NLSC: Unrestricted Natural Language-based Service Composition through Sentence Embeddings

Current approaches for service composition (assemblies of atomic services) require developers to use: (a) domain-specific semantics to formalize services that restrict the vocabulary for their descriptions, and (b) translation mechanisms for service retrieval to convert unstructured user requests to strongly-typed semantic representations. In our work, we argue that effort to developing service descriptions, request translations, and matching mechanisms could be reduced using unrestricted natural language; allowing both: (1) end-users to intuitively express their needs using natural language, and (2) service developers to develop services without relying on syntactic/semantic description languages. Although there are some natural language-based service composition approaches, they restrict service retrieval to syntactic/semantic matching. With recent developments in Machine learning and Natural Language Processing, we motivate the use of Sentence Embeddings by leveraging richer semantic representations of sentences for service description, matching and retrieval. Experimental results show that service composition development effort may be reduced by more than 44\% while keeping a high precision/recall when matching high-level user requests with low-level service method invocations.Comment: This paper will appear on SCC'19 (IEEE International Conference on Services Computing) on July 1

An analysis of the application of AI to the development of intelligent aids for flight crew tasks

This report presents the results of a study aimed at developing a basis for applying artificial intelligence to the flight deck environment of commercial transport aircraft. In particular, the study was comprised of four tasks: (1) analysis of flight crew tasks, (2) survey of the state-of-the-art of relevant artificial intelligence areas, (3) identification of human factors issues relevant to intelligent cockpit aids, and (4) identification of artificial intelligence areas requiring further research

METHODOLOGIES FOR DESIGNING AND DEVELOPING HYPERMEDIA APPLICATIONS

Hypermedia design, as any other design activity, may be observed according to two points of view: methods which suggest milestones to guide the designer's work and process which concerns the actual detailed behavior of the designer at work. Cognitive studies assess that mental processes involved in any design process show widely shared human characteristics regardless to the used design method. Thereby, they provide general keys to help designers. Thus, a hypertext design environment should equally consider the two dimensions of a hypertext design activity, in particular it should support the natural design process specificities, mainly the incremental and opportunist aspects. The paper focuses on the hypertext design as a computer supported human activity. It examines what is general both in the design methods and in the design process of hypertexts in order to determine which general features are helpful to designers. This analysis has raised from the observation of the behavior of MacWeb users during design tasks. It is related to sound and well known results in cognitive science. The paper also describes how the proposed features are implemented in the MacWeb system.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

Challenges and Directions in Formalizing the Semantics of Modeling Languages

Developing software from models is a growing practice and there exist many model-based tools (e.g., editors, interpreters, debuggers, and simulators) for supporting model-driven engineering. Even though these tools facilitate the automation of software engineering tasks and activities, such tools are typically engineered manually. However, many of these tools have a common semantic foundation centered around an underlying modeling language, which would make it possible to automate their development if the modeling language specification were formalized. Even though there has been much work in formalizing programming languages, with many successful tools constructed using such formalisms, there has been little work in formalizing modeling languages for the purpose of automation. This paper discusses possible semantics-based approaches for the formalization of modeling languages and describes how this formalism may be used to automate the construction of modeling tools

Ontology-Based QoS Aggregation for Composite Web Services

Determining the QoS (quality of service) of composite Web services is of high importance for both service providers and service consumers. Heterogeneity of service descriptions, however, often hinders the aggregation of QoS parameters. We propose ontology-based QoS aggregation that integrates the semantics of QoS parameters and their aggregation into the overall aggregation process. The contribution is a QoS aggregation ontology and a QoS aggregation method that uses this ontology. We demonstrate the usefulness of our proposal for designers of composite services and assess its computational efficiency

Towards Interoperability in E-health Systems: a three-dimensional approach based on standards and semantics

Proceedings of: HEALTHINF 2009 (International Conference on Helath Informatics), Porto (Portugal), January 14-17, 2009, is part of BIOSTEC (Intemational Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies)The interoperability problem in eHealth can only be addressed by mean of combining standards and technology. However, these alone do not suffice. An appropiate framework that articulates such combination is required. In this paper, we adopt a three-dimensional (information, conference and inference) approach for such framework, based on OWL as formal language for terminological and ontological health resources, SNOMED CT as lexical backbone for all such resources, and the standard CEN 13606 for representing EHRs. Based on tha framewok, we propose a novel form for creating and supporting networks of clinical terminologies. Additionally, we propose a number of software modules to semantically process and exploit EHRs, including NLP-based search and inference, wich can support medical applications in heterogeneous and distributed eHealth systems.This work has been funded as part of the Spanish nationally funded projects ISSE (FIT-350300-2007-75) and CISEP (FIT-350301-2007-18). We also acknowledge IST-2005-027595 EU project NeO

Impact of service-oriented architectures (SOA) on business process standardization - Proposing a research model

Originally, Data Warehouses (DWH) were conceived to be components for the data support of controlling and management. From early on, this brought along the need to cope with extensive data preparation, integration, and distribution requirements. In the growing infrastructures for managerial support (“Business Intelligence”), the DWH turned into a central data hub for decision support. As the business environment and the underlying technical infrastructures are fostering an ever increasing degree of systems integration, the DWH has been recognized to be a pivotal component for all sorts of data transformation and data integration operations. Nowadays, the DWH is supposed to process both managerial and operational data – it becomes a transformation hub (TH). This article delineates the relevant motives that drive the trend towards THs and the resulting requirements. The logical composition of a TH is developed based on data transformation steps. Two case studies exemplify the application of the resulting architecture