T. Ariza

A methodology for structured ontology construction applied to intelligent transportation systems

The number of computers installed in urban and transport networks has grown tremendously in recent years, also the local processing capabilities and digital networking currently available. However, the heterogeneity of existing equipment in the field of ITS (Intelligent Transportation Systems) and the large volume of information they handle, greatly hinder the interoperability of the equipment and the design of cooperative applications between devices currently installed in urban networks. While the dynamic discovery of information, composition and invocation of services through intelligent agents are a potential solution to these problems, all these technologies require intelligent management of information flows. In particular, it is necessary to wean these information flows of the technologies used, enabling universal interoperability between computers, regardless of the context in which they are located. The main objective of this paper is to propose a systematic methodology to create ontologies, using methods such as a semantic clustering algorithms for retrieval and representation of information. Using the proposed methodology, an ontology will be developed in the ITS domain. This ontology will serve as the basis of semantic information to a SS (Semantic Service) that allows the connection of new equipment to an urban network. The SS uses the CORBA standard as distributed communication architecture. We propose a methodology to build ontologys in the domain of ITS (Intelligent Transportation Systems).We have proposed: DPK (Discrimination of Paragraphs with Keywords) and IRWDP (Retrieval with Weighted Data in Paragraphs).The two new methods proposed, allow reducing the sample size of the study.Much information irrelevant has been discarded, achieving greater performance in the ontology construction.The methodologies proposed can be used to build ontologies in any domains.

Establishment EHEA for telecommunication technologies engineering degree

This paper describes the results of establishment of European Higher Education Area for Telecommunication Technologies Engineering Degree at University of Sevilla aimed at carrying out a comparative analysis between the applications of the European Credit Transfer and Accumulations System and the traditional teaching and learning system to first-year students, in order to improve their performance in the subject Fundamentals of Programming.

Implementing a virtual manufacturing device for MMS/CORBA

The heterogeneity found in distributed manufacturing systems and the underlying communication make the development of these systems a difficult task. Manufacturing message service (MMS) and CORBA makes the communication between several objects easier, reducing the implementation cost to a minimum. It has been used to communicate to a real device. Various UML diagrams are presented to understand its functionality.

TVSP: A Tool for Validation Software Projects in programming labs

This work shows a testing tool used in Fundamentals of Programming II laboratory in Telecommunication Technologies Engineering Degree at University of Sevilla to check the student project. This tool allows students to test the proper operation of their project in autonomous way. This is a flexible and useful tool for testing the project because the tool identifies when the student has carried out a project that meet the given specifications of the project. This implies a high rate of success when the student delivers its project to the teacher.

LTI for Interoperating e-Assessment Tools with LMS

Learning Management Systems (LMS) are widely used nowadays because they let the users organize the learning process through courses, composed by documents, homework and exams, and it allows the teacher to follow students’ progress. However LMS can’t evaluate a student project due to its complexity. It can be solved by using external tools prepared for this specific task, losing the capability to track the student progress. Therefore the need of integration between them appears. To achieve a code project’s assessment, we have developed an external tool interoperating with LMS using Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI).

An ontology-based semantic service for cooperative urban equipments

The development of SOA (service oriented architecture) applications is a paradigm to consider for the integration of services which usually requires the incorporation of distributed artificial intelligence technologies or multi agent systems (MAS) to achieve their objectives. This is the case of transportation field, where the improvement of urban data networks and embedded systems allow the implementation of complex distributed services based on intelligent transportation systems. One of the challenges of this kind of systems is the discovery of services. Typically, discovery of services lacks of intelligence, or the result of this process returns a lot of nonsense information. However, the field of transportation requires quick and accurate requests and answers to deal with emergencies or incidents in the traffic flow. For this purpose, this paper proposes the development of a specific service called semantic service (an ontology-based semantic communication service) developed in TAO (The ACE ORB) of CORBA (common object request broker architecture). This service is able to provide a communication support for distributed environment in conjunction with a set of base libraries like Redland (RDF language bindings) for interacting with ontologies written in RDF and RDFS format. A parser Raptor (RDF Syntax Library) is used for analyzing sequences of symbols to determine the grammatical structure, and a syntax query language, Rasqal (RDF Query Library) is used to build and execute queries. Both, Raptor and Rasqal were designed to work with the Redland library. The main objective is to manage ontological information and interoperate with implemented services in embedded urban devices. Obtained results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Computing Labs on Virtual Environments: A Flexible, Portable, and Multidisciplinary Model

Computer-aided teaching of practical subjects in engineering education poses new challenges. Computers have to be configured to support the particular requirements of each subject. Virtual environments allow the building of a virtual machine (VM) tailored to the requirements of each subject, allowing flexible, versatile, and low-cost laboratory configurations. However, the use of multiple VM at a shared computing facility poses new problems on the lab sessions, both technical and performance related. To solve these challenges, we have developed the VM on-demand tool. This tool automates the adaptation of each VM to the environment in which it is deployed. As a result, the creation of computer-aided engineering laboratories on a shared computing facility using VM is possible and profitable.

Virtualization environment in telematics labs

The aim of this paper is to show the common scenario for practical content of subjects in the Department of Telematics Engineering by means of virtualization. This Department is responsible for a high number of laboratory groups, requiring many teachers and a high workload. A common environment for all practice groups is desired. A virtual machine was built with the same environment of the Computing Centre at School of Engineering at University of Seville. Then, this virtual machine was provided to students and is used to do practices. This article describes this experience and shows the improvements obtained.

Educational resource based on games for the reinforcement of engineering learning programming in mobile devices

Educational resources are essential components in education and they have improved and evolved through information technologies and everyday use, such as mobile devices. So much time devoted to this device turns it into a very attractive means to suggest applications which serve as a reinforcement to the theoretical contents of the subjects. In this paper, it is shown the implementation of an educational resource based on games for the reinforcement of engineering learning programming for Android mobile devices. This resource serves as a support for programming in Java in an intuitive and easy way.

Implementing the CORBA notification service for JavaIDL

Nowadays, the usefulness of distributed object techniques is proved. CORBA is one of these techniques. It allows communication between remote processes in an easy and flexible way. This technology is being widely used in commercial telecommunication and manufacturing systems, amongst others. The notification service has been defined in the CORBA common object services specification in order to simplify the communication of events. This issue is especially important in manufacturing systems to inform the different components of the distributed system of events that have taken place in other elements of the system. In this article the basic concepts about developing a part of this service for JavaIDL are presented.