Catarina Ferreira da Silva

A Framework to Support Interoperability among Semantic Resources

This paper presents the framework to support the interoperability among Semantic Resources (SRs) proposed by the FUNSIEC project. FUNSIEC aims at studying the feasibility of building and maintaining an Open Semantic Infrastructure for the European Construction Sector (OSIECS). FUNSIEC adopted a layered approach where the SRs are mapped at the meta-schema and schema levels. This process produces the respective OSIECS meta-schema and schema, which support the design of the OSIECS kernel — the heart of the OSIECS infrastructure. This paper presents and discusses the elements involved in FUNSIEC’s work (e.g. framework, architecture, methodology). Some conclusions and future work complete the paper.

Service-based negotiation for advanced collaboration in enterprise networks

Information systems support organisations to achieve greater efficiency by automating their activities. Nowadays, in the actual competitive and global business context, the advent of enterprise networking has been challenging collaboration, coordination and continuous interactions among dissimilar information systems to adapt and improve them. Sustainability of interoperability among heterogeneous systems regarding sharing information and knowledge in a collaborative dynamic environment is hard to achieve and maintain. This paper proposes a service-based negotiation framework for advanced collaboration in enterprise networks, as a solution to improve the sustainability of interoperability within enterprise information systems. Validation in industrial scenario is presented and discussed.

Resolving Interoperability in Concurrent Engineering

To face an increasingly competitive environment within a globalization context, and to focus on core high-added value business activities, enterprises have to establish partnerships with other companies specialized in complementary domains. Such an approach, primarily based on optimization of the value chain, is called virtualization of the Enterprise. Enterprises relying on virtualization, sub-contracting and outsourcing have to coordinate activities of all the partners, to integrate the results of their activities, to manage federated information coming from the different implied information systems and to re-package them as a product for the clients. The adopted organization, which is considering as well as the internal and external resources, is called “Extended Enterprise”. Nevertheless, in such complex emerging networked organizations, it is more and more challenging to be able to interchange, to share and to manage internal and external resources such as digital information, digital services and computer-enacted processes. In addition, digital artifacts produced by enterprise activities are more and more heterogeneous and complex. After characterizing expected interoperability for collaborative platform systems and highlighting interoperability issues and brakes not yet addressed, this chapter describes an innovative approach to build interoperability based on a Federated Framework of legacy eBusiness standards of a given ecosystem. It implies facing important issues related to semantic preservation along the lifecycle of the artifacts and infrastructures required to define and exploit an application. We present two use case studies that apply interoperability strategies.

Collaborative negotiation for ontology-driven enterprise businesses

The requirements from a globalised world demand that enterprises not only shift their paradigm from product-centrism to component-centrism on integrated products, potentiating the need for tight interoperability dependencies, but also that the product specifications and concepts are fully understood by customers and providers in a transparent manner that surpasses the barriers of language, culture and technology. This paper presents the NEGOSEIO framework, which enables service-based interoperability between parties, closely integrated with semantics and business understanding via the use of reference ontologies in the quest for achieving a stronger interoperability liaison. The papers validation and discussion is performed in its application on the ontology negotiation of business environments in the scope of the EU-funded FP7 project TIMBUS for digital preservation of resources and enduring business continuity.

Towards Combining Declarative Specification with On-the-Fly Mediation

Business process interoperability (BPI) is an important issue for distributed applications in collaborative environments. This problem is further complicated in dynamic collaborative environments where stakeholders can quit the network and be replaced by new ones. To date, existing approaches do not provide the necessary flexibility to handle the dynamic nature of the network. In this work a formal framework is developed which combines cross-organizational process specifications with mediation-based solutions to ensure BPI. The concepts defined in this framework are used to build flexible collaboration contracts that better handle the dynamicity of the network. The applicability of the framework has been illustrated through a real-life industrial use-case in the aerospace industry for collaborative aircraft design process. The proposed framework provides higher level concepts than existing process modeling languages which better captures the business intent behind the collaboration.

MADONA: a method for automated provisioning of cloud-based component-oriented business applications

Service-oriented computing and cloud computing offer many opportunities for developing and deploying applications. In this paper, we propose and describe a component-oriented method for automated provisioning of cloud business applications. The method covers the whole application’s lifecycle and is based on cloud orchestration tools that manage the deployment and dependencies of supplied components. We aim to reduce the necessary technical knowledge for provisioning component-oriented cloud applications. To this end, we extend Linked Unified Service Description Language to describe services for matching user’s requirements. We adopt a real case study to show the feasibility of the method.

Aggregating and Managing Big Realtime Data in the Cloud - Application to Intelligent Transport for Smart Cities

The increasing power of computer hardware and the sophistication of computer software have brought many new possibilities to information world. On one side the possibility to analyse massive data sets has brought new insight, knowledge and information. On the other, it has enabled to massively distribute computing and has opened to a new programming paradigm called Service Oriented Computing particularly well adapted to cloud computing. Applying these new technologies to the transport industry can bring new understanding to town transport infrastructures. The objective of our work is to manage and aggregate cloud services for managing big data and assist decision making for transport systems. Thus this paper presents our approach for developing data storage, data cleaning and data integration services to make an efficient decision support system. Our services will implement algorithms and strategies that consume storage and computing resources of the cloud. For this reason, appropriate consumption models will guide their use. Proposing big data management strategies for data produced by transport infrastructures, whilst maintaining cost effective systems deployed on the cloud, is a promising approach.

Improving Open Information Extraction for Semantic Web Tasks

Open Information Extraction OIE aims to automatically identify all the possible assertions within a sentence. Results of this task are usually a set of triples subject, predicate, object. In this paper, we first present what OIE is and how it can be improved when we work in a given domain of knowledge. Using a corpus made up of sentences in building engineering construction, we obtain an improvement of more than 18i¾?%. Next, we show how OIE can be used at a base of a high-level semantic web task. Here we have applied OIE on formalisation of natural language definitions. We test this formalisation task on a corpus of sentences defining concepts found in the pizza ontology. At this stage, 70.27i¾?% of our 37 sentences-corpus are fully rewritten in OWL DL.

An Application Domain-Based Taxonomy for IoT Sensors.

If we look at the Internet of Things (IoT) from a viewpoint that comprises higher levels of abstraction, we will see that the IoT generated data can actually be transformed into more complex information, which would in turn facilitate the lives of human users. Because sensors have different purposes and measure different phenomena, it is necessary to know them and their different areas and domains of application so we can make a better use of their potential. This paper presents the identification and categorization of the main sensors used these days to build IoT applications, arranged in a taxonomy of application domains and sensor measurement types. To this purpose, we review the literature in order to identify IoT solutions, areas and domains of application and the main sensor types employed in these solutions. We hope this taxonomy can provide IoT designers, developers, and researchers with a snapshot of how sensors are currently used in the IoT application domains. Knowing the source devices is a key strategy to provide publication, discovery, sharing, reuse and integration of data/information within the IoT. We believe identifying and categorizing those sensors could be the first step to creating in the future a common communication model, which could be instantiated from each environmental context on the IoT.

Avoiding Lock-In: Timely Reconfiguration of a Virtual Cloud Platform on Top of Multiple PaaS and IaaS Providers

We describe our work with a major telecom company in creating a broker that enables them to retain independence from the various PaaS and IaaS providers that they use to support their own SaaS offer on the cloud. To achieve this goal, the broker starts by setting up the required operating environment across the desired mix of PaaS and IaaS providers, and then installs and configures the telcos software on top of that virtual platform. The automation and articulation of these procedures confers the company a considerable flexibility. By updating the list of preferred PaaS providers maintained by our system and forcing a redeploy of the whole environment, it can move services from one supplier to the next, or even to virtual machines running in-house, in a matter of minutes. The most favorable combination of outsourcing and insourcing can be constantly pursued, by pondering factors such as cost, SLAs, and other factors on a provider-by-provider basis.