ExtruOnt: An ontology for describing a type of manufacturing machine for Industry 4.0 systems

Semantically rich descriptions of manufacturing machines, offered in a machine-interpretable code, can provide interesting benefits in Industry 4.0 scenarios. However, the lack of that type of descriptions is evident. In this paper we present the development effort made to build an ontology, called ExtruOnt, for describing a type of manufacturing machine, more precisely, a type that performs an extrusion process (extruder). Although the scope of the ontology is restricted to a concrete domain, it could be used as a model for the development of other ontologies for describing manufacturing machines in Industry 4.0 scenarios. The terms of the ExtruOnt ontology provide different types of information related with an extruder, which are reflected in distinct modules that constitute the ontology. Thus, it contains classes and properties for expressing descriptions about components of an extruder, spatial connections, features, and 3D representations of those components, and finally the sensors used to capture indicators about the performance of this type of machine. The ontology development process has been carried out in close collaboration with domain experts.This research was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, grant number FEDER/TIN2016-78011-C4- 2R. The work of Víctor Julio Ramírez-Durán is funded by the contract with reference BES-2017-081193

Towards the implementation of Industry 4.0: A methodology-based approach oriented to the customer life cycle

Many different worldwide initiatives are promoting the transformation from machine dominant manufacturing to digital manufacturing. Thus, to achieve a successful transformation to Industry 4.0 standard, manufacturing enterprises are required to implement a clear roadmap. However, Small and Medium Manufacturing Enterprises (SMEs) encounter many barriers and difficulties (economical, technical, cultural, etc.) in the implementation of Industry 4.0. Although several works deal with the incorporation of Industry 4.0 technologies in the area of the product and supply chain life cycles, which SMEs could use as reference, this is not the case for the customer life cycle. Thus, we present two contributions that can help the software engineers of those SMEs to incorporate Industry 4.0 technologies in the context of the customer life cycle. The first contribution is a methodology that can help those software engineers in the task of creating new software services, aligned with Industry 4.0, that allow to change how customers interact with enterprises and the experiences they have while interacting with them. The methodology details a set of stages that are divided into phases which in turn are made up of activities. It places special emphasis on the incorporation of semantics descriptions and 3D visualization in the implementation of those new services. The second contribution is a system developed for a real manufacturing scenario, using the proposed methodology, which allows to observe the possibilities that this kind of systems can offer to SMEs in two phases of the customer life cycle: Discover & Shop, and Use & Service.This research was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, grant number FEDER/TIN2016-78011-C4-2R and the Basque Government under Grant No.: IT1330-19. The work of Víctor Julio Ramírez-Durán is funded by the contract with reference BES-2017-081193

Binding SNOMED-CT Terms to Archetype Elements: Establishing a Baseline of Results

Introduction: This article is part of the Focus Theme of METHODS of Information in Medicine on "Managing Interoperability and Complexity in Health Systems". Background: The proliferation of archetypes as a means to represent information of Electronic Health Records has raised the need of binding terminological codes - such as SNOMED CT codes - to their elements, in order to identify them univocally. However, the large size of the terminologies makes it difficult to perform this task manually. Objectives: To establish a baseline of results for the aforementioned problem by using off-the-shelf string comparison-based techniques against which results from more complex techniques could be evaluated. Methods: Nine Typed Comparison METHODS were evaluated for binding using a set of 487 archetype elements. Their recall was calculated and Friedman and Nemenyi tests were applied in order to assess whether any of the methods outperformed the others. Results: Using the qGrams method along with the 'Text' information piece of archetype elements outperforms the other methods if a level of confidence of 90% is considered. A recall of 25.26% is obtained if just one SNOMED CT term is retrieved for each archetype element. This recall rises to 50.51% and 75.56% if 10 and 100 elements are retrieved respectively, that being a reduction of more than 99.99% on the SNOMED CT code set. Conclusions: The baseline has been established following the above-mentioned results. Moreover, it has been observed that although string comparison-based methods do not outperform more sophisticated techniques, they still can be an alternative for providing a reduced set of candidate terms for each archetype element from which the ultimate term can be chosen later in the more-than-likely manual supervision task

SSDOnt: an Ontology for representing Single-Subject Design Studies

Background: Single-Subject Design is used in several areas such as education and biomedicine. However, no suited formal vocabulary exists for annotating the detailed configuration and the results of this type of research studies with the appropriate granularity for looking for information about them. Therefore, the search for those study designs relies heavily on a syntactical search on the abstract, keywords or full text of the publications about the study, which entails some limitations. Objective: To present SSDOnt, a specific purpose ontology for describing and annotating single-subject design studies, so that complex questions can be asked about them afterwards. Methods: The ontology was developed following the NeOn methodology. Once the requirements of the ontology were defined, a formal model was described in a Description Logic and later implemented in the ontology language OWL 2 DL. Results: We show how the ontology provides a reference model with a suitable terminology for the annotation and searching of single-subject design studies and their main components, such as the phases, the intervention types, the outcomes and the results. Some mappings with terms of related ontologies have been established. We show as proof-of-concept that classes in the ontology can be easily extended to annotate more precise information about specific interventions and outcomes such as those related to autism. Moreover, we provide examples of some types of queries that can be posed to the ontology. Conclusions: SSDOnt has achieved the purpose of covering the descriptions of the domain of single-subject research studies.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (FEDER/TIN2013-46238-C4-1-R and FEDER/TIN2016-78011-C4-2-

Toward Semantic Interoperability of Electronic Health Records

Although the goal of achieving semantic interoperability of electronic health records (EHRs) is pursued by many researchers, it has not been accomplished yet. In this paper, we present a proposal that smoothes out the way toward the achievement of that goal. In particular, our study focuses on medical diagnoses statements. In summary, the main contributions of our ontology-based proposal are the following: first, it includes a canonical ontology whose EHR-related terms focus on semantic aspects. As a result, their descriptions are independent of languages and technology aspects used in different organizations to represent EHRs. Moreover, those terms are related to their corresponding codes in well-known medical terminologies. Second, it deals with modules that allow obtaining rich ontological representations of EHR information managed by proprietary models of health information systems. The features of one specific module are shown as reference. Third, it considers the necessary mapping axioms between ontological terms enhanced with so-called path mappings. This feature smoothes out structural differences between heterogeneous EHR representations, allowing proper alignment of information.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science under Project TIN2010-21387-C02-01. The work of I. Berges was supported by a grant of the Basque Government (Programa de Formacion de Investigadores del Departamento de Educación, Universidades e Investigación

A Semantic Approach for Big Data Exploration in Industry 4.0

The growing trends in automation, Internet of Things, big data and cloud computing technologies have led to the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0), where it is possible to visualize and identify patterns and insights, which results in a better understanding of the data and can improve the manufacturing process. However, many times, the task of data exploration results difficult for manufacturing experts because they might be interested in analyzing also data that does not appear in pre-designed visualizations and therefore they must be assisted by Information Technology experts. In this paper, we present a proposal materialized in a semantic-based visual query system developed for a real Industry 4.0 scenario that allows domain experts to explore and visualize data in a friendly way. The main novelty of the system is the combined use that it makes of captured data that are semantically annotated first, and a 2D customized digital representation of a machine that is also linked with semantic descriptions. Those descriptions are expressed using terms of an ontology, where, among others, the sensors that are used to capture indicators about the performance of a machine that belongs to a Industry 4.0 scenario have been modeled. Moreover, this semantic description allows to: formulate queries at a higher level of abstraction, provide customized graphical visualizations of the results based on the format and nature of the data, and download enriched data enabling further types of analysis.This research was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under Grant No. FEDER/TIN2016-78011-C4-2-R and the Basque Government under Grant No. IT1330-19. The work of Víctor Julio Ramírez is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under contract with reference BES-2017-081193

Semantic Web Technology for Agent Communication Protocols.

Proceeding presentado a 5th European Semantic Web Conference, ESWC 2008, Tenerife, Canary Islands, SpainOne relevant aspect in the development of the Semantic Web framework is the achievement of a real inter-agents communication capability at the semantic level. The agents should be able to communicate and understand each other using standard communication protocols freely, that is, without needing a laborious a priori preparation, before the communication takes place. For that setting we present in this paper a proposal that promotes to describe standard communication protocols using Semantic Web technology (specifically, OWL-DL and SWRL). Those protocols are constituted by communication acts. In our proposal those communication acts are described as terms that belong to a communication acts ontology, that we have developed, called CommOnt. The intended semantics associated to the communication acts in the ontology is expressed through social commitments that are formalized as fluents in the Event Calculus. In summary, OWL-DL reasoners and rule engines help in our proposal for reasoning about protocols. We define some comparison relationships (dealing with notions of equivalence and specialization) between protocols used by agents from different systems.The work of Idoia Berges is supported by a grant of the Basque Government. This work is also supported by the University of the Basque Country, Diputación Foral de Gipuzkoa (cosupported by the European Social Fund) and the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science TIN2007-68091-C02-01

On demand translation for querying incompletely aligned datasets

More and more users aim at taking advantage of the existing Linked Open Data environment to formulate a query over a dataset and to then try to process the same query over different datasets, one after another, in order to obtain a broader set of answers. However, the heterogeneity of vocabularies used in the datasets on the one side, and the fact that the number of alignments among those datasets is scarce on the other, makes that querying task difficult for them. Considering this scenario we present in this paper a proposal that allows on demand translations of queries formulated over an original dataset, into queries expressed using the vocabulary of a targeted dataset. Our approach relieves users from knowing the vocabulary used in the targeted datasets and even more it considers situations where alignments do not exist or they are not suitable for the formulated query. Therefore, in order to favour the possibility of getting answers, sometimes there is no guarantee of obtaining a semantically equivalent translation. The core component of our proposal is a query rewriting model that considers a set of transformation rules devised from a pragmatic point of view. The feasibility of our scheme has been validated with queries defined in well known benchmarks and SPARQL endpoint logs, as the obtained results confirm

A mechanism for discovering semantic relationships among agent communication protocols

One relevant aspect in the development of the Semantic Web framework is the achievement of a real inter-agent communication capability at the semantic level. Agents should be able to communicate with each other freely using different communication protocols, constituted by communication acts. For that scenario, we introduce in this paper an efficient mechanism that presents the following main features: (i) It promotes the description of the communication acts of protocols as classes that belong to a communication actsmontology, and associates to those acts a social commitment semantics formalized through predicates in the Event Calculus. (ii) It is sustained on the idea that different protocols can be compared semantically by looking to the set of fluents associated to each branch of the protocols. Those sets are generated using Semantic Web technology rules. (iii) It discovers the following types of protocol relationships: equivalence, specialization, restriction, prefix, suffix, infix and complement_to_infix.The work of Idoia Berges is supported by a grant of the Basque Government (Programa de Formación de Investigadores del Departamento de Educación, Universidades e Investigación). This work is also supported by the Basque Country Government IT-427-07 and the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science TIN2007-68091-C02-01

Towards a satisfactory conversion of messages among agent-based information systems

Over the last years, there has been a change of perspective concerning the management of information systems, since they are no longer isolated and need to communicate with others. However, from a semantic point of view, real communication is difficult to achieve due to the heterogeneity of the systems. We present a proposal which, considering information systems are represented by software agents, provides a framework that favors a semantic communication among them, overcoming the heterogeneity of their agent communication languages. The main components of the framework are a suite of ontologies – conceptualizing communication acts – that will be used for generating the communication conversion, and an Event Calculus interpretation of the communications, which will be used for formalizing the notion of a satisfactory conversion. Moreover, we present a motivating example in order to complete the explanation of the whole picture.The work of Idoia Berges was supported by a grant of the Basque Government (Programa de Formación de Investigadores del Departamento de Educación, Universidades e Investigación). This work is also supported the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science TIN2010–21387-C02–01