Pragmatic Ontology Evolution: Reconciling User Requirements and Application Performance

Increasingly, organizations are adopting ontologies to describe their large catalogues of items. These ontologies need to evolve regularly in response to changes in the domain and the emergence of new requirements. An important step of this process is the selection of candidate concepts to include in the new version of the ontology. This operation needs to take into account a variety of factors and in particular reconcile user requirements and application performance. Current ontology evolution methods focus either on ranking concepts according to their relevance or on preserving compatibility with existing applications. However, they do not take in consideration the impact of the ontology evolution process on the performance of computational tasks – e.g., in this work we focus on instance tagging, similarity computation, generation of recommendations, and data clustering. In this paper, we propose the Pragmatic Ontology Evolution (POE) framework, a novel approach for selecting from a group of candidates a set of concepts able to produce a new version of a given ontology that i) is consistent with the a set of user requirements (e.g., max number of concepts in the ontology), ii) is parametrised with respect to a number of dimensions (e.g., topological considerations), and iii) effectively supports relevant computational tasks. Our approach also supports users in navigating the space of possible solutions by showing how certain choices, such as limiting the number of concepts or privileging trendy concepts rather than historical ones, would reflect on the application performance. An evaluation of POE on the real-world scenario of the evolving Springer Nature taxonomy for editorial classification yielded excellent results, demonstrating a significant improvement over alternative approaches

Norm-based and Commitment-driven Agentification of the Internet of Things

There are no doubts that the Internet-of-Things (IoT) has conquered the ICT industry to the extent that many governments and organizations are already rolling out many anywhere,anytime online services that IoT sustains. However, like any emerging and disruptive technology, multiple obstacles are slowing down IoT practical adoption including the passive nature and privacy invasion of things. This paper examines how to empower things with necessary capabilities that would make them proactive and responsive. This means things can, for instance reach out to collaborative peers, (un)form dynamic communities when necessary, avoid malicious peers, and be “questioned” for their actions. To achieve such empowerment, this paper presents an approach for agentifying things using norms along with commitments that operationalize these norms. Both norms and commitments are specialized into social (i.e., application independent) and business (i.e., application dependent), respectively. Being proactive, things could violate commitments at run-time, which needs to be detected through monitoring. In this paper, thing agentification is illustrated with a case study about missing children and demonstrated with a testbed that uses di_erent IoT-related technologies such as Eclipse Mosquitto broker and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport protocol. Some experiments conducted upon this testbed are also discussed

Cloud versus Edge: Who Serves the Internet-of-Things Better?

Usually announced to the ICT community as rivals in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) context, cloud and edge could work together according to their respective capabilities. Today’s IoT applications cannot be dependent on a single technology (either SQL or noSQL) nor a single operation model (either centralized or decentralized). The challenges are multiple including complexity of user scenarios, multiplicity of things, sensitivity of data, etc. This paper raises the question of who serves IoT better? Cloud, only; edge, only; or both together. To answer this question, clouds’ and edges’ duties are identified and then a set of collaborative scenarios are discussed with respect to these duties

Weaving Cognition into the Internet-of-Things: Application to Water Leaks

Despite the growing interest in the Internet-of-Things, many organizations remain reluctant to integrating things into their business processes. Different reasons justify this reluctance including things’ limited capabilities to act upon the cyber-physical environment in which they operate. To address this specific limitation, this paper examines thing empowerment with cognitive capabilities that would make them for instance, selective of the forthcoming business processes in which they would participate. The selection is based on things’ restrictions like limitedness and goals to achieve like improved reputation. For demonstration and implementation purposes, water leaks are used as a case study. A BPEL-based business process driving the fixing of water leaks is implemented involving different cognitive-empowered things like moisture sensor

Restriction-based Fragmentation of Business Processes over the Cloud

Despite the elasticity and pay-per-use benefits of cloud computing (aka fifth utility computing), organizations adopting clouds could be locked-into single cloud providers, which is not always a “pleasant” experience when these providers stop operations. This is a serious concern for those organizations that who would like to deploy (core) business processes on the cloud along with tapping into these 2 benefits. To address the lock-into concern, this paper proposes an approach for decomposing business processes into fragments that would run over multiple clouds and hence, multiple providers. To develop fragments, the approach considers both restrictions over ownersof business processes and potential competition among cloud providers.Onthe one hand, restrictions apply to each task in a business process and are specialized into budget to allocate, deadline to meet, and exclusivity to request. On the other hand, competition leads cloud providers to offer flexible pricing policies that would cater to the needs and requirements of each process owner. A policy handles certain clouds’ properties referred to as limitedness, non-renewability, and nonshareability that impact the availability of cloud resources and hence, the whole fragmentation. For instance, a non- shareable resource could delay other processes, should the current process do not release this resource on time. During fragmentation interactions between owners of processes and providers of clouds happen according to 2 strategies referred to as global and partial. The former collects offers about cloud resources from all providers, while the latter collects such details from particular providers. To evaluate these strategies’ pros and cons, a system implementing them as well as demonstrating the technical feasibility of the fragmentation approach using credit-application case study, is also presented in the paper. The system extends BPMN2- modeler Eclipse plugin and supports interactions of processes’ owners with clouds’ providers that result to identifying the necessary fragments with focus on cost optimization

Ethological principles predict the neuropeptides co-opted to influence parenting

Ethologists predicted that parental care evolves by modifying behavioural precursors in the asocial ancestor. As a corollary, we predict that the evolved mechanistic changes reside in genetic pathways underlying these traits. Here we test our hypothesis in female burying beetles, Nicrophorus vespilloides, an insect where caring adults regurgitate food to begging, dependent offspring. We quantify neuropeptide abundance in brains collected from three behavioural states: solitary virgins, individuals actively parenting or post-parenting solitary adults and quantify 133 peptides belonging to 18 neuropeptides. Eight neuropeptides differ in abundance in one or more states, with increased abundance during parenting in seven. None of these eight neuropeptides have been associated with parental care previously, but all have roles in predicted behavioural precursors for parenting. Our study supports the hypothesis that predictable traits and pathways are targets of selection during the evolution of parenting and suggests additional candidate neuropeptides to study in the context of parenting

Business analytics in industry 4.0: a systematic review

Recently, the term “Industry 4.0” has emerged to characterize several Information Technology and Communication (ICT) adoptions in production processes (e.g., Internet-of-Things, implementation of digital production support information technologies). Business Analytics is often used within the Industry 4.0, thus incorporating its data intelligence (e.g., statistical analysis, predictive modelling, optimization) expert system component. In this paper, we perform a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) on the usage of Business Analytics within the Industry 4.0 concept, covering a selection of 169 papers obtained from six major scientific publication sources from 2010 to March 2020. The selected papers were first classified in three major types, namely, Practical Application, Reviews and Framework Proposal. Then, we analysed with more detail the practical application studies which were further divided into three main categories of the Gartner analytical maturity model, Descriptive Analytics, Predictive Analytics and Prescriptive Analytics. In particular, we characterized the distinct analytics studies in terms of the industry application and data context used, impact (in terms of their Technology Readiness Level) and selected data modelling method. Our SLR analysis provides a mapping of how data-based Industry 4.0 expert systems are currently used, disclosing also research gaps and future research opportunities.The work of P. Cortez was supported by FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/2020. We would like to thank to the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions

Enzyme production from food wastes using a biorefinery concept

According to Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), one-third of food produced globally for human consumption (nearly 1.3 billion tonnes) is lost along the food supply chain. In many countries food waste is currently landfilled or incinerated together with other combustible municipal wastes for possible recovery of energy. However, these two options are facing more and more economic and environmental stresses. Due to its organic- and nutrient-rich nature, theoretically food waste can be converted to valuable products (e.g. bio-products such as methane, hydrogen, ethanol, enzymes, organic acids, chemicals and fuels) through various fermentation processes. Such conversion of food waste is potentially more profitable than its conversion to animal feed or transportation fuel. Food waste valorisation has therefore gained interest, with value added bio-products such as methane, hydrogen, ethanol, enzymes, organic acids, chemicals, and fuels. Therefore, the aim of this review is to provide information on the food waste situation with emphasis on Asia–Pacific countries and the state of the art food waste processing technologies to produce enzymes