Collaboration and Process Modelling in Engineering and Business using Visualisation and Semantic Web techniques - Conclusion and Further Research

Conclusion

Test implementations assisted with :-

Providing clarity for process modelling and management, by creating a structured open standard visual modelling environment that is usable by non-programmers.

* Collaboration, dissemination, reuse and sharing of models using web applications and services.

* Enabling people to model at a high level of abstract conceptual modelling, thereby producing better process models using tools that model at domain level, rather than at code level.

* Development of Semantic Web based process modelling to provide the means for visualisation and calculation/sequencing, together with a decision support engine for model creation and retrieval.

* Increased user involvement for model development allows savings in cost and time taken for process modelling.

* Enhanced availability of process models and interactive visualisation of model results using web browser based software, this will also be an important teaching resource.
Identification of improvements to process efficiency and effectiveness.

* Better interoperability of models and ability to identify common problems missed during creation of standalone spreadsheets. Increased model detail and ease of upgrade with layered architecture of open standard languages to eliminate inconsistencies and allow better decision making.

* New ways of enabling end user interaction, with collaborative development of process models that will allow people more scope to solve problems.

*Enabling task based access to Semantic Web information, e.g. by employees and home users who have no knowledge or interest in the Semantic Web, but who will use tools for particular tasks.

This research tested first steps towards helping to solve problems caused by lack of collaborative modelling in process design. This could also bridge the gap between industry and those advocating the use of modelling/programming using Semantic Web techniques, to improve efficiency and effectiveness.

This research has potential benefit for any problem where end user programming using Semantic Web technology is applicable. This is a very broad range, involving most modelling. The particular areas where the research is most transferable are manufacturing and business modelling, e-learning and provision of models for public understanding of science and engineering, and health and science taxonomy/ontology management.

The research in this field has reinforced the view that Semantic Web based process modelling is an appropriate and robust means of achieving end user objectives. If domain experts are not involved in creation of the model, there is no proper way for the knowledge they are encoding to emerge, or for proper collaboration. This is necessary as each expert is best focused on encapsulating the part of the model that they are most expert in. People need to be involved in model creation if they are to understand the model, decision, and how the decision was made. So there is a need for end user modelling/programming to enable this. Full automation hinders user involvement and traceability, so semi-automated systems that interact with end users and assist with all stages of the model decision are better. If a person goes straight to the answer how can it be expected that they fully understood the question?

Breaking complex mathematics into modularised traceable steps eases management of it, and visualisation, and allows modelling of different scenarios, and these scenarios demonstrate the emergent properties of the model, enabling decision support. BiDirectional Traceability is needed, traceability between nodes/sub-models, and between models, and between suppliers and buyers.

The research made some progress towards allowing end users to concentrate on the domain to be modelled rather than on computing technologies. This research can enable collaborative modelling and interaction, via applying end user programming techniques to enable domain experts such as engineers and business people to create and interact with the knowledge representation themselves, and co-operate to ensure the representations are useful for addressing their problems, with less software creation barriers. Software developers need to enable such systems to make this all possible.

Existing ontologies can be extended for modelling of software systems and engineering systems e.g. PSL, STEPML, UML, SysML can be extended/adapted for use in particular problems.

Further Research

An editing facility to model these equations, and constraints, so that errors could be prevented, will improve the usability of visual process modelling systems. This should enable standardisation of the representation of mathematical expressions that relate nodes, and their values and expressions; this requires a user interface that enables complex mathematical structures to be conveyed by language and/or diagrammatic visualisation. The next stage in the research will be provision of constraints to prevent invalid mathematical expressions. Background research has been undertaken into this. Mathematical modelling can help deal with the complex interactions and calculations necessary for process modelling. Miller and Baramidze (2005) examine efforts to develop mathematical semantic representations above the syntactical representations of MathML, and the need for rigorous definitions of mathematical concepts. They also explain ontology languages OWL (Web Ontology Language) and SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language), which can be used for open standard ontology based process modelling. Miller and Baramidze's DEMO system uses OWL to define a simulation and modelling class hierarchy. Elenius et al. (2005) show how an OWL-S editor can be used for creating process modelling and web service environments.

Further research is needed into modelling based on SWRL, to model conditional statements, and OWL-S Editor (Elenius et al., 2005) with UML style diagrams, together with investigation and use of online search facilities for services and process models. The reusable process architectures and process models held in an ontology, could also be translated as necessary between OWL-S and BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) representations. Also, Meta-Programming and Rule-based languages could be used to develop an interface to an end user programming environment. Models could be encoded and checked via languages such as MathLang (Kamareddine et el., 2005).

References

Elenius D, Denker G, Martin D, Gilham F, Khouri J, Sadaati S, Senanayake R, 2005. The OWL-S Editor - A Development Tool for Semantic Web Services, The Semantic Web: Research and Applications, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg.

Kamareddine F, Maarek M, Wells J B, 2005, Toward an Object-Oriented Structure for Mathematical Text, Mathematical Knowledge Management, 4th Int'l Conf., Proceedings LNCS Springer-Verlag.

Miller J A, Baramidze G, 2005, Simulation and the Semantic Web, 2005 Winter Simulation Conference.

Collaboration and Process Modelling in Engineering and Business - Conclusions

This post concludes the series that explains my research in this subject, and points towards how the research can be used in engineering and business, and how it can be furthered by others. This explains what was achieved in provision of modeling and decision support systems that could automate user-computer translation, and interact with users such as engineers to help them model problems and make appropriate decisions.

To make this research into modeling for engineering practical for a wide range of computer literate non-programmers, sustained further research is needed in the areas of visualisation, interaction, modeling, end user programming, and transformation as well as the links between these areas.

The need is for a methodology for creation of systems to enable more collaborative approaches to modeling by domain expert end users. This combined with visualisation would allow engineers to model problems accurately. This can be made possible by provision of systems that may not fulfil all of the requirements of the domain experts because this would be difficult or impossible, but instead allows the domain experts, e.g. engineers to customise this themselves and help build the system they need and that could be changed as required. Alternatives to the current approach to software development are required. Modeling languages can be used as an interface to an end user programming environment. Transformation from a model building environment to program code was investigated.

Even if programming is made easier, only a proportion of people would actually be interested or capable of doing this. But there is still an advantage to colleagues such as people in the same team or department as an end user programmer, even if they are not undertaking programming themselves. Then all in the team have much closer access to someone, the end user programmer, who understands their, and the team's tasks, requirements, and projects. This closes the gap between those producing software systems, and those who require the software. This also makes it easier to iterate through solutions and solve problems more quickly and collaboratively.

Experienced programmers can build a modeling environment that can then be used by non programmers to create models or solve other software problems. This was achieved for the DATUM (Design Analysis Tool for Unit-cost Modelling) project with Rolls-Royce, and the modelling environment created was used by their engineers. Collaboration, simulation and modeling have been investigated to determine the requirements for future research in modeling of problems.

This should allow translation from a model based representation of software to the actual software. This can involve semi automatically producing software for a Semantic website from visual representations of the problem. The core of this modeling infrastructure is automated generation of models created with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards based languages, and the visualization of information represented in such W3C standard ways.

This research investigated alternative approaches to software development, which give users greater involvement, and can actually be used in combination. This partially automates the process of software creation via a collaborative process and equation tree that maps the problem structure, and user interface creation by providing a means to manage a diagrammatic and/or tree based representation.