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.
Showing posts with label Software development. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Software development. Show all posts
Friday, August 28, 2009
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Collaboration in Engineering using Semantic Web techniques
Abstract
This article describes how software developers could enable domain experts such as engineers to collaborate on problem solving. The means for this is development using Semantic Web and Web 2.0 techniques to enable end-user programming. This could enable domain experts such as engineers to be involved in the modelling of a problem such as product design, and so understand, assess, and develop possible solutions.
Introduction
Visualisation is necessary to provide traceability for decision making, as an audit trail for information, to justify a decision and/or cost, or to understand a process, or a product data structure. It is necessary to navigate a database in order to validate it, the structure of the visual interface needs to show the structure of the data, and the model. The best way to do this is to relate them all so that any change to the database, changes the structure of the model and this changes the structure of the visualisation, or vice versa . Semantic search allows someone to see results or individual items but enables going straight to this, that doesn’t show the context and the model is still a ‘black box’, unless the Semantic search actually returns the relevant portion of the structure so that the context of the returned information is displayed.
Methodology
The example below illustrates how it is possible to enable refining a search by visualising all the items present in sub-categories of the main category found in the search. McGuinness (2003) explains how ontologies support this functionality and calls this ‘generalization/specialization’ of information. Uschold and Gruninger (2004) describe ‘ontology-based search’ as “Ontology used for concept-based structuring of information in a repository”; and describe the benefit of this as “better information access” This aids the research objectives of ease of use and sharing of information. The use of open standards for representing information makes it possible to enable searches that understand the semantics of the information and so can track all of the relationships between items. This example illustrates the interface for making a search. In this example the user wants to retrieve all the information related to a spar (aircraft wing component).
Semantic Search interface
The result is shown as a series of trees for each item that contains the word spar. Each keyword match is the root of a tree. Each tree shows the item found and all its children and attributes. The example below shows an image of the top part of the results, this is part of the branch for the first item returned.
Results from semantic search
The information is held in linked and related taxonomies/sub ontologies so it is not HTML that is being searched but the taxonomy itself. Because the information is held in a structured way, it is much more likely that searchers will find what they are looking for, because the search can follow the relationships represented in the taxonomy. One of the key objectives of Semantic Web research and Web 2.0 is to make this kind of search possible over the web as a whole. The Semantic Web is a longer-term vision for managing information over the web and Web 2.0 is the shorter-term practical implementation of techniques, which can ease current information search and management problems. A web interface has been developed for Protégé An example of the use of this is the illustration below where a search is made for information on the cure cycle for composites manufacturing. This search is possible as WebProtege[1] has succeeded in providing a web based interface for displaying and searching ontologies, so providing an additional way to enable web access to the test ontologies created for this research.
Web Protégé Interface
The next stage of this problem is to enable interaction and modelling with the returned information. A project was created called Bitriple by Leaver (2008), to enable end-user functionality for this kind of web-based ontology construction and search. The application provides a facility to edit an ontology/ies and instances, and provides tree-based visualisation of the ontology (as shown in the example below). This example illustrates creation of an online aircraft wing ontology. Wing component sub/ontologies created using Protégé can be translated for the Bitriple application to be represented as RDF/XML. An application could be built as an extension to Bitriple to perform calculations and modelling using the information stored. This could assist in allowing domain expert end-user programmers/modellers to create models. Such web applications provide an alternative to spreadsheets, and to single computer based programs; and if installed on a network server, such applications can provide a collaborative model development environment. This would fit in well with both Semantic Web, and Web 2.0 approaches to knowledge creation, allowing structured representation and navigation of information, and end-user interaction, collaboration, customisation and programming via the web. Collaboration can aid people to agree on terminology, and standardisation of calculations used such as for cost rates and currencies. RDF information can be searched with SPARQL[2] (SPARQL Protocol And RDF Query Language), which is used to search the Bitriple application.
A screenshot from the Bitriple application, of ontology creation for an aircraft wing, is shown below :-
Bitriple Ontology Creation Screenshot
Conclusion
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/submodels, and between models, and between suppliers and buyers.
Existing ontologies can be extended for modelling of software systems and engineering systems e.g. PSL, STEPML, UML, SysML can be extended.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.
[2] WebProtege (2008) Wiki Page [online]. Available from: http://protege.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WebProtege [Accessed 27 June 2008].
Uschold, M., Gruninger, M., 2004. Ontologies and Semantics for Seamless Connectivity. In: Association for Computer Machinery - Special Interest Group on Management of Data - SIGMOD Record December, 33(4).
This article describes how software developers could enable domain experts such as engineers to collaborate on problem solving. The means for this is development using Semantic Web and Web 2.0 techniques to enable end-user programming. This could enable domain experts such as engineers to be involved in the modelling of a problem such as product design, and so understand, assess, and develop possible solutions.
Introduction
Visualisation is necessary to provide traceability for decision making, as an audit trail for information, to justify a decision and/or cost, or to understand a process, or a product data structure. It is necessary to navigate a database in order to validate it, the structure of the visual interface needs to show the structure of the data, and the model. The best way to do this is to relate them all so that any change to the database, changes the structure of the model and this changes the structure of the visualisation, or vice versa . Semantic search allows someone to see results or individual items but enables going straight to this, that doesn’t show the context and the model is still a ‘black box’, unless the Semantic search actually returns the relevant portion of the structure so that the context of the returned information is displayed.
Methodology
The example below illustrates how it is possible to enable refining a search by visualising all the items present in sub-categories of the main category found in the search. McGuinness (2003) explains how ontologies support this functionality and calls this ‘generalization/specialization’ of information. Uschold and Gruninger (2004) describe ‘ontology-based search’ as “Ontology used for concept-based structuring of information in a repository”; and describe the benefit of this as “better information access” This aids the research objectives of ease of use and sharing of information. The use of open standards for representing information makes it possible to enable searches that understand the semantics of the information and so can track all of the relationships between items. This example illustrates the interface for making a search. In this example the user wants to retrieve all the information related to a spar (aircraft wing component).
Semantic Search interface
The result is shown as a series of trees for each item that contains the word spar. Each keyword match is the root of a tree. Each tree shows the item found and all its children and attributes. The example below shows an image of the top part of the results, this is part of the branch for the first item returned.
Results from semantic search
The information is held in linked and related taxonomies/sub ontologies so it is not HTML that is being searched but the taxonomy itself. Because the information is held in a structured way, it is much more likely that searchers will find what they are looking for, because the search can follow the relationships represented in the taxonomy. One of the key objectives of Semantic Web research and Web 2.0 is to make this kind of search possible over the web as a whole. The Semantic Web is a longer-term vision for managing information over the web and Web 2.0 is the shorter-term practical implementation of techniques, which can ease current information search and management problems. A web interface has been developed for Protégé An example of the use of this is the illustration below where a search is made for information on the cure cycle for composites manufacturing. This search is possible as WebProtege[1] has succeeded in providing a web based interface for displaying and searching ontologies, so providing an additional way to enable web access to the test ontologies created for this research.
Web Protégé Interface
The next stage of this problem is to enable interaction and modelling with the returned information. A project was created called Bitriple by Leaver (2008), to enable end-user functionality for this kind of web-based ontology construction and search. The application provides a facility to edit an ontology/ies and instances, and provides tree-based visualisation of the ontology (as shown in the example below). This example illustrates creation of an online aircraft wing ontology. Wing component sub/ontologies created using Protégé can be translated for the Bitriple application to be represented as RDF/XML. An application could be built as an extension to Bitriple to perform calculations and modelling using the information stored. This could assist in allowing domain expert end-user programmers/modellers to create models. Such web applications provide an alternative to spreadsheets, and to single computer based programs; and if installed on a network server, such applications can provide a collaborative model development environment. This would fit in well with both Semantic Web, and Web 2.0 approaches to knowledge creation, allowing structured representation and navigation of information, and end-user interaction, collaboration, customisation and programming via the web. Collaboration can aid people to agree on terminology, and standardisation of calculations used such as for cost rates and currencies. RDF information can be searched with SPARQL[2] (SPARQL Protocol And RDF Query Language), which is used to search the Bitriple application.
A screenshot from the Bitriple application, of ontology creation for an aircraft wing, is shown below :-
Bitriple Ontology Creation Screenshot
Conclusion
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 so each expert is best 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/submodels, and between models, and between suppliers and buyers.
Existing ontologies can be extended for modelling of software systems and engineering systems e.g. PSL, STEPML, UML, SysML can be extended.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.
[1] SPARQL is the query language and protocol for RDF being recommended to the World Wide Web Consortium - (2008) [online]. Available from: http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/ [Accessed 27 June 2008]. A tutorial has been developed by Dodds - [online]. Available from: http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/2005/11/16/introducing-sparql-querying-semantic-web-tutorial.html
[Accessed 27 June 2008].
[Accessed 27 June 2008].
[2] WebProtege (2008) Wiki Page [online]. Available from: http://protege.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WebProtege [Accessed 27 June 2008].
References
Leaver, N. (2008) Using RDF as an Enabling Technology. MSc. Dissertation, University of the West of England, Bristol.
McGuinness, D. L., 2003. Ontologies Come of Age. In: Dieter Fensel, Jim Hendler, Henry Lieberman, and Wolfgang Wahlster, ed. Spinning the Semantic Web: Bringing the World Wide Web to Its Full Potential. MIT Press, 2003.
McGuinness, D. L., 2003. Ontologies Come of Age. In: Dieter Fensel, Jim Hendler, Henry Lieberman, and Wolfgang Wahlster, ed. Spinning the Semantic Web: Bringing the World Wide Web to Its Full Potential. MIT Press, 2003.
Uschold, M., Gruninger, M., 2004. Ontologies and Semantics for Seamless Connectivity. In: Association for Computer Machinery - Special Interest Group on Management of Data - SIGMOD Record December, 33(4).
Monday, May 25, 2009
Enabling diagrammatic de-abstraction and modelling of engineering problems - Summary
This post discusses efforts to enable de-abstraction of engineering problems from a representation suitable for engineers to that suitable for computer models and code. The key question is to what extent diagrammatic representations of problems can be used in order to provide modelling solutions. To achieve this, a source tree is created, this is translated to computer code, then represented as a result tree. This enables engineers to visualise problems such as representation of a product data structure in a way familiar to them, and this also gives a visual and colour coded representation of equations. This visualisation is easier to navigate and understand than that which can be provided by spreadsheets, and more maintainable. This research could also be used for business modelling, process modelling, and workflow.
The essence of the problem is that organisations and individuals have many limitations resulting from the lack of facilities to allow users to program. Organisations have many limitations resulting from the lack of facilities to allow users to program. For example the use of 'out of the box' modelling tools, which are hard to customise or introduce collaborative capabilities, because a project deadline is so urgent that nothing else is practical. The problem with this is that when organisations have urgent needs to produce models for a particular deadline, all their effort goes into this. Once a deadline is met or missed, there will be a new deadline for something else. So all the effort goes into meeting these deadlines, and there are little or no resources for providing a better solution that makes it easier in the long run to meet the deadlines. This causes many issues, which need to be urgently tackled by organisations in the short term. This creates an ironic dilemma, that the problems caused by lack of end user programming facilities cause there to be a need to tackle these problems via quick fixes because they are so urgent. This makes it difficult to secure funding and time for longer term end user programming research.
As an example of the problems that occur; many people use Excel for financial modelling, and engineering, business, and science models. As these models become large, the short term solution is to use Excel Visual Basic to aid navigation through the model. However, though this helps with the immediate problem, in the longer term it can be difficult to reuse the model, as the Excel spreadsheet creator has to go through his or her code and remember what they have done, this problem is worse if a different user is trying to reuse the spreadsheet. Experience of dealing with projects that create new software systems is that they are very ambitious, but not very modular or customisable. Under management pressure for meeting of timescales, they are often released too early with insufficient consultation with users. Then software developer's time is reallocated to a help desk, in order to deal with the problems caused by the release of software too early, too unchangeable and with too little user involvement.
A longer term solution would be to provide a visual programming environment where the structure of the code is visualised, to make it easier to track the formulae, and so navigation is a central part of the program design, this also minimises the need for code. A solution is to produce highly customisable software, so that the software team do not have to anticipate every problem the users will want to solve. Then many users with more advanced needs and computing abilities could customise software for their needs.
Engineering modelling can be performed using a high level diagrammatic view of the problem and conveyed to the computer via transformation. Program/model transformation allows for writing in one representation or language, and translating to another. This is particularly useful for language independent programming, or for high level and end user programming that can then be translated to a language more easily interpreted by computer systems.
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.
Application of this kind of research at Rolls-Royce are described by Scanlan et al. (2006). Collaboration, simulation and modelling have been investigated to determine the requirements for future research in modelling 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 modelling infrastructure is automated generation of models created with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards based languages, and the visualisation 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.
Reference
Scanlan, J., Rao, A., Bru, C., Hale, P., Marsh, R., 2006. DATUM Project: Cost Estimating Environment for Support of Aerospace Design Decision Making. Journal of Aircraft, 43(4).
The essence of the problem is that organisations and individuals have many limitations resulting from the lack of facilities to allow users to program. Organisations have many limitations resulting from the lack of facilities to allow users to program. For example the use of 'out of the box' modelling tools, which are hard to customise or introduce collaborative capabilities, because a project deadline is so urgent that nothing else is practical. The problem with this is that when organisations have urgent needs to produce models for a particular deadline, all their effort goes into this. Once a deadline is met or missed, there will be a new deadline for something else. So all the effort goes into meeting these deadlines, and there are little or no resources for providing a better solution that makes it easier in the long run to meet the deadlines. This causes many issues, which need to be urgently tackled by organisations in the short term. This creates an ironic dilemma, that the problems caused by lack of end user programming facilities cause there to be a need to tackle these problems via quick fixes because they are so urgent. This makes it difficult to secure funding and time for longer term end user programming research.
As an example of the problems that occur; many people use Excel for financial modelling, and engineering, business, and science models. As these models become large, the short term solution is to use Excel Visual Basic to aid navigation through the model. However, though this helps with the immediate problem, in the longer term it can be difficult to reuse the model, as the Excel spreadsheet creator has to go through his or her code and remember what they have done, this problem is worse if a different user is trying to reuse the spreadsheet. Experience of dealing with projects that create new software systems is that they are very ambitious, but not very modular or customisable. Under management pressure for meeting of timescales, they are often released too early with insufficient consultation with users. Then software developer's time is reallocated to a help desk, in order to deal with the problems caused by the release of software too early, too unchangeable and with too little user involvement.
A longer term solution would be to provide a visual programming environment where the structure of the code is visualised, to make it easier to track the formulae, and so navigation is a central part of the program design, this also minimises the need for code. A solution is to produce highly customisable software, so that the software team do not have to anticipate every problem the users will want to solve. Then many users with more advanced needs and computing abilities could customise software for their needs.
Engineering modelling can be performed using a high level diagrammatic view of the problem and conveyed to the computer via transformation. Program/model transformation allows for writing in one representation or language, and translating to another. This is particularly useful for language independent programming, or for high level and end user programming that can then be translated to a language more easily interpreted by computer systems.
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.
Application of this kind of research at Rolls-Royce are described by Scanlan et al. (2006). Collaboration, simulation and modelling have been investigated to determine the requirements for future research in modelling 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 modelling infrastructure is automated generation of models created with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards based languages, and the visualisation 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.
Reference
Scanlan, J., Rao, A., Bru, C., Hale, P., Marsh, R., 2006. DATUM Project: Cost Estimating Environment for Support of Aerospace Design Decision Making. Journal of Aircraft, 43(4).
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
More Customisable Software Systems
My experience of dealing with projects that create new software systems is that they are very ambitious, but not very modular or customisable. Under management pressure for meeting of timescales, they are often released too early with insufficient consultation with users. Then software developer's time is reallocated to a help desk, in order to deal with the problems caused by the release of software too early, too unchangeable and with too little user involvement.
A solution is to produce highly customisable software, so that the software team don't have to anticipate every problem the users will want to solve. Then many users with more advanced needs and computing abilities could customise software for their needs.
A solution is to produce highly customisable software, so that the software team don't have to anticipate every problem the users will want to solve. Then many users with more advanced needs and computing abilities could customise software for their needs.
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