Marek Paralic

Knowledge management in a distributed organisation

It has become very important for advanced organisations to make the best use of information gathered from various document sources inside companies and from external sources like the Internet. There are many technologies under development, which address knowledge discovery. On the other hand, there is a lack of efficient technologies focused on organising and sharing of existing knowledge. In this paper we introduce the research in scope of Know Webi (EC funded project). We focus our attention on two important issues — (i) how to capture tacit, contextual knowledge that is connected to the documents and (ii) how to support knowledge management in geographically distributed organisations through up-to-date communication and AI technologies

ShareMe: running a distributed systems lab for 600 students with three faculty members

The goal of the distributed systems (DS) laboratory is to provide an attractive environment in which students learn about network programming and apply some fundamental concepts of distributed systems. In the last two years, students had to implement a fully functional peer-to-peer file sharing system called ShareMe. This paper presents the approach the authors used to provide the best possible support and guidance for the students while keeping up with ever-rising participant numbers in the laboratory course (approximately 600 last year), as well as managing budget and personnel constraints. The learning environment is based on Web and Internet technologies and not only offers the description of the laboratory tasks but also covers electronic submission, a discussion forum, automatic grading, and online access to grading and test results. The authors report their experiences of using the automated grading system, the amount of work required to prepare and run the laboratory, and how they deal with students who submit plagiarized solutions. Furthermore, the results of student feedback and evaluation forms are presented, and the overall student course satisfaction is discussed. Detailed information about the DS laboratory is available at http://www.dslab.tuwien.ac.at.

Semantically-Aided Data-Aware Service Workflow Composition

Composition of workflows of computational tasks, grid jobs, or even web services is not a new topic. Many papers and research projects have tackled this problem in the past, in recent years also using semantic description of resources. Most of the proposed or developed solutions deal only with the composition of the functional part of the workflow, the data necessary to actually execute it is considered secondary. The system, design of which we describe in this paper, tries to overcome this gap, and create workflows with the input data of the workflow actions already included. Our design is based on an existing solution from the project K-Wf Grid. The workflow is modeled as a Petri net, which allows for easy incorporation of data into the process. It utilizes semantic description of resources by means of ontologies, and operates on a SOA-based grid composed of web services. It is being developed in the context of a project called SEMCO-WS.

Heterogeneous Applications, Tools, and Methodologies in the Car Manufacturing Industry Through an IoT Approach

Due to the growth of industrial Internet services, todays production environment is on the edge of a new era of innovations and changes. This is taking place through the convergence of the global industrial system with the power of advanced computing, analytics, low-cost sensing, and new levels of connectivity enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT). These innovations will bring higher efficiency, flexibility, and interoperability among industries, although they belong to different production ecosystems. This paper describes an IoT platform and the related prototypes developed within the project: Enabling Business-Based Internet of Things and Services (ebbits), with a focus on the industrial domain. Heterogeneous applications were deployed and tested, including a wireless sensor and actuator network for industrial machines monitoring and a radio-frequency-identification-based system for operator management, locating, and authorization, which also includes an interactive user interface for portable devices to visualize real-time information from physical-world devices. Moreover, tools for model-driven development are used to simplify the process of building IoT applications. Those developments are based on IoT middleware that is developed and deployed by the project to enable the seamless integration of heterogeneous technologies and processes into mainstream enterprise systems. This paper also presents the prototypal deployment of the developed prototypes in the car manufacturing industry.

Food Traceability Chain Supported by the Ebbits IoT Middleware

The paper presents the food traceability prototype, which was implemented as a pilot application of the FP7 EU project ebbits. The platform architecture, built upon the principles of the Internet of Things (IoT), People, and Services, is described in aspects of the supported interoperability and semantic orchestration of services involved in the food production chain. The platform represents physical objects as digital objects that go through different phases in the production chain. The information produced in each phase is stored by involved actors and could be retrieved back by the consumers through orchestrating services provided by the actors in the production chain. These services are resolved by a product service orchestration, which is supported by a semantic backend.

Mobile Agents Based on Concurrent Constraint Programming

This paper introduces an experimental framework for mobile agents. It utilizes expressiveness and formal foundation of concurrent constraint programming to solve the problem of system support for dynamic re-binding of not transferable resources and inter-agent collaboration based on logic variables. Proposed solutions make the agent-based programming easier and more straightforward and on the other hand offer a basis for a more sophisticated multi-agent system. The framework is implemented in the Distributed Oz programming language that appears to the programmer as concurrent, object-oriented language with data-flow synchronization. There are two implementations of the system – one is based on freely mobile objects and the other one is based on components (functors).

Personalized and Adaptive Access to Services – The Semantic Web Services Approach

In this paper we present and compare experiences with two different approaches to the utilization of semantic technologies for the adaptive and personalized access to the services. By services we mean generally both web services accessible online and “traditional” services provided by the business or government organizations. We illustrate presented approaches based on our experiences from two projects, where applications in different areas, such as e-government, e-business and crisis management have been implemented. In these cases different approaches according to the used semantic services technology were applied.