The shift towards global networking brings with it many opportunities and challenges. In this paper, we discuss key technologies in achieving global semantic interoperability among heterogeneous information systems, including both traditional and web data sources. In particular, we focus on the importance of this capability and technologies we have designed to overcome ontological heterogeneity, a common type of disparity in financial information systems. Our approach to representing and reasoning with ontological heterogeneities in data sources is an extension of the Context Interchange (COIN) framework, a mediator-based approach for achieving semantic interoperability among heterogeneous sources and receivers. We also analyze the issue of ontological heterogeneity in the context of source-selection, and offer a declarative solution that combines symbolic solvers and mixed integer programming techniques in a constraint logic-programming framework. Finally, we discuss how these techniques can be coupled with emerging Semantic Web related technologies and standards such as Web-Services, DAML+OIL, and RuleML, to offer scalable solutions for global semantic interoperability. We believe that the synergy of database integration and Semantic Web research can make significant contributions to the financial knowledge integration problem, which has implications in financial services, and many other e-business tasks. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

Reproduction de : Thèse de doctorat : Sûreté de logiciel et calcul à haute performance : Toulouse, INPT : 2007. / Titre provenant de l'écran-titre. Bibliogr. 88 réf.

Il lavoro mette in luce le reciproche implicazioni di due mondi, quello delle tecnologie e quello dell'educazione, rispetto a temi di interesse condiviso: l'evoluzione della Rete in termini semantici attraverso l'impiego di ontologie informatiche e i complessi rapporti tra formalismi per la rappresentazione della conoscenza e didattica. La ricostruzione storica delle relazioni tra didattica, tecnologie e sistemi di espressione e comunicazione dei saperi ci ha condotto alla ricomprensione del Semantic Web nell'archeologia delle forme di rappresentazione della conoscenza, osservate con attenzione alle loro potenzialità didattiche e in rapporto all'evoluzione della cultura occidentale. La trattazione intende provvedere un modello per la lettura delle intersezioni tra Web Ontologies e scienze dell'educazione. Con uno sguardo al panorama internazionale della ricerca educativa su questi temi, si sono isolate e descritte alcune esperienze significative di impiego dell'approccio ontologico in ambienti e sistemi per l'e-learning, per calare nella realtà delle applicazioni e degli strumenti il discorso teorico proposto. / The work highlights the mutual implications between technologies and education: the two worlds have interest in common matters such as Internet semantic evolution through the implementation of informatic ontologies and the connections we can draw between knowledge representation and didactics. The historical reconstruction of the relationships among didactics, technologies and cultural resources leads us to the Semantic Web as a stage in the knowledge representation archaeology, regarded from cultural transmission and educational mediation perspectives. The work provides an explanation model for the intersections we can see between ontologies and sciences of education. With regard to the international research panorama about these themes, we point out and describe some significant experiences, which put the theory in practice. We analyze tools and applications involving the ontological approach in the development of e-learning environments and systems.

Thesis (M.S.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Computer Science, Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

Ever increasing complexity of software systems, and distributed and dynamic nature of today’s enterprise level computing have initiated the demand for more self aware, flexible and robust systems, where human beings could delegate much of their work to software agents. The Semantic Web presents new opportunities for enabling, modeling, sharing and reasoning with knowledge available on the web. These opportunities are made possible through the formal representation of knowledge domains with ontologies. Semantic Web is a vision of World Wide Web (WWW) level knowledge representation system where each piece of information is equipped with well defined meaning; enabling software agents to understand and process that information. This, in turn, enables people and software agents to work in a more smooth and collaborative way. In this thesis we have first presented a detailed overview of Semantic web vision by describing its fundamental building blocks which constitutes famous layered architecture of Semantic Web. We have discussed the mile stones Semantic Web vision has achieved so far in the areas of research, education and industry and on the other hand we have presented some of the social, business and technological barriers in the way of this vision to become reality. We have also evaluated that how Semantic vision is effecting some of the current technological and research areas like Web Services, Software Agents, Knowledge Engineering and Grid Computing. In the later part of thesis we have focused on problem of ontology mapping for agents on semantic web. We have precisely defined the problem and categorized it on the basis of syntactic and semantic aspects. Finally we have produced a survey of the current state of the art in ontology mapping research. In the survey we have presented some of the selected ontology mapping systems and described their functionality on the basis of the way they approach the problem, their efficiency, effectiveness and the part of problem space they cover. We consider that the survey of current state of the art in ontology mapping will provide a solid basis for further research in this field. / Ever increasing complexity of software systems, and distributed and dynamic nature of today’s enterprise level computing have initiated the demand for more self aware, flexible and robust systems, where human beings could delegate much of their work to software agents. The Semantic Web presents new opportunities for enabling, modeling, sharing and reasoning with knowledge available on the web. These opportunities are made possible through the formal representation of knowledge domains with ontologies. Semantic Web is a vision of World Wide Web (WWW) level knowledge representation system where each piece of information is equipped with well defined meaning; enabling software agents to understand and process that information. This, in turn, enables people and software agents to work in a more smooth and collaborative way. In this thesis we have first presented a detailed overview of Semantic web vision by describing its fundamental building blocks which constitutes famous layered architecture of Semantic Web. We have discussed the mile stones Semantic Web vision has achieved so far in the areas of research, education and industry and on the other hand we have presented some of the social, business and technological barriers in the way of this vision to become reality. We have also evaluated that how Semantic vision is effecting some of the current technological and research areas like Web Services, Software Agents, Knowledge Engineering and Grid Computing. In the later part of thesis we have focused on problem of ontology mapping for agents on semantic web. We have precisely defined the problem and categorized it on the basis of syntactic and semantic aspects. Finally we have produced a survey of the current state of the art in ontology mapping research. In the survey we have presented some of the selected ontology mapping systems and described their functionality on the basis of the way they approach the problem, their efficiency, effectiveness and the part of problem space they cover. We consider that the survey of current state of the art in ontology mapping will provide a solid basis for further research in this field. / Folkparksvagen 18:01,372 40 Ronneby. Sweden

Ontologien spielen eine zentrale Rolle für die formalisierte Repräsentation von Wissen und Informationen sowie für die Infrastruktur des sogenannten semantic web. Trotz früherer Initiativen der Bibliotheken und Gedächtnisinstitutionen hat sich die deutschsprachige Musikwissenschaft insgesamt nur sehr zögerlich dem Thema genähert. Im Rahmen einer Bestandsaufnahme werden neben der Erläuterung grundlegender Konzepte, Herausforderungen und Herangehensweisen bei der Modellierung von Ontologien daher auch vielversprechende Modelle und bereits erprobte Anwendungsbeispiele für eine ‚semantische‘ digitale Musikwissenschaft identifiziert. / Ontologies play a crucial role for the formalised representation of knowledge and information as well as for the infrastructure of the semantic web. Despite early initiatives that were driven by libraries and memory institutions, German musicology as a whole has turned very slowly to the subject. In an overview the author addresses basic concepts, challenges, and approaches for ontology design and identifies models and use cases with promising applications for a ‚semantic‘ digital musicology.

Earthquake engineering is increasingly focusing on large international collaborations to address complex problems. Recent computing advances have greatly contributed to the way scientific collaborations are conducted, where web-based solutions are an emerging trend to manage and present results to the scientific community and the general public. However, collaborations in earthquake engineering lack a common interoperability framework, resulting in tedious and complex processes to integrate results, which cannot be efficiently used by third-party institutions. The work described in this thesis applies novel computing techniques to enable the interoperability of earthquake engineering resources, by integrating data, distributed simulation services and laboratory facilities. This integration focuses on distributed approaches rather than centralised solutions, and has been materialised in a platform called Celestina, that supports the integration of hazard mitigation resources. The prototype of Celestina has been implemented and validated within the context of two of the current largest earthquake engineering networks, the SERIES network in Europe and the NEES network in the USA. It has been divided into three sub-systems to address different problems: (i) Celestina Data, to develop best methods to define, store, integrate and share earthquake engineering experimental data. Celestina Data uses a novel approach based on Semantic Web technologies, and it has accomplished the first data integration between earthquake engineering institutions from the United States and Europe by means of a formalised infrastructure. (ii) Celestina Tools, to research applications that can be implemented on top of the data integration, in order to provide a practical benefit for the end user. (iii) Celestina Simulations, to create the most efficient methods to integrate distributed testing software and to support the planning, definition and execution of the experimental workflow from a high-level perspective. Celestina Simulations has been implemented and validated by conducting distributed simulations between the Universities of Oxford and Kassel. Such validation has demonstrated the feasibility to conduct both flexible, general-purpose and high performance simulations under the framework. Celestina has enabled global analysis of data requirements for the whole community, the definition of global policies for data authorship, curation and preservation, more efficient use of efforts and funding, more accurate decision support systems and more efficient sharing and evaluation of data results in scientific articles.

Software development is a complex task. Executable applications comprise a mutlitude of diverse components that are developed with various frameworks, libraries, or communication platforms. The technical complexity in development retains resources, hampers efficient problem solving, and thus increases the overall cost of software production. Another significant challenge in market-driven software engineering is the variety of customer needs. It necessitates a maximum of flexibility in software implementations to facilitate the deployment of different products that are based on one single core. To reduce technical complexity, the paradigm of Model-Driven Software Development (MDSD) facilitates the abstract specification of software based on modeling languages. Corresponding models are used to generate actual programming code without the need for creating manually written, error-prone assets. Modeling languages that are tailored towards a particular domain are called domain-specific languages (DSLs). Domain-specific modeling (DSM) approximates technical solutions with intentional problems and fosters the unfolding of specialized expertise. To cope with feature diversity in applications, the Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) community provides means for the management of variability in software products, such as feature models and appropriate tools for mapping features to implementation assets. Model-driven development, domain-specific modeling, and the dedicated management of variability in SPLE are vital for the success of software enterprises. Yet, these paradigms exist in isolation and need to be integrated in order to exhaust the advantages of every single approach. In this thesis, we propose a way to do so. We introduce the paradigm of Multi-Domain Engineering (MDE) which means model-driven development with multiple domain-specific languages in variability-intensive scenarios. MDE strongly emphasize the advantages of MDSD with multiple DSLs as a neccessity for efficiency in software development and treats the paradigm of SPLE as indispensable means to achieve a maximum degree of reuse and flexibility. We present HybridMDSD as our solution approach to implement the MDE paradigm. The core idea of HybidMDSD is to capture the semantics of particular DSLs based on properly defined semantics for software models contained in a central upper ontology. Then, the resulting semantic foundation can be used to establish references between arbitrary domain-specific models (DSMs) and sophisticated instance level reasoning ensures integrity and allows to handle partiucular change adaptation scenarios. Moreover, we present an approach to automatically generate composition code that integrates generated assets from separate DSLs. All necessary development tasks are arranged in a comprehensive development process. Finally, we validate the introduced approach with a profound prototypical implementation and an industrial-scale case study. / Softwareentwicklung ist komplex: ausführbare Anwendungen beinhalten und vereinen eine Vielzahl an Komponenten, die mit unterschiedlichen Frameworks, Bibliotheken oder Kommunikationsplattformen entwickelt werden. Die technische Komplexität in der Entwicklung bindet Ressourcen, verhindert effiziente Problemlösung und führt zu insgesamt hohen Kosten bei der Produktion von Software. Zusätzliche Herausforderungen entstehen durch die Vielfalt und Unterschiedlichkeit an Kundenwünschen, die der Entwicklung ein hohes Maß an Flexibilität in Software-Implementierungen abverlangen und die Auslieferung verschiedener Produkte auf Grundlage einer Basis-Implementierung nötig machen. Zur Reduktion der technischen Komplexität bietet sich das Paradigma der modellgetriebenen Softwareentwicklung (MDSD) an. Software-Spezifikationen in Form abstrakter Modelle werden hier verwendet um Programmcode zu generieren, was die fehleranfällige, manuelle Programmierung ähnlicher Komponenten überflüssig macht. Modellierungssprachen, die auf eine bestimmte Problemdomäne zugeschnitten sind, nennt man domänenspezifische Sprachen (DSLs). Domänenspezifische Modellierung (DSM) vereint technische Lösungen mit intentionalen Problemen und ermöglicht die Entfaltung spezialisierter Expertise. Um der Funktionsvielfalt in Software Herr zu werden, bietet der Forschungszweig der Softwareproduktlinienentwicklung (SPLE) verschiedene Mittel zur Verwaltung von Variabilität in Software-Produkten an. Hierzu zählen Feature-Modelle sowie passende Werkzeuge, um Features auf Implementierungsbestandteile abzubilden. Modellgetriebene Entwicklung, domänenspezifische Modellierung und eine spezielle Handhabung von Variabilität in Softwareproduktlinien sind von entscheidender Bedeutung für den Erfolg von Softwarefirmen. Zur Zeit bestehen diese Paradigmen losgelöst voneinander und müssen integriert werden, damit die Vorteile jedes einzelnen für die Gesamtheit der Softwareentwicklung entfaltet werden können. In dieser Arbeit wird ein Ansatz vorgestellt, der dies ermöglicht. Es wird das Multi-Domain Engineering Paradigma (MDE) eingeführt, welches die modellgetriebene Softwareentwicklung mit mehreren domänenspezifischen Sprachen in variabilitätszentrierten Szenarien beschreibt. MDE stellt die Vorteile modellgetriebener Entwicklung mit mehreren DSLs als eine Notwendigkeit für Effizienz in der Entwicklung heraus und betrachtet das SPLE-Paradigma als unabdingbares Mittel um ein Maximum an Wiederverwendbarkeit und Flexibilität zu erzielen. In der Arbeit wird ein Ansatz zur Implementierung des MDE-Paradigmas, mit dem Namen HybridMDSD, vorgestellt.