Learning from AI : new trends in database technology

Recently some researchers in the areas of database data modelling and knowledge representations in artificial intelligence have recognized that they share many common goals. In this survey paper we show the relationship between database and artificial intelligence research. We show that there has been a tendency for data models to incorporate more modelling techniques developed for knowledge representations in artificial intelligence as the desire to incorporate more application oriented semantics, user friendliness, and flexibility has increased. Increasing the semantics of the representation is the key to capturing the "reality" of the database environment, increasing user friendliness, and facilitating the support of multiple, possibly conflicting, user views of the information contained in a database

Semantic Description, Publication and Discovery of Workflows in myGrid

The bioinformatics scientific process relies on in silico experiments, which are experiments executed in full in a computational environment. Scientists wish to encode the designs of these experiments as workflows because they provide minimal, declarative descriptions of the designs, overcoming many barriers to the sharing and re-use of these designs between scientists and enable the use of the most appropriate services available at any one time. We anticipate that the number of workflows will increase quickly as more scientists begin to make use of existing workflow construction tools to express their experiment designs. Discovery then becomes an increasingly hard problem, as it becomes more difficult for a scientist to identify the workflows relevant to their particular research goals amongst all those on offer. While many approaches exist for the publishing and discovery of services, there have been few attempts to address where and how authors of experimental designs should advertise the availability of their work or how relevant workflows can be discovered with minimal effort from the user. As the users designing and adapting experiments will not necessarily have a computer science background, we also have to consider how publishing and discovery can be achieved in such a way that they are not required to have detailed technical knowledge of workflow scripting languages. Furthermore, we believe they should be able to make use of others' expert knowledge (the semantics) of the given scientific domain. In this paper, we define the issues related to the semantic description, publishing and discovery of workflows, and demonstrate how the architecture created by the myGrid project aids scientists in this process. We give a walk-through of how users can construct, publish, annotate, discover and enact workflows via the user interfaces of the myGrid architecture; we then describe novel middleware protocols, making use of the Semantic Web technologies RDF and OWL to support workflow publishing and discovery

Enabling High-Level Application Development for the Internet of Things

Application development in the Internet of Things (IoT) is challenging because it involves dealing with a wide range of related issues such as lack of separation of concerns, and lack of high-level of abstractions to address both the large scale and heterogeneity. Moreover, stakeholders involved in the application development have to address issues that can be attributed to different life-cycles phases. when developing applications. First, the application logic has to be analyzed and then separated into a set of distributed tasks for an underlying network. Then, the tasks have to be implemented for the specific hardware. Apart from handling these issues, they have to deal with other aspects of life-cycle such as changes in application requirements and deployed devices. Several approaches have been proposed in the closely related fields of wireless sensor network, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, and software engineering in general to address the above challenges. However, existing approaches only cover limited subsets of the above mentioned challenges when applied to the IoT. This paper proposes an integrated approach for addressing the above mentioned challenges. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) a development methodology that separates IoT application development into different concerns and provides a conceptual framework to develop an application, (2) a development framework that implements the development methodology to support actions of stakeholders. The development framework provides a set of modeling languages to specify each development concern and abstracts the scale and heterogeneity related complexity. It integrates code generation, task-mapping, and linking techniques to provide automation. Code generation supports the application development phase by producing a programming framework that allows stakeholders to focus on the application logic, while our mapping and linking techniques together support the deployment phase by producing device-specific code to result in a distributed system collaboratively hosted by individual devices. Our evaluation based on two realistic scenarios shows that the use of our approach improves the productivity of stakeholders involved in the application development

Design and implementation of a filter engine for semantic web documents

This report describes our project that addresses the challenge of changes in the semantic web. Some studies have already been done for the so-called adaptive semantic web, such as applying inferring rules. In this study, we apply the technology of Event Notification System (ENS). Treating changes as events, we developed a notification system for such events

Design and Implementation of a Method Base Management System for a Situational CASE Environment

Situational method engineering focuses on configuration of system development methods (SDMs) tuned to the situation of a project at hand. Situational methods are assembled from parts of existing SDMs, so called method fragments, that are selected to match the project situation. The complex task of selecting appropriate method fragments and assembling them into a method requires effective automated support. The paper describes the architecture of a tool prototype offering such support. We present the structure of its central repository, a method base containing method fragments. The functions to store, select and assemble these method fragments are offered by a stratified method base management system tool component, which is described as wel

How to Find Suitable Ontologies Using an Ontology-based WWW Broker

Knowledge reuse by means of outologies now faces three important problems: (1) there are no standardized identifying features that characterize ontologies from the user point of view; (2) there are no web sites using the same logical organization, presenting relevant information about ontologies; and (3) the search for appropriate ontologies is hard, time-consuming and usually fruitless. To solve the above problems, we present: (1) a living set of features that allow us to characterize ontologies from the user point of view and have the same logical organization; (2) a living domain ontology about ontologies (called ReferenceOntology) that gathers, describes and has links to existing ontologies; and (3) (ONTO)2Agent, the ontology-based www broker about ontologies that uses the Reference Ontology as a source of its knowledge and retrieves descriptions of ontologies that satisfy a given set of constraints. (ONTO)~Agent is available at http://delicias.dia.fi.upm.es/REFERENCE ONTOLOGY