Contribuição ao desenvolvimento de ontologias para processos petroquímicos : estudo de caso em uma planta DEA

In the last decades, the oil, gas and petrochemical industries have registered a series of huge accidents. Influenced by this context, companies have felt the necessity of engaging themselves in processes to protect the external environment, which can be understood as an ecological concern. In the particular case of the nuclear industry, sustainable education and training, which depend too much on the quality and applicability of the knowledge base, have been considered key points on the safely application of this energy source. As a consequence, this research was motivated by the use of the ontology concept as a tool to improve the knowledge management in a refinery, through the representation of a fuel gas sweetening plant, mixing many pieces of information associated with its normal operation mode. In terms of methodology, this research can be classified as an applied and descriptive research, where many pieces of information were analysed, classified and interpreted to create the ontology of a real plant. The DEA plant modeling was performed according to its process flow diagram, piping and instrumentation diagrams, descriptive documents of its normal operation mode, and the list of all the alarms associated to the instruments, which were complemented by a non-structured interview with a specialist in that plant operation. The ontology was verified by comparing its descriptive diagrams with the original plant documents and discussing with other members of the researchers group. All the concepts applied in this research can be expanded to represent other plants in the same refinery or even in other kind of industry. An ontology can be considered a knowledge base that, because of its formal representation nature, can be applied as one of the elements to develop tools to navigate through the plant, simulate its behavior, diagnose faults, among other possibilities

SISOnt: sistema de informação em saúde baseado em ontologias

The sharing of knowledge and integration of data is one of the biggest challenges in health and essential contribution to improve the quality of health care. Since the same person receives care in various health facilities throughout his/her live, that information is distributed in different information systems which run on platforms of heterogeneous hardware and software. This paper proposes a System of Health Information Based on Ontologies (SISOnt) for knowledge sharing and integration of data on health, which allows to infer new information from the heterogeneous databases and knowledge base. For this purpose it was created three ontologies represented by the patterns and concepts proposed by the Semantic Web. The first ontology provides a representation of the concepts of diseases Secretariat of Health Surveillance (SVS) and the others are related to the representation of the concepts of databases of Health Information Systems (SIS), specifically the Information System of Notification of Diseases (SINAN) and the Information System on Mortality (SIM)

Aplicação de ontologias para métodos de negociação de um sistema multiagente para o reconhecimento de padrões

The use of intelligent agents in multi-classifier systems appeared in order to making the centralized decision process of a multi-classifier system into a distributed, flexible and incremental one. Based on this, the NeurAge (Neural Agents) system (Abreu et al 2004) was proposed. This system has a superior performance to some combination-centered methods (Abreu, Canuto, and Santana 2005). The negotiation is important to the multiagent system performance, but most of negotiations are defined informaly. A way to formalize the negotiation process is using an ontology. In the context of classification tasks, the ontology provides an approach to formalize the concepts and rules that manage the relations between these concepts. This work aims at using ontologies to make a formal description of the negotiation methods of a multi-agent system for classification tasks, more specifically the NeurAge system. Through ontologies, we intend to make the NeurAge system more formal and open, allowing that new agents can be part of such system during the negotiation. In this sense, the NeurAge System will be studied on the basis of its functioning and reaching, mainly, the negotiation methods used by the same ones. After that, some negotiation ontologies found in literature will be studied, and then those that were chosen for this work will be adapted to the negotiation methods used in the NeurAge.

GeOntoQuery - um mecanismo de busca em bancos de dados geográficos baseado em ontologias

Geographic Information System (GIS) are computational tools used to capture, store, consult, manipulate, analyze and print geo-referenced data. A GIS is a multi-disciplinary system that can be used by different communities of users, each one having their own interest and knowledge. This way, different knowledge views about the same reality need to be combined, in such way to attend each community. This work presents a mechanism that allows different community users access the same geographic database without knowing its particular internal structure. We use geographic ontologies to support a common and shared understanding of a specific domain: the coral reefs. Using these ontologies' descriptions that represent the knowledge of the different communities, mechanisms are created to handle with such different concepts. We use equivalent classes mapping, and a semantic layer that interacts with the ontologies and the geographic database, and that gives to the user the answers about his/her queries, independently of the used terms

Contribuição ao desenvolvimento de ontologias para processos petroquímicos : estudo de caso em uma planta DEA

In the last decades, the oil, gas and petrochemical industries have registered a series of huge accidents. Influenced by this context, companies have felt the necessity of engaging themselves in processes to protect the external environment, which can be understood as an ecological concern. In the particular case of the nuclear industry, sustainable education and training, which depend too much on the quality and applicability of the knowledge base, have been considered key points on the safely application of this energy source. As a consequence, this research was motivated by the use of the ontology concept as a tool to improve the knowledge management in a refinery, through the representation of a fuel gas sweetening plant, mixing many pieces of information associated with its normal operation mode. In terms of methodology, this research can be classified as an applied and descriptive research, where many pieces of information were analysed, classified and interpreted to create the ontology of a real plant. The DEA plant modeling was performed according to its process flow diagram, piping and instrumentation diagrams, descriptive documents of its normal operation mode, and the list of all the alarms associated to the instruments, which were complemented by a non-structured interview with a specialist in that plant operation. The ontology was verified by comparing its descriptive diagrams with the original plant documents and discussing with other members of the researchers group. All the concepts applied in this research can be expanded to represent other plants in the same refinery or even in other kind of industry. An ontology can be considered a knowledge base that, because of its formal representation nature, can be applied as one of the elements to develop tools to navigate through the plant, simulate its behavior, diagnose faults, among other possibilities

Uma plataforma de integração de middleware para computação ubíqua

One of the current challenges of Ubiquitous Computing is the development of complex applications, those are more than simple alarms triggered by sensors or simple systems to configure the environment according to user preferences. Those applications are hard to develop since they are composed by services provided by different middleware and it is needed to know the peculiarities of each of them, mainly the communication and context models. This thesis presents OpenCOPI, a platform which integrates various services providers, including context provision middleware. It provides an unified ontology-based context model, as well as an environment that enable easy development of ubiquitous applications via the definition of semantic workflows that contains the abstract description of the application. Those semantic workflows are converted into concrete workflows, called execution plans. An execution plan consists of a workflow instance containing activities that are automated by a set of Web services. OpenCOPI supports the automatic Web service selection and composition, enabling the use of services provided by distinct middleware in an independent and transparent way. Moreover, this platform also supports execution adaptation in case of service failures, user mobility and degradation of services quality. The validation of OpenCOPI is performed through the development of case studies, specifically applications of the oil industry. In addition, this work evaluates the overhead introduced by OpenCOPI and compares it with the provided benefits, and the efficiency of OpenCOPI s selection and adaptation mechanism

Um monitor de metadados de QoS e QoC para plataformas de middleware

Context-aware applications are typically dynamic and use services provided by several sources, with different quality levels. Context information qualities are expressed in terms of Quality of Context (QoC) metadata, such as precision, correctness, refreshment, and resolution. On the other hand, service qualities are expressed via Quality of Services (QoS) metadata such as response time, availability and error rate. In order to assure that an application is using services and context information that meet its requirements, it is essential to continuously monitor the metadata. For this purpose, it is needed a QoS and QoC monitoring mechanism that meet the following requirements: (i) to support measurement and monitoring of QoS and QoC metadata; (ii) to support synchronous and asynchronous operation, thus enabling the application to periodically gather the monitored metadata and also to be asynchronously notified whenever a given metadata becomes available; (iii) to use ontologies to represent information in order to avoid ambiguous interpretation. This work presents QoMonitor, a module for QoS and QoC metadata monitoring that meets the abovementioned requirement. The architecture and implementation of QoMonitor are discussed. To support asynchronous communication QoMonitor uses two protocols: JMS and Light-PubSubHubbub. In order to illustrate QoMonitor in the development of ubiquitous application it was integrated to OpenCOPI (Open COntext Platform Integration), a Middleware platform that integrates several context provision middleware. To validate QoMonitor we used two applications as proofof- concept: an oil and gas monitoring application and a healthcare application. This work also presents a validation of QoMonitor in terms of performance both in synchronous and asynchronous requests

Um ambiente para especificação e execução AD-HOC de processos de negócio baseados em serviços Web

Recently the focus given to Web Services and Semantic Web technologies has provided the development of several research projects in different ways to addressing the Web services composition issue. Meanwhile, the challenge of creating an environment that provides the specification of an abstract business process and that it is automatically implemented by a composite service in a dynamic way is considered a currently open problem. WSDL and BPEL provided by industry support only manual service composition because they lack needed semantics so that Web services are discovered, selected and combined by software agents. Services ontology provided by Semantic Web enriches the syntactic descriptions of Web services to facilitate the automation of tasks, such as discovery and composition. This work presents an environment for specifying and ad-hoc executing Web services-based business processes, named WebFlowAH. The WebFlowAH employs common domain ontology to describe both Web services and business processes. It allows processes specification in terms of users goals or desires that are expressed based on the concepts of such common domain ontology. This approach allows processes to be specified in an abstract high level way, unburdening the user from the underline details needed to effectively run the process workflow

Model-Driven requirements engineering process aided by ontologies and natural controlled languages

Researches in Requirements Engineering have been growing in the latest few years. Researchers are concerned with a set of open issues such as: communication between several user profiles involved in software engineering; scope definition; volatility and traceability issues. To cope with these issues a set of works are concentrated in (i) defining processes to collect client s specifications in order to solve scope issues; (ii) defining models to represent requirements to address communication and traceability issues; and (iii) working on mechanisms and processes to be applied to requirements modeling in order to facilitate requirements evolution and maintenance, addressing volatility and traceability issues. We propose an iterative Model-Driven process to solve these issues, based on a double layered CIM to communicate requirements related knowledge to a wider amount of stakeholders. We also present a tool to help requirements engineer through the RE process. Finally we present a case study to illustrate the process and tool s benefits and usage

Uma ontologia para a descrição da semântica da IMML

This work presents an ontology to describe the semantics of IMML (Interactive Message Modeling Language) an XML-based User Interface Description Language. The ontology presents the description of all IMML elements including a natural language description and semantic rules and relationships. The ontology is implemented in OWL-DL, a standard language to ontology description that is recommended by W3C. Our main goal is to describe the semantic using languages and tools that can be processed by computers. As a consequence, we develop tools to the validation of a user interface specification and also to present the semantic description in different views

AutoWebS: um Ambiente para Modelagem e Geração Automática de ServiçosWeb Semânticos

Typically Web services contain only syntactic information that describes their interfaces. Due to the lack of semantic descriptions of the Web services, service composition becomes a difficult task. To solve this problem, Web services can exploit the use of ontologies for the semantic definition of service s interface, thus facilitating the automation of discovering, publication, mediation, invocation, and composition of services. However, ontology languages, such as OWL-S, have constructs that are not easy to understand, even for Web developers, and the existing tools that support their use contains many details that make them difficult to manipulate. This paper presents a MDD tool called AutoWebS (Automatic Generation of Semantic Web Services) to develop OWL-S semantic Web services. AutoWebS uses an approach based on UML profiles and model transformations for automatic generation of Web services and their semantic description. AutoWebS offers an environment that provides many features required to model, implement, compile, and deploy semantic Web services