Agent-oriented approach to develop context-aware applications : a case study on communities of practice

This paper presents and discusses the use of an agent-oriented context-aware platform to support the interactions of the participating actors of communities of practice in the health care domain. Our work is based on a scenario where communities of practice are applied in a hospital to enhance the knowledge sharing among the hospital staff members who share interests and goals. An agent-oriented modeling language (AORML) is used to support the analysis of contextual information and interaction between participating actors in the context-aware services platform. The chosen supporting platform is a context-aware services platform that uses semantic web services and runs on top of 3G networks

The attention to the appropriate data treatment is fundamental to possible achieve all the potential to the open science

Since XVII century, the societies demand a grater opening and transparency for the academic activities. Considering that most of scientific founding come from government resources, it is natural that the society expects a better access to the elements that constitutes the scientific research, like data, experiments and results. This causes not only the society access to those results, but also that other scientists may reuse data and results of other researches in another different way and reach other conclusions. Therefore, a greater data reuse and results from a more opened scientific environment enables a more efficient and effective use of the resources invested

GSO: Designing a Well-Founded Service Ontology to Support Dynamic Service Discovery and Composition

A pragmatic and straightforward approach to semantic service discovery is to match inputs and outputs of user requests with the input and output requirements of registered service descriptions. This approach can be extended by using pre-conditions, effects and semantic annotations (meta-data) in an attempt to increase discovery accuracy. While on one hand these additions help improve discovery accuracy, on the other hand complexity is added as service users need to add more information elements to their service requests. In this paper we present an approach that aims at facilitating the representation of service requests by service users, without loss of accuracy. We introduce a Goal-Based Service Framework (GSF) that uses the concept of goal as an abstraction to represent service requests. This paper presents the core concepts and relations of the Goal-Based Service Ontology (GSO), which is a fundamental component of the GSF, and discusses how the framework supports semantic service discovery and composition. GSO provides a set of primitives and relations between goals, tasks and services. These primitives allow a user to represent its goals, and a supporting platform to discover or compose services that fulfil them