An extension of ontology based databases to handle preferences

1th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems; Milan; Italy; 6 May 2009 through 10 May 2009Ontologies have been defined to make explicit the semantics of data. With the emergence of the SemanticWeb, the amount of ontological data (or instances) available has increased. To manage such data, Ontology Based DataBases (OBDBs), that store ontologies and their instance data in the same repository have been proposed. These databases are associated with exploitation languages supporting description, querying, etc. on both ontologies and data. However, usually queries return a big amount of data that may be sorted in order to find the relevant ones. Moreover, in the current, few approaches considering user preferences when querying have been developed. Yet this problem is fundamental for many applications especially in the e-commerce domain. In this paper, we first propose an extension of an existing OBDB, called OntoDB through extension of their ontology model in order to support semantic description of preferences. Secondly, an extension of an ontology based query language, called OntoQL defined on OntoDB for querying ontological data with preferences is presented. Finally, an implementation of the proposed extensions are described

Digital Availability of Product Information for Collaborative Engineering of Spacecraft

In this paper, we introduce a system to collect product information from manufacturers and make it available in tools that are used for concurrent design of spacecraft. The planning of a spacecraft needs experts from different disciplines, like propulsion, power, and thermal. Since these different disciplines rely on each other there is a high need for communication between them, which is often realized by a Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) process and corresponding tools. We show by comparison that the product information provided by manufacturers often does not match the information needed by MBSE tools on a syntactic or semantic level. The information from manufacturers is also currently not available in machine-readable formats. Afterwards, we present a prototype of a system that makes product information from manufacturers directly available in MBSE tools, in a machine-readable way.Comment: accepted at CDVE201

Formal Modelling and Verification of Transactional Web Service Composition: A Refinement and Proof Approach with Event-B

International audienceSeveral languages for describing Web service compositions, like BPEL, make use of fault and compensation constructs to handle internal and/or external runtime errors of the composed service. This situation particularly occurs for transactional services. However, the absence of a rigorous definition of these BPEL constructors make it difficult to correctly define the transactional behaviour of a BPEL process. The definitions of such constructs are usually given by their informal descriptions available in the standards. Our contribution proposes an approach to formally define the semantics of these operators. Thus, this paper presents a new Event-B semantics for formal modelling of web services compositions that covers the scope, the faults and the compensations handlers introduced by the BPEL language specification. It also proposes a methodology showing how we can use Event-B method to design a transactional BPEL processes. The proposed approach is illustrated by a case study

Composition Operators for Event-B. CO4EB Rodin plugin

International audienc

Formal validation of HCI user tasks

Our work focuses on the use of formal techniques in order to increase the quality of HCI software and of all the processes resulting from the development, verification, design and validation activities. This paper shows how the B formal technique can be used for user tasks modelling and validation. A trace based semantics is used to describe either the HCI or the user tasks. Each task is modelled by a sequence of fired events. Each event is defined in the abstract specification and design of the HCI system