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

Dealing with abstraction: Case study generalisation as a method for eliciting design patterns

Developing a pattern language is a non-trivial problem. A critical requirement is a method to support pattern writers with abstraction, so as they can produce generalised patterns. In this paper, we address this issue by developing a structured process of generalisation. It is important that this process is initiated through engaging participants in identifying initial patterns, i.e. directly dealing with the 'cold-start' problem. We have found that short case study descriptions provide a productive 'way into' the process for participants. We reflect on a 1-year interdisciplinary pan-European research project involving the development of almost 30 cases and over 150 patterns. We provide example cases, detailing the process by which their associated patterns emerged. This was based on a foundation for generalisation from cases with common attributes. We discuss the merits of this approach and its implications for pattern development

Intellectual heritages of post-1990 public sector accounting research: An exploration

PURPOSE: The article’s aim is to refine prospects for theorising in public sector accounting (PSA) research in order to capture the methodological benefits promised by its multi-disciplinarity. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: The study primarily employs a bibliometric analysis of research outputs invoking New Public Management (NPM). Applying a content analysis to Hood (1991), as the most cited NPM source, bibliographic methods and citation/co-citation analysis for the period 1991 to 2018 are mobilised to identify the disciplinary evolution of the NPM knowledge base from a structural and longitudinal perspective. FINDINGS: The analysis exhibits disciplinary branching of NPM over time and its imprints on post-1990 PSA research. Given the discourse about origins of NPM-based accounting research, there are research domains behind the obvious that indicate disciplinary fragmentations. For instance, novelty of PSA research is found in Public Value Accounting, continuity is evidenced by transcending contextual antecedents. Interestingly, these domains are loosely coupled. Exploring the role of disciplinary imprints designates prospects for post-NPM PSA research that acknowledges multi-disciplinarity and branching in order to deploy insularity as a building block for its inquiries. RESEARCH LIMITATIONS/IMPLICATIONS: Criteria for assessing the limitations and credibility of an explorative inquiry are used, especially on how the proposal to develop cumulative knowledge from post-1990 PSA research can be further developed. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: A matrix suggesting a method of ordering disciplinary references enables positioning of research inquiries within PSA research. SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS: ORIGINALITY: By extending common taxonomies of PSA intellectual heritages, the study proposes the ‘inquiry-heritage’ matrix as a typology that displays patterns of theorisation for positioning an inquiry within PSA disciplinary groundings

Requesting Distant Robotic Action: An Ontology for Naming and Action Identification for Planning on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission.

This paper focuses on the development of a naming convention and the use of abbreviated names and a related ontology for science work and distant robotic action that comprise requests for a robotic rover during the NASA Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission, run by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). We demonstrate how abbreviated names and an associated ontology support sharing and identifying information among teams and software tools. An ontology of distant action must take into account a dynamic environment, changing in response to physical events and intentional actions, and reflect the influence of context on the meaning of action. The nascent domain of Martian tele-robotic science, in which specialists request work from a rover moving through a distant landscape, as well as the need to consider the interdisciplinary teams involved in completing that work, required an empirical approach. The formulation of this ontology used ethnographic methods and grounded theory to study human behavior and work practice with software tools

Digital Games as Media for Teaching and Learning: A Template for Critical Evaluation

Background - Videogames can be useful tools for teaching and learning. To plan educational uses, potential benefits and possible problematic aspects of specific titles need to be critically assessed by teachers and school leaders prior to implementation. Theory and method - Based on game ontological models, we identify salient areas of inquiry in games research and use these to structure a template for evaluation. This way we operationalize foundational games research and put key insights to practical use in the planning and preparation of videogame-based teaching sessions. Aims - We develop a template for the evaluation of videogames as tools for and objects of teaching and learning to facilitate critical uses of these technologies in schools and other educational settings. Results - We present a template for critical evaluation to facilitate the use of videogames for educational endeavors. The template distinguishes between videogames as tools for and objects of teaching and learning and is structured along the game ontological dimensions of 1) sign system, 2) rules and mechanics, 3) materiality and 4) players, and includes aspects of both representation and simulation. This way, we disentangle a complex phenomenon and make its components amendable for critical analysis and constructive intervention. Discussion & conclusion - We offer illustrating examples for how the template can be used to assess the usability of specific titles in education and discuss advantages and disadvantages. Finally, we suggest steps for implementation and further improvement. Keywords Videogames, education, game ontology, cybermedia model, representation, simulation, evaluatio

Towards Intelligent Assistance for a Data Mining Process:-

A data mining (DM) process involves multiple stages. A simple, but typical, process might include preprocessing data, applying a data-mining algorithm, and postprocessing the mining results. There are many possible choices for each stage, and only some combinations are valid. Because of the large space and non-trivial interactions, both novices and data-mining specialists need assistance in composing and selecting DM processes. Extending notions developed for statistical expert systems we present a prototype Intelligent Discovery Assistant (IDA), which provides users with (i) systematic enumerations of valid DM processes, in order that important, potentially fruitful options are not overlooked, and (ii) effective rankings of these valid processes by different criteria, to facilitate the choice of DM processes to execute. We use the prototype to show that an IDA can indeed provide useful enumerations and effective rankings in the context of simple classification processes. We discuss how an IDA could be an important tool for knowledge sharing among a team of data miners. Finally, we illustrate the claims with a comprehensive demonstration of cost-sensitive classification using a more involved process and data from the 1998 KDDCUP competition.NYU, Stern School of Business, IOMS Department, Center for Digital Economy Researc

The Integrated Realization of Materials, Products and Associated Manufacturing Processes

Problem: A materials design revolution is underway in the recent past where the focus is to design (not select) the material microstructure and processing paths to achieve multiple property or performance requirements that are often in conflict. The advancements in computer simulations have resulted in the speeding up of the process of discovering new materials and has paved way for rapid assessment of process-structure-property-performance relationships of materials, products, and processes. This has led to the simulation-based design of material microstructure (microstructure-mediated design) to satisfy multiple property or performance goals of the product/process/system thereby replacing the classical material design and selection approaches. The foundational premise for this dissertation is that systems-based materials design techniques offer the potential for tailoring materials, their processing paths and the end products that employ these materials in an integrated fashion for challenging applications to satisfy conflicting product and process level property and performance requirements. The primary goal in this dissertation is to establish some of the scientific foundations and tools that are needed for the integrated realization of materials, products and manufacturing processes using simulation models that are typically incomplete, inaccurate and not of equal fidelity by managing the uncertainty associated. Accordingly, the interest in this dissertation lies in establishing a systems-based design architecture that includes system-level synthesis methods and tools that are required for the integrated design of complex materials, products and associated manufacturing processes starting from the end requirements. Hence the primary research question: What are the theoretical, mathematical and computational foundations needed for establishing a comprehensive systems-based design architecture to realize the integrated design of the product, its environment, manufacturing processes and material as a system? Major challenges to be addressed here are: a) integration of models (material, process and product) to establish processing-structure-property-performance relationships, b) goal-oriented inverse design of material microstructures and processing paths to meet multiple conflicting performance/property requirements, c) robust concept exploration by managing uncertainty across process chains and d) systematic, domain-independent, modular, reconfigurable, reusable, computer interpretable, archivable, and multi-objective decision support in the early stages of design to different users. Approach: In order to address these challenges, the primary hypothesis in this dissertation is to establish the theoretical, mathematical and computational foundations for: 1) forward material, product and process workflows through systematic identification and integration of models to define the processing-structure-property-performance relationships; 2) a concept exploration framework supporting systematic formulation of design problems facilitating robust design exploration by bringing together robust design principles and multi-objective decision making protocols; 3) a generic, goal-oriented, inverse decision-based design method that uses 1) and 2) to facilitate the systems-based inverse design of material microstructures and processing paths to meet multiple product level performance/property requirements, thereby generating the problem-specific inverse decision workflow; and 4) integrating the workflows with a knowledge-based platform anchored in modeling decision-related knowledge facilitating capture, execution and reuse of the knowledge associated with 1), 2) and 3). This establishes a comprehensive systems-based design architecture to realize the integrated design of the product, its environment, manufacturing processes and material as a system. Validation: The systems-based design architecture for the integrated realization of materials, products and associated manufacturing processes is validated using the validation-square approach that consists of theoretical and empirical validation. Empirical validation of the design architecture is carried out using an industry driven problem namely the ‘Integrated Design of Steel (Material), Manufacturing Processes (Rolling and Cooling) and Hot Rolled Rods (Product) for Automotive Gears’. Specific sub-problems are formulated within this problem domain to address various research questions identified in this dissertation. Contributions: The contributions from the dissertation are categorized into new knowledge in four research domains: a) systematic model integration (vertical and horizontal) for integrated material and product workflows, b) goal-oriented, inverse decision support, c) robust concept exploration of process chains with multiple conflicting goals and d) knowledge-based decision support for rapid and robust design exploration in simulation-based integrated material, product and process design. The creation of new knowledge in this dissertation is associated with the development of a systems-based design architecture involving systematic function-based approach of formulating forward material workflows, a concept exploration framework for systematic design exploration, an inverse decision-based design method, and robust design metrics, all integrated with a knowledge-based platform for decision support. The theoretical, mathematical and computational foundations for the design architecture are proposed in this dissertation to facilitate rapid and robust exploration of the design and solution spaces to identify material microstructures and processing paths that satisfy conflicting property and performance for complex materials, products and processes by managing uncertainty