Reason Maintenance - Conceptual Framework

This paper describes the conceptual framework for reason maintenance developed as part of WP2

Towards a service-oriented architecture for a mobile assistive system with real-time environmental sensing

Dalian Key Lab. of Smart Medical and Healthcare, Computer Science Department, Dalian University, China,With the growing aging population, age-related diseases have increased considerably over the years. In response to these, ambient assistive living (AAL) systems are being developed and are continually evolving to enrich and support independent living. While most researchers investigate robust activity recognition (AR) techniques, this paper focuses on some of the architectural challenges of the AAL systems. This work proposes a system architecture that fuses varying software design patterns and integrates readily available hardware devices to create wireless sensor networks for real-time applications. The system architecture brings together the service-oriented architecture (SOA), semantic web technologies, and other methods to address some of the shortcomings of the preceding system implementations using off-the-shelf and open source components. In order to validate the proposed architecture, a prototype is developed and tested positively to recognize basic user activities in real time. The system provides a base that can be further extended in many areas of AAL systems, including composite AR

User Review Analysis for Requirement Elicitation: Thesis and the framework prototype's source code

Online reviews are an important channel for requirement elicitation. However, requirement engineers face challenges when analysing online user reviews, such as data volumes, technical supports, existing techniques, and legal barriers. Juan Wang proposes a framework solving user review analysis problems for the purpose of requirement elicitation that sets up a channel from downloading user reviews to structured analysis data. The main contributions of her work are: (1) the thesis proposed a framework to solve the user review analysis problem for requirement elicitation; (2) the prototype of this framework proves its feasibility; (3) the experiments prove the effectiveness and efficiency of this framework. This resource here is the latest version of Juan Wang's PhD thesis "User Review Analysis for Requirement Elicitation" and all the source code of the prototype for the framework as the results of her thesis

Generating Natural Language Explanations For Entailments In Ontologies

Building an error-free and high-quality ontology in OWL (Web Ontology Language)---the latest standard ontology language endorsed by the World Wide Web Consortium---is not an easy task for domain experts, who usually have limited knowledge of OWL and logic. One sign of an erroneous ontology is the occurrence of undesired inferences (or entailments), often caused by interactions among (apparently innocuous) axioms within the ontology. This suggests the need for a tool that allows developers to inspect why such an entailment follows from the ontology in order to debug and repair it. This thesis aims to address the above problem by advancing knowledge and techniques in generating explanations for entailments in OWL ontologies. We build on earlier work on identifying minimal subsets of the ontology from which an entailment can be drawn---known technically as justifications. Our main focus is on planning (at a logical level) an explanation that links a justification (premises) to its entailment (conclusion); we also consider how best to express the explanation in English. Among other innovations, we propose a method for assessing the understandability of explanations, so that the easiest can be selected from a set of alternatives. Our findings make a theoretical contribution to Natural Language Generation and Knowledge Representation. They could also play a practical role in improving the explanation facilities in ontology development tools, considering especially the requirements of users who are not expert in OWL

Web and Semantic Web Query Languages

A number of techniques have been developed to facilitate powerful data retrieval on the Web and Semantic Web. Three categories of Web query languages can be distinguished, according to the format of the data they can retrieve: XML, RDF and Topic Maps. This article introduces the spectrum of languages falling into these categories and summarises their salient aspects. The languages are introduced using common sample data and query types. Key aspects of the query languages considered are stressed in a conclusion

Towards computerizing intensive care sedation guidelines: design of a rule-based architecture for automated execution of clinical guidelines

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Computerized ICUs rely on software services to convey the medical condition of their patients as well as assisting the staff in taking treatment decisions. Such services are useful for following clinical guidelines quickly and accurately. However, the development of services is often time-consuming and error-prone. Consequently, many care-related activities are still conducted based on manually constructed guidelines. These are often ambiguous, which leads to unnecessary variations in treatments and costs.</p> <p>The goal of this paper is to present a semi-automatic verification and translation framework capable of turning manually constructed diagrams into ready-to-use programs. This framework combines the strengths of the manual and service-oriented approaches while decreasing their disadvantages. The aim is to close the gap in communication between the IT and the medical domain. This leads to a less time-consuming and error-prone development phase and a shorter clinical evaluation phase.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A framework is proposed that semi-automatically translates a clinical guideline, expressed as an XML-based flow chart, into a Drools Rule Flow by employing semantic technologies such as ontologies and SWRL. An overview of the architecture is given and all the technology choices are thoroughly motivated. Finally, it is shown how this framework can be integrated into a service-oriented architecture (SOA).</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The applicability of the Drools Rule language to express clinical guidelines is evaluated by translating an example guideline, namely the sedation protocol used for the anaesthetization of patients, to a Drools Rule Flow and executing and deploying this Rule-based application as a part of a SOA. The results show that the performance of Drools is comparable to other technologies such as Web Services and increases with the number of decision nodes present in the Rule Flow. Most delays are introduced by loading the Rule Flows.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The framework is an effective solution for computerizing clinical guidelines as it allows for quick development, evaluation and human-readable visualization of the Rules and has a good performance. By monitoring the parameters of the patient to automatically detect exceptional situations and problems and by notifying the medical staff of tasks that need to be performed, the computerized sedation guideline improves the execution of the guideline.</p

When one Logic is Not Enough: Integrating First-order Annotations in OWL Ontologies

In ontology development, there is a gap between domain ontologies which mostly use the web ontology language, OWL, and foundational ontologies written in first-order logic, FOL. To bridge this gap, we present Gavel, a tool that supports the development of heterogeneous 'FOWL' ontologies that extend OWL with FOL annotations, and is able to reason over the combined set of axioms. Since FOL annotations are stored in OWL annotations, FOWL ontologies remain compatible with the existing OWL infrastructure. We show that for the OWL domain ontology OBI, the stronger integration with its FOL top-level ontology BFO via our approach enables us to detect several inconsistencies. Furthermore, existing OWL ontologies can benefit from FOL annotations. We illustrate this with FOWL ontologies containing mereotopological axioms that enable new meaningful inferences. Finally, we show that even for large domain ontologies such as ChEBI, automatic reasoning with FOL annotations can be used to detect previously unnoticed errors in the classification

Is Context-aware Reasoning = Case-based Reasoning?

The purpose of this paper is to explore the similarities and differences and then argue for the potential synergies between two methodologies, namely Context-aware Reasoning and Case-based Reasoning, that are amongst the tools which can be used for intelligent environment (IE) system development. Through a case study supported by a review of the literature, we argue that context awareness and case based reasoning are not equal and are complementary methodologies to solve a domain specific problem, rather, the IE development paradigm must build a cooperation between these two approaches to overcome the individual drawbacks and to maximise the success of the IE systems