Enterprise Engineering Using Semantic Technologies

Modern Enterprises are facing unprecedented challenges in every aspect of their businesses: from marketing research, invention of products, prototyping, production, sales to billing. Innovation is the key to enhancing enterprise performances and knowledge is the main driving force in creating innovation. The identification and effective management of valuable knowledge, however, remains an illusive topic. Knowledge management (KM) techniques, such as enterprise process modelling, have long been recognised for their value and practiced as part of normal business. There are plentiful of KM techniques. However, what is still lacking is a holistic KM approach that enables one to fully connect KM efforts with existing business knowledge and practices already in IT systems, such as organisational memories. To address this problem, we present an integrated three-dimensional KM approach that supports innovative semantics technologies. Its automated formal methods allow us to tap into modern business practices and capitalise on existing knowledge. It closes the knowledge management cycle with user feedback loops. Since we are making use of reliable existing knowledge and methods, new knowledge can be extracted with less effort comparing with another method where new information has to be created from scratch

Using Formal Concept Analysis and Information Flow for Modelling and Sharing Common Semantics: Lessons Learnt and Emergent Issues

We have been witnessing an explosion of user involvement in knowledge creation, publication and access both from within and between organisations. This is partly due to the widespread adoption of Web technology. But, it also introduces new challenges for knowledge engineers, who have to find suitable ways for sharing and integrating all this knowledge in meaningful chunks. In this paper we are exposing our experiences in using two technologies for capturing, representing and modelling semantic integration that are relatively unknown to the integration practitioners: Information Flow and Formal Concept Analysis

Competence: intelligence in sheep's clothing? Culture, representations, and cognitive performance

The first aim of this thesis was to contribute to the understanding of how cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1983/1986) affects students achievements and performances. We specifically claimed that the effect of cultural capital is at least partly explained by the positioning students take towards the principles they use to attribute competence and intelligence. The testing of these hypothesis have been framed within the social representations theory, specifically in the formulation of the Lemanic school approach (Doise, 1986)

On the emergent Semantic Web and overlooked issues

The emergent Semantic Web, despite being in its infancy, has already received a lotof attention from academia and industry. This resulted in an abundance of prototype systems and discussion most of which are centred around the underlying infrastructure. However, when we critically review the work done to date we realise that there is little discussion with respect to the vision of the Semantic Web. In particular, there is an observed dearth of discussion on how to deliver knowledge sharing in an environment such as the Semantic Web in effective and efficient manners. There are a lot of overlooked issues, associated with agents and trust to hidden assumptions made with respect to knowledge representation and robust reasoning in a distributed environment. These issues could potentially hinder further development if not considered at the early stages of designing Semantic Web systems. In this perspectives paper, we aim to help engineers and practitioners of the Semantic Web by raising awareness of these issues

Discovering Semantically Similar Associations (SeSA) for Complex Mappings between Conceptual Models

Abstract. There is an increasing demand for discovering meaningful relation-ships, i.e., mappings, between conceptual models for interoperability. Current solutions have been focusing on the discovery of correspondences between el-ements in different conceptual models. However, a complex mapping associating a structure connecting a set of elements in one conceptual model with a structure connecting a set of elements in another conceptual model is required in many cases. In this paper, we propose a novel technique for discovering semantically similar associations (SeSA) for constructing complex mappings. Given a pair of conceptual models, we create a mapping graph by taking the cross product of the two conceptual model graphs. Each edge in the mapping graph is assigned a weight based on the semantic similarity of the two elements encoded by the edge. We then turn the problem of discovering semantically similar associations (SeSA) into the problem of finding shortest paths in the mapping graph. We ex-periment different combinations of values for element similarities according to the semantic types of the elements. By choosing the set of values that have the best performance on controlled mapping cases, we apply the algorithm on test conceptual models drawn from a variety of applications. The experimental re-sults show that the proposed technique is effective in discovering semantically similar associations (SeSA).

Towards a killer app for the Semantic Web

Killer apps are highly transformative technologies that create new markets and widespread patterns of behaviour. IT generally, and the Web in particular, has benefited from killer apps to create new networks of users and increase its value. The Semantic Web community on the other hand is still awaiting a killer app that proves the superiority of its technologies. There are certain features that distinguish killer apps from other ordinary applications. This paper examines those features in the context of the Semantic Web, in the hope that a better understanding of the characteristics of killer apps might encourage their consideration when developing Semantic Web applications

Product oriented modelling and Interoperability issues

International audienceThe consideration of Product information or Knowledge management, product traceability or genealogy, and product life cycle management implies new strategies and approaches to manage flows of information that relate to flows of material managed in shop floor level. Moreover, throughout product lifecycle coordination needs to be established between reality in the physical world (physical view) and the virtual world handled by manufacturing information systems (informational view). This paper presents a product oriented modelling and a product oriented interoperability approach based on the use of the “Holon” modelling concept as a means for the synchronisation of both physical view and informational views. The Zachman framework is afterwards used as a guideline to establish product oriented interoperability between enterprise systems

Agreement Computing

[EN] In this paper we introduce the concept of Agreement Computing, motivate the central role that the concept of agreement plays in open software systems and discuss a number of research challenges that need to be addressed to make the agreement computing vision a reality.Research supported by the Agreement Technologies CONSOLIDER project under contract CSD2007-0022 and INGENIO 2010 and by the Agreement Technologies COST Action, IC0801.Sierra Garcia, C.; Botti Navarro, VJ.; Ossowski, DS. (2011). Agreement Computing. KI - Künstliche Intelligenz. 25(1):57-61. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13218-010-0070-yS5761251Arcos JL, Esteva M, Noriega P, Rodríguez JA, Sierra C (2005) Engineering open environments with electronic institutions. Eng Appl Artif Intell 18(2):191–204Boella G, Noriega P, Pigozzi G, Verhagen H (2009) In: Dagstuhl seminar proceedings 09121: normative multi-agent systems.Henrik G, Wright V (1963) Norm and action, a logical enquiry. Routledge and Kegan Paul, LondonHermenegildo M, Albert E, López-García P, Puebla G (2005) Abstraction carrying code and resource-awareness. In: Principle and practice of declarative programming. ACM Press, New YorkJennings N, Faratin P, Lomuscio A, Parsons S, Sierra C, Wooldridge M (2001) Automated negotiation: prospects methods and challenges. Group Decis Negot 10(2):199–215Jøsang A, Ismail R, Boyd C (2007) A survey of trust and reputation systems for online service provision. Decis Support Syst 43(2):618–644Kalfoglou Y, Schorlemmer M (2003) IF-Map: an ontology-mapping method based on information-flow theory. In: Spaccapietra S, March S, Aberer K (eds) Journal on data semantics I. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 2800. Springer, Heidelberg, pp 98–127Ko RKL, Lee SSG, Lee EW (2009) Business process management (bpm) standards: a survey. Bus Process Manag J 15(5):744–791Kraus S (1997) Negotiation and cooperation in multi-agent environments. Artif Intell 94(1–2):79–97March J (1996) A preface to understanding how decisions happen in organizations. In: Organizational decision-making, Cambridge University Press, CambridgeNecula GC, Lee P (1996) Proof-carrying code. Tech repRoss A (1968) Directives and norms. Humanities, Atlantic HighlandsSierra C, Debenham J (2006) Trust and honour in information-based agency. In: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems. ACM Press, New York, pp 1225–1232Simon HA Administrative behavior. Free Press (1997)Vasirani M, Ossowski S (2009) A market-inspired approach to reservation-based urban road traffic management. In: Proceedings of the 8th international conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems, IFAAMAS, pp. 617–62

A Theory of Mediators for Eternal Connectors

International audienceOn the fly synthesis of mediators is a revolutionary approach to the seamless networking of today's and future digital systems that increasingly need be connected. The resulting emergent mediators (or Connectors) adapt the interaction protocols run by the connected systems to let them communicate. However, although the mediator concept has been studied and used quite extensively to cope with many heterogeneity dimensions, a remaining key challenge is to support on-the-fly synthesis of mediators. Towards this end, this paper introduces a theory of mediators for the ubiquitous networking environment. The proposed formal model: (i) precisely characterizes the problem of interoperability between networked systems, and (ii) paves the way for automated reasoning about protocol matching (interoperability) and related mediator synthesis

Application-Layer Connector Synthesis

International audienceThe heterogeneity characterizing the systems populating the Ubiquitous Computing environment prevents their seamless interoperability. Heterogeneous protocols may be willing to cooperate in order to reach some common goal even though they meet dynamically and do not have a priori knowledge of each other. Despite numerous e orts have been done in the literature, the automated and run-time interoperability is still an open challenge for such environment. We consider interoperability as the ability for two Networked Systems (NSs) to communicate and correctly coordinate to achieve their goal(s). In this chapter we report the main outcomes of our past and recent research on automatically achieving protocol interoperability via connector synthesis. We consider application-layer connectors by referring to two conceptually distinct notions of connector: coordinator and mediator. The former is used when the NSs to be connected are already able to communicate but they need to be speci cally coordinated in order to reach their goal(s). The latter goes a step forward representing a solution for both achieving correct coordination and enabling communication between highly heterogeneous NSs. In the past, most of the works in the literature described e orts to the automatic synthesis of coordinators while, in recent years the focus moved also to the automatic synthesis of mediators. Within the Connect project, by considering our past experience on automatic coordinator synthesis as a baseline, we propose a formal theory of mediators and a related method for automatically eliciting a way for the protocols to interoperate. The solution we propose is the automated synthesis of emerging mediating connectors (i.e., mediators for short)