid sociable designers in developing human-centered technologies that allow for individual control over personal identity. First, i argue the need for mechanisms of self-awareness and discuss what forms of awareness users should have. In doing so, i analyze current approaches to awareness and critique my own work on Social Network Fragments, a visualization tool for revealing the structure of one's digital social network. Alongside self-awareness, i present the need for identity management and critique my work on SecureId, a prototype intended to give users control over their digital presentation by offering security through identity-based knowledge. This thesis argues for empowering users through awareness and control, so that they may provide the level of regulation that is desirable. In doing so, i offer a novel approach to context and identity management in digital social interaction.by Danah Boyd.S.M

Collected Papers (Neutrosophics and other topics), Volume XIV

This fourteenth volume of Collected Papers is an eclectic tome of 87 papers in Neutrosophics and other fields, such as mathematics, fuzzy sets, intuitionistic fuzzy sets, picture fuzzy sets, information fusion, robotics, statistics, or extenics, comprising 936 pages, published between 2008-2022 in different scientific journals or currently in press, by the author alone or in collaboration with the following 99 co-authors (alphabetically ordered) from 26 countries: Ahmed B. Al-Nafee, Adesina Abdul Akeem Agboola, Akbar Rezaei, Shariful Alam, Marina Alonso, Fran Andujar, Toshinori Asai, Assia Bakali, Azmat Hussain, Daniela Baran, Bijan Davvaz, Bilal Hadjadji, Carlos Díaz Bohorquez, Robert N. Boyd, M. Caldas, Cenap Özel, Pankaj Chauhan, Victor Christianto, Salvador Coll, Shyamal Dalapati, Irfan Deli, Balasubramanian Elavarasan, Fahad Alsharari, Yonfei Feng, Daniela Gîfu, Rafael Rojas Gualdrón, Haipeng Wang, Hemant Kumar Gianey, Noel Batista Hernández, Abdel-Nasser Hussein, Ibrahim M. Hezam, Ilanthenral Kandasamy, W.B. Vasantha Kandasamy, Muthusamy Karthika, Nour Eldeen M. Khalifa, Madad Khan, Kifayat Ullah, Valeri Kroumov, Tapan Kumar Roy, Deepesh Kunwar, Le Thi Nhung, Pedro López, Mai Mohamed, Manh Van Vu, Miguel A. Quiroz-Martínez, Marcel Migdalovici, Kritika Mishra, Mohamed Abdel-Basset, Mohamed Talea, Mohammad Hamidi, Mohammed Alshumrani, Mohamed Loey, Muhammad Akram, Muhammad Shabir, Mumtaz Ali, Nassim Abbas, Munazza Naz, Ngan Thi Roan, Nguyen Xuan Thao, Rishwanth Mani Parimala, Ion Pătrașcu, Surapati Pramanik, Quek Shio Gai, Qiang Guo, Rajab Ali Borzooei, Nimitha Rajesh, Jesús Estupiñan Ricardo, Juan Miguel Martínez Rubio, Saeed Mirvakili, Arsham Borumand Saeid, Saeid Jafari, Said Broumi, Ahmed A. Salama, Nirmala Sawan, Gheorghe Săvoiu, Ganeshsree Selvachandran, Seok-Zun Song, Shahzaib Ashraf, Jayant Singh, Rajesh Singh, Son Hoang Le, Tahir Mahmood, Kenta Takaya, Mirela Teodorescu, Ramalingam Udhayakumar, Maikel Y. Leyva Vázquez, V. Venkateswara Rao, Luige Vlădăreanu, Victor Vlădăreanu, Gabriela Vlădeanu, Michael Voskoglou, Yaser Saber, Yong Deng, You He, Youcef Chibani, Young Bae Jun, Wadei F. Al-Omeri, Hongbo Wang, Zayen Azzouz Omar

The Multi-Agent Transport Simulation MATSim

"The MATSim (Multi-Agent Transport Simulation) software project was started around 2006 with the goal of generating traffic and congestion patterns by following individual synthetic travelers through their daily or weekly activity programme. It has since then evolved from a collection of stand-alone C++ programs to an integrated Java-based framework which is publicly hosted, open-source available, automatically regression tested. It is currently used by about 40 groups throughout the world. This book takes stock of the current status. The first part of the book gives an introduction to the most important concepts, with the intention of enabling a potential user to set up and run basic simulations.The second part of the book describes how the basic functionality can be extended, for example by adding schedule-based public transit, electric or autonomous cars, paratransit, or within-day replanning. For each extension, the text provides pointers to the additional documentation and to the code base. It is also discussed how people with appropriate Java programming skills can write their own extensions, and plug them into the MATSim core. The project has started from the basic idea that traffic is a consequence of human behavior, and thus humans and their behavior should be the starting point of all modelling, and with the intuition that when simulations with 100 million particles are possible in computational physics, then behavior-oriented simulations with 10 million travelers should be possible in travel behavior research. The initial implementations thus combined concepts from computational physics and complex adaptive systems with concepts from travel behavior research. The third part of the book looks at theoretical concepts that are able to describe important aspects of the simulation system; for example, under certain conditions the code becomes a Monte Carlo engine sampling from a discrete choice model. Another important aspect is the interpretation of the MATSim score as utility in the microeconomic sense, opening up a connection to benefit cost analysis. Finally, the book collects use cases as they have been undertaken with MATSim. All current users of MATSim were invited to submit their work, and many followed with sometimes crisp and short and sometimes longer contributions, always with pointers to additional references. We hope that the book will become an invitation to explore, to build and to extend agent-based modeling of travel behavior from the stable and well tested core of MATSim documented here.

Synthesizing knowledge graphs from web sources with the MINTE+ framework

Institutions from different domains require the integration of data coming from heterogeneous Web sources. Typical use cases include Knowledge Search, Knowledge Building, and Knowledge Completion. We report on the implementation of the RDF Molecule-Based Integration Framework MINTE+ in three domain-specific applications: Law Enforcement, Job Market Analysis, and Manufacturing. The use of RDF molecules as data representation and a core element in the framework gives MINTE+ enough flexibility to synthesize knowledge graphs in different domains. We first describe the challenges in each domain-specific application, then the implementation and configuration of the framework to solve the particular problems of each domain. We show how the parameters defined in the framework allow to tune the integration process with the best values according to each domain. Finally, we present the main results, and the lessons learned from each application

Use of surveys and agent based modelling to assess the management implications of the behaviours of specialised recreational boat fishers

This PhD study employed two fisheries surveys and an agent-based model to characterise, in the context of specialisation theory, the behaviours and motivations of non-avid and avid fishers among a diverse group of recreational boat fishers. Broadly, specialisation theory, which relates to the field of human dimensions research, dictates that groups of recreational fishers fit along a continuum of behaviour or ‘specialisation’, from occasional, novice fishers to avid and highlyexperienced fishing specialists. Furthermore, this theory considers that fishers may be characterised according to such attributes as frequency of participation, species targeted, fishing locations and fishing gears, motivations for going fishing, preferences for resource management, as well as various other attributes. In one survey, a sample of recreational fishers living near Perth, in Western Australia, was randomly-selected from a database containing details of recreational fishing boat licence holders in that state. Selected anglers were interviewed by phone using the Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) technique. Fishers were chracterised as either non-avid or avid, based on levels of participation rates, an approach consistent with many fisheries surveys. The phone survey demonstrated that Perth boat fishers are typically male, often 45-59 y and mainly target inshore, easy-to-catch ‘bread and butter’ species, such as whiting species and Australian herring. Anglers typically use rod and lines for fishing and often revisit areas in which they have experienced previous fishing success. Ownership of Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) systems was high among all surveyed boat fishers. However, compared with non-avid fishers, avid fishers were, as hypothesised according to specialisation theory, more likely to use these devices for storing fishing locations (and also for storing a greater number of locations compared to non-avid fishers). Moreover, as hypothesised, avid fishers were more likely than non-avid fishers to go fishing on a normal weekday rather than on a weekend or public holiday, presumably to avoid periods of congestion at boat ramps. Unlike most fisheries surveys, those undertaken for this study asked a range of questions relating to movements of boat fishers when fishing. Surveyed fishers generally travelled small distances offshore (< 5 km), visited few fishing locations (≤ 4), and typically moved ≤ 3 km between their first and second fishing location, usually moving because they were not catching any fish. The hypothesis that avid fishers would be more likely than non-avid fishers to move more frequently between fishing locations when catch rates were low was not supported by the available data, however, as the durations of fishing trips were relatively short (~3.5 h) and fishers only moved a few times during each trip. It was able to be shown, however, that avid fishers are more likely to move when they receive a low fish ‘bite rate’. A second survey, in the form of a written questionnaire, was developed to obtain data with which to characterise fishers who are members of angling clubs located in the same region as the fishers interviewed by the above phone survey. Comparisons were made between the data from the two surveys to test the hypothesis that the club members are more avid and specialised than the general population of boat fishers interviewed in the phone survey. The surveyed club members were predominantly male, between the age of 45-59 y and almost all had more than 10 y fishing experience. These fishers were more likely than the fishers interviewed in the phone survey to own their own boat and GPS, and generally targeted a ‘mix’ of demersal reef fish species including West Australian dhufish, Glaucosoma hebraicum, and pink snapper, Chrysophrys auratus. As hypothesised, compared with non-members, club members were more avid, tended to travel further to fishing locations, typically fished in deeper waters, made greater investments in fishing technology and greater use of this (more fishing locations stored in their GPS systems), and moved more frequently between fishing locations when not receiving good fish bite rates. These findings were thus consistent with the hypothesis that club members are more specialised than avid, non-club affiliated fishers. In the next phase of the project, an agent-based model (ABM) was employed to simulate the dynamics of the multi-species demersal, boat-based recreational fishery near Perth, in Western Australia. The model considered three fish species, West Australian dhufish and pink snapper, and a non-target species (with biological characteristics based on those of silver trevally, Pseudocaranx georgianus), and a ‘fleet’ of avid, recreational boat fishers, with characteristics similar to those of the fishers surveyed at angling clubs. The model simulated the fishing activities of this group of boat anglers in a reef fishing area (i.e. an artificial computer landscape) and subject to an established fisheries management regime (size and boat limits), and tracked their catches (released and retained) and impacts of these on fish populations. The characteristics of the individual fishers, individual fish and certain characteristics of the computer landscape were informed by a combination of biological information from existing literature and results obtained from the survey of angling club members. Several hypotheses were explored in simulations. For example, it was demonstrated that, in simulations, fishers are able to maintain similar catch rates despite declining abundances of fish by moving more rapidly between fishing locations and by finding new locations with relatively high fish abundances. This ability of fishers to maintain catch rates was also linked to fishers updating their ‘knowledge’ of the quality of their fishing locations (i.e. as stored in a GPS) based on previous fishing experiences. Thus, it was concluded that, for this recreational demersal fishery, such ‘learning’ behaviours of fishers, and particularly their ability to improve their knowledge of good fishing locations, are key to making them highly specialised, successful fishers. It was also demonstrated that the behaviours of fishers, in response to a change in abundance of one species, can impact on the abundances of another fish species, which thus has implications for managing multi-species fisheries. Model simulations provided a range of other results across different scenarios of initial abundance of G. hebraicum and different management regulations, some of which were not expected (i.e. not immediately intuitive), which thereby provided some useful insights regarding the dynamics of the system. For example, as initial fish abundance increased, catch per hour fishing did not always increase, a result that was attributed to management regulations limiting the number of fish that anglers may retain, reduced movements by anglers from fishing locations and reduced time spent searching by anglers. The study results also suggested that catch per unit of ‘time spent searching’ by anglers could be a useful indicator of stock abundance. The ability of anglers to maintain their catches when fish abundances were declining, through searching for new fishing locations and moving between locations more often, highlights the fact that catch rate data, as typically obtained in many surveys, do not necessarily provide a reliable index of fish abundance. Unlike many studies relating to human dimensions research, this study focussed on understanding the key characteristics and behaviours of avid and specialised boat-based anglers in a multi-species fishery. In such an environment, different anglers are likely to adjust their behaviours in different ways to balance their fishing skills and the values they place on the mixture of species that they are likely to catch. That is, in a multi-species fishery, anglers act in a ‘multiple objective decision making framework’, and individuals respond to their own motivations and assessments of the values that they accord to the fishing experience. Although it is unlikely that the knowledge gained in one fishery will be totally applicable to the next, research methods are, however, likely to be transferable among fisheries. In this context, this study benefited from the integration of fishery surveys and simulation modelling, and consideration of the combined results in the context of specialisation theory