Open Standard Layered Architecture for computer to human translation

This diagram shows a central infrastructure of an open standards layered architecture. This enables interoperability at the Computer to computer layer. This gives advantages to developers for maintenance and re-use. This infrastructure aids translation from computer and developers upwards, to end users. Visualising the model/program structure translated upward from code to a navigable interactive visualisation enables accessibility, thus assisting with modelling and end user programming. This infrastructure that aids computer to computer interoperability thus also aids human to human collaboration. This all aids ease of use and re-use of models/programs also.

So far this translation has been enabled upwards from computer to human. Future research could involve translation from human to computer and interaction to make this an iterative, interactive life-cycle process.

Objectives for future development of Ontologies

My next posts outline future research that is required for the advancement of representation, search, and visualisation of information, and at recent and future developments in the use and representation of taxonomies and ontologies, and visualisation tools that can aid in their use. Berners-Lee et al (2006) explain the importance of visualisation for navigation of information "Despite excitement about the Semantic Web, most of the world's data are locked in large data stores and are not published as an open Web of inter-referring resources. As a result, the reuse of information has been limited. Substantial research challenges arise in changing this situation: how to effectively query an unbounded Web of linked information repositories, how to align and map between different data models, and how to visualise and navigate the huge connected graph of information that results."

Horrocks (2002) explains the advantages of moving towards a more formal ontology. Making use of a more formal ontology is the next major aim for my research. Creation of a formal ontology, while at the same time creating applications that model problems such as early stage design and cost, and interactive modelling environments for students, will widen the applicability of the research. This would enable further testing on ways ontologies can be used to solve problems, and are meaningful to people as well as being searchable by computer software. My intention is to enable tagging of this ontology and eventually editing of it by users, in order to allow users and domain experts to be involved in the ontology construction.

So far the taxonomies used in my thesis include traditional object oriented relationships such as child, parent, sibling, attribute, and instance. There are other types of relationship that would need to be modelled in order to maximise the capabilities of software that would use the taxonomies. Key relationships used within the object oriented programming domain between objects have been modelled. These key relationships depict families and aggregations of objects that may share attributes and methods through inheritance. When physical items are represented, this can be translated to geometric diagrams. Semantic descriptions with more relationship types than the ones modelled so far allow a more expressive depiction of a problem domain, and can aid some forms of search within a model. One of the main advantages of a semantic net description, in terms of automated model generation, is that labelling relationships between objects allows the depiction of a number of aspects of a domain in one model, and with a consistent syntax. Ciocoiu et al (2000) explain how an engineering ontology can be made more rigorous in order to facilitate interoperability. This allows representation of, say, a product structure and its manufacturing processes together. A single node then is the only representation of that node within the model, with all its relationships depicted as arcs emanating/terminating at the node. More expressive semantic descriptions are possible through the use of the standard OWL dialects. These more expressive descriptions require sophisticated visualisation tools which will be the subject of the next post.

My Pages on this subject

Semantic Web - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/RDF/RDF.htm.
Semantic Web Modelling - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/ModellingSemanticWeb.htm.

References

Berners-Lee, T., Hall, W., Hendler, J., Shadbolt, N., Weitzner, D. J., 2006. Creating a Science of the Web. Science 11 August 2006:Vol. 313. no. 5788, pp. 769 - 771. - http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/313/5788/769?ijkey=o66bodkFqpcCs&keytype=ref&siteid=sci.

Ciocoiu, M., Gruninger, M., Nau, D. S., 2000. Ontologies for Integrating Engineering Applications. Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering, 1(1) pp 12-22. - http://www.cs.umd.edu/~nau/papers/ontologies-JCISE-2001.pdf.

Horrocks, I., 2002. DAML+OIL: a Reason-able Web Ontology Language. In: proceedings of the Eighth Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT 2002) March 24-28 2002, Prague. - http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~horrocks/Publications/download/2002/edbt02.pdf.

Future Developments Of Ontologies And Visualization

So far my taxonomies include the traditional object oriented relationships such as child, parent, sibling, attribute, and instance. There are other types of relationship that would need to be modelled in order to maximise the capabilities of software that would use the taxonomies. Basic key relationships used within the object oriented programming domain between objects are implemented. These key relationships depict families of objects that may share attributes and methods through inheritance. They also describe aggregations of objects that make (usually) some geometric sense.

Semantic descriptions with more relationship types than this allow a more expressive depiction of a problem domain, and can aid some forms of search within a model. One of the main advantages of a semantic net description, in terms of automated model generation, is that labelling relationships between objects allows the depiction of a number of aspects of a domain in one model, and with a consistent syntax. Ciocoiu et al (2000) explain how an engineering ontology can be made more rigorous in order to facilitate interoperability. This allows representation of, say, a product structure and its manufacturing processes together. A single node then is the only representation of that node within the model, with all its relationships depicted as arcs emanating/terminating at the node. More expressive semantic descriptions are possible through the use of one of the standard OWL dialects. Protégé has OWL plug-ins available that provide this functionality, together with links to reasoning tools for maintaining and analysing the logical constructs (Storey et al, 2004) and (Elenius, 2005). The University of Victoria Computer-Human Interaction and Software Engineering lab (CHISEL) (University of Victoria, 2006) has developed Jambalaya (Ernst et al, 2003) for visualization of knowledge and relationships. Cheung et al (2005) provide an ontology editor for knowledge sharing in manufacturing.

It is also important not to stay limited on one ontology development environment but instead explore how ontologies can be developed using a range of development tools and translated between each where necessary (Garcia-Castro and Gomez-Perez, 2006) are testing this. For this reason, a large range of ontology management tools have been investigated and meta languages. An interesting development is SWRL a Semantic Web Rule Language Combining OWL and RuleML and its use in modelling (Miller and Baramidze, 2005).

References

Cheung, W. M., Maropoulos, P. G., Gao, J. X., Aziz, H., 2005. Ontological Approach for Organisational Knowledge Re-use in Product Developing Environments. In: 11th International Conference on Concurrent Enterprising - ICE 2005, University BW Munich, Germany.

Ciocoiu, M., Gruninger, M., Nau, D. S., 2000. Ontologies for Integrating Engineering Applications. Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering, 1(1) pp 12-22.

Elenius, D., 2005. The OWL-S Editor - A Domain-Specific Extension to Protégé. In: 8th Intl. Protégé Conference - July 18-21, 2005 - Madrid, Spain.

Ernst, N. A., Storey, M., Allen, P., Musen, M., 2003. Addressing cognitive issues in knowledge engineering with Jambalaya http://www.neilernst.net/docs/pubs/ernst-kcap03.pdf.

Garcia-Castro R, Gomez-Perez A, 2006. Interoperability of Protégé using RDF(S) as interchange language. In: 9th Intl. Protégé Conference, July 23-26, 2006 - Stanford, California.

Storey, M., Lintern, R., Ernst, N., Perrin, D., 2004, Visualization and Protégé In: 7th International Protégé Conference - July 2004 - Bethesda, Maryland.

University of Victoria, 2006. Model Driven Visualization (MDV) http://www.thechiselgroup.org/?q=mdv.

I am developing a project to provide free online collaborative modelling tools.

My Research - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/

Examples - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/InteractiveSVGExamples.htm

Semantic Web Modelling - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/ModellingSemanticWeb.htm