Moisés Lima Dutra

A Generic and Synchronous Ontology-based Architecture for Collaborative Design

Today’s complex design projects require teams of designers to come together to facilitate the sharing of their respective expertise in order to produce effective design solutions. Due to the increasing need for exchanging knowledge, modern design projects are even more structured to work with virtual distributed teams that collaborate over computer networks to achieve global optima in design. This article presents an architecture where collaborative design is synchronously and generically achieved. That is, where particular representation models are transformed into ontology instances and merged together in order to accomplish the final product design. It is a synchronous approach because the merging process is undertaken at the same time that interaction among designers takes place. As supporting technologies, Web Ontology Language and Web Services are used to implement such an architecture.

EXPRESS to OWL morphism: making possible to enrich ISO10303 Modules

ISO10303 STEP has been acknowledged by the world’s largest industrial companies, as the most important family of standards for the integration and exchange of product data under manufacturing domains. With the advent of globalization, smaller enterprises (SMEs) looking to level up with world-class competitors and raise their effectiveness are also realizing the importance of the usage of this kind of standards. However, to enable a model-based interoperability, STEP industrial standards, the Application Protocols (APs) follow a modular approach, i.e. they are composed by a set of generic purpose modules sharable by a number of different APs. This way, the core STEP reference models contain vague definitions that sometimes raise ambiguous interpretations. A possible solution to overcome this barrier would be to add further semantics to the concepts defined and enable STEP modules as ontologies, thus providing an alternative to traditional implementations. SMEs can benefit even more from this alternative, since OWL is currently a widespread technology, with abundant low cost supporting tools comparing to the ones dealing directly with STEP.

A Reasoning Approach for Conflict Dealing in Collaborative Design

In collaborative design process, multidisciplinary virtual teams’ integration — involving exchange and sharing of knowledge and expertise — frequently generate a lot of conflicting situations. Different experts’ point of views and perspectives, in addition to several ways of communicating and collaborating in knowledge level, make all this process very hard to tackle. Aiming to minimize the appearance of early design conflicts and to solve the rest of them, this paper presents an approach to represent knowledge in design process based on Web Ontology Language (OWL). OWL is structured to be a major formalism for the design and dissemination of ontology information. The use of OWL reasoning is intended to be a consistent way to verify the information given by several experts, trying to avoid redundancies, contradictions and misunderstoods. A prototype, based on the Function-Behavior-Structure design framework, that uses OWL to input data, was built up to validate this approach.

Collaborative environment for the detection and the follow-up of Legionella

Nosocomial infections constitute a serious problem for public health. They develop by various ways, and their detection, at early stages, is not always easy. Furthermore, their follow-up requires the collaboration of several partners, which is very complex and sometimes inefficient. The objective is to produce collaborative platform of diagnosis and follow-up of the disease in order to bring a real-time analyse of the situation and an automatic transfer of the adequate data to various institutional and medical partners. Each partner can access the system with interfaces that are adapted to the user’s profile (doctors, nurse, technician, etc.). These interfaces takes in consideration the heterogeneous of platforms to access the system (mobile phone, PDA, computer). Our proposal will be set up and validated at the Civil Hospices of Lyon, aiming to accelerate the detection and the follow-up of Legionella in Edouard Herriot hospital’s units. If the system is conclusive, it will be applied in other hospitals.

An Approach to Adapt Collaborative Architectures to Cloud Computing

Companies keep trying various strategies in order to reduce the cost of their computer systems. The trend through which “everything is as a service” seems like the most effective solution used. By benefiting from the advantages of Cloud Computing, companies can minimize the cost of their systems and focus on their core businesses, by placing their IT parts into cloud providers. New companies can build their entire systems based on the clouds from the scratch. For legacy systems, however, the adaptation to the Cloud Computing paradigm remais the more effective solution. By proposing a methodology to adapt collaborative architectures to Cloud Computing, we intend to contribute to the first application of this technology in the industrial world. In order to validate the proposed approach, we have adapted our team’s collaborative system to the clouds.

Resolving Collaborative Design Conflicts Through an Ontology-based Approach

This paper presents an ontology-based approach to resolve conflicts in collaborative design. In a collaborative design environment, achieving a global design of a product implies the proposed model is realisable and acceptable to all participants involved in the design project. Whenever this not happens we have a conflicting situation. The work presented here is based on the use of ontology modelling (OWL) to represent knowledge and, like that, to enable a reasoning process to be done. The results of this reasoning, the conflicting axioms detected, are used as starting point to a conflict resolution process. First, an automatic approach is tried. In case of failure, the next step is the direct interaction among the project participants, i.e., negotiation and mediation. A small electrical connector was taken as example to illustrate our approach.

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.