Simulation and Discrete-Event Modelling

A future task to be undertaken would be the inclusion of uncertainty in automatically produced models, for situations where accurate information cannot be provided for the model. This would require provision of a way of handling uncertainty for parameters within the ontology, e.g. as 3 values describing a triangular distribution rather than a unique absolute value. The decision support meta-program could be expanded to write out the code to run Monte-Carlo sampling, hence making use of the statistical uncertainty capability. Miller and Baramidze (2005) examine efforts to develop mathematical semantic representations above the syntactical representations of MathML. this effort should make it possible for standardisation of the representation of mathematical expressions that relate nodes, and their values and expressions, to each other. The next stage in the research surrounding this thesis will be provision of constraints to prevent invalid mathematical expressions. Miller and Baramidze also explain their research in Discrete-Event Modelling Ontology (DeMO) for simulation and modelling. This uses OWL to define a simulation and modelling class hierarchy. It would be very useful to create an example to demonstrate this with a practical model to test the use of this ontology.

References

MathML - http://www.w3.org/Math/.

Miller, J. A., Baramidze, G., 2005. Simulation and the Semantic Web. In. Proceedings of the 2005 Winter Simulation Conference. - http://www.informs-cs.org/wsc05papers/297.pdf.

More Information is available at -

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

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

Metaplace - Online Virtual World Builder

I found this article on the BBC website - Virtual worlds opened up to all - 19 September 2007 - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7002479.stm. This looks very interesting and potentially useful for End-User programming and E-Learning.

The link is Metaplace - http://www.metaplace.com/. I'm looking forward to building a virtual world, and to linking to other peoples' worlds especially if their world is useful for End-User programming and E-Learning and/or has a space or climate modelling theme.

This links with these aims -

Building Developer Communities - http://userdrivenmodelling.blogspot.com/2006_03_01_archive.html.

E-Learning Provision using Semantic Web Technologies - http://userdrivenmodelling.blogspot.com/2007/08/e-learning-provision-using-semantic-web.html.

Drag and Drop Programming - http://userdrivenmodelling.blogspot.com/2007/08/drag-and-drop-programming.html.

In the BBC article Metaplace say -

"We want to see 10,000 virtual worlds so that lots of wild and crazy stuff gets made because that is the only way it will advance as a medium."

So I would like to be part of this effort. If anyone at Metaplace, or who is developing a Metaplace world has something I can link to that would be useful for the above, could they please email me at peter2.hale@uwe.ac.uk.

I am also interested in this from the BBC article -

"As each world is based on standard web technology they can also be embedded in blogs, a facebook profile, myspace page or website."

How can I do this or link to other peoples' worlds.

I think to begin with we register at http://www.metaplace.com/. The release is due for Spring 2008 but perhaps registering will allow for earlier involvement. It's called Alpha Signup.

This looks like the best place to keep up with developments and a community of users/developers - http://www.metaplace.info/.

Ontology Visualisation and Interaction

Protégé has OWL plug-ins available that provide extra capabilities for representing and visualising information, and also 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) (2006) has developed Jambalaya (Ernst et al, 2003) for visualisation of knowledge and relationships. Ernst et al explain that the "larger ontologies that are being developed quickly exhaust human capacity for conceptualizing them in their entirety", so visualisation tools must assist users to view the information they need. Researchers at the University of Queensland Australia have developed a hyperbolic browser to display RDF files, this is explained in Eklund et al (2002). 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 for this thesis. SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language) combining OWL and RuleML and its use in modelling will also be investigated. This could be used for formally specifying the construction of equations and rules in a model and the relationships and constraints between items represented in an equation. Miller and Baramidze (2005), Horrocks et al (2003), and Zhang (2005) explain the SWRL language. Horrocks et al talk of defining properties as general rules over other properties and of defining operations on datatypes, within the thesis this research could assist in providing a visual rule and equation editor. An editing facility to model these equations and constraints, so that errors could be prevented, would improve the usability of future visual modelling systems created. Support for SWRL in Protégé (Miller and Baramidze, 2005) will assist with the construction of a modelling system with sophisticated editing of rules.

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.
Visualisation - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/Visualisation.htm.

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 - http://www.eamber-esilkroad.org/Projects/408/ICE2005/Knowledge%20Management/P13%20Ontological%20Approach%20for%20Organisational%20Knowledge%20Re-use%20in%20Product%20Developing%20Environments.pdf.

Elenius, D., 2005. The OWL-S Editor - A Domain-Specific Extension to Protégé. In: 8th Intl. Protégé Conference - July 18-21, 2005 - Madrid, Spain - http://protege.stanford.edu/conference/2005/submissions/abstracts/accepted-abstract-elenius.pdf.

Eklund, P., Roberts, N., Green, S., 2002. OntoRama: Browsing RDF Ontologies using a Hyperbolic-style Browser. In: The First International Symposium on Cyber Worlds, CW02, Theory and Practices, IEEE Press. (2002) pp 405-411. - http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/8409/26515/01180907.pdf.

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 - http://protege.stanford.edu/conference/2006/submissions/abstracts/3.4_Garcia-Castro_Gomez-Perez_Protege2006.pdf.

Horrocks, I., Patel-Schneider, P. F., van Harmelen, F., 2003. From SHIQ and RDF to OWL: The making of a web ontology language. Journal of Web Semantics, Vol 1(1), pp 7-26 - http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~horrocks/Publications/download/2003/HoPH03a.pdf.

Miller, J. A., Baramidze, G., 2005. Simulation and the Semantic Web. In. Proceedings of the 2005 Winter Simulation Conference - http://www.informs-cs.org/wsc05papers/297.pdf.

Storey, M., Lintern, R., Ernst, N., Perrin, D., 2004, Visualization and Protégé In: 7th International Protégé Conference - July 2004 - Bethesda, Maryland - http://protege.stanford.edu/conference/2004/abstracts/Storey.pdf.

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

Zhang, Z., 2005. Ontology Query Languages for the Semantic Web: A Performance Evaluation. MSc Thesis, (Under the Direction of John.A.Miller) -http://www.cs.uga.edu/~jam/home/theses/zhijun_thesis/final/zhang_zhijun_200508_ms.pdf

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.