A semantic modelling approach to knowledge based statistical software

The topic of this thesis is the development of knowledge based statistical software. The shortcomings of conventional statistical packages are discussed to illustrate the need to develop software which is able to exhibit a greater degree of statistical expertise, thereby reducing the misuse of statistical methods by those not well versed in the art of statistical analysis. Some of the issues involved in the development of knowledge based software are presented and a review is given of some of the systems that have been developed so far. The majority of these have moved away from conventional architectures by adopting what can be termed an expert systems approach. The thesis then proposes an approach which is based upon the concept of semantic modelling. By representing some of the semantic meaning of data, it is conceived that a system could examine a request to apply a statistical technique and check if the use of the chosen technique was semantically sound, i.e. will the results obtained be meaningful. Current systems, in contrast, can only perform what can be considered as syntactic checks. The prototype system that has been implemented to explore the feasibility of such an approach is presented, the system has been designed as an enhanced variant of a conventional style statistical package. This involved developing a semantic data model to represent some of the statistically relevant knowledge about data and identifying sets of requirements that should be met for the application of the statistical techniques to be valid. Those areas of statistics covered in the prototype are measures of association and tests of location.

The application of knowledge based expert systems to mechanical engineering design

Investigation of the different approaches used by Expert Systems researchers to solve problems in the domain of Mechanical Design and Expert Systems was carried out. The techniques used for conventional formal logic programming were compared with those used when applying Expert Systems concepts. A literature survey of design processes was also conducted with a view to adopting a suitable model of the design process. A model, comprising a variation on two established ones, was developed and applied to a problem within what are described as class 3 design tasks. The research explored the application of these concepts to Mechanical Engineering Design problems and their implementation on a microcomputer using an Expert System building tool. It was necessary to explore the use of Expert Systems in this manner so as to bridge the gap between their use as a control structure and for detailed analytical design. The former application is well researched into and this thesis discusses the latter. Some Expert System building tools available to the author at the beginning of his work were evaluated specifically for their suitability for Mechanical Engineering design problems. Microsynics was found to be the most suitable on which to implement a design problem because of its simple but powerful Semantic Net Knowledge Representation structure and the ability to use other types of representation schemes. Two major implementations were carried out. The first involved a design program for a Helical compression spring and the second a gearpair system design. Two concepts were proposed in the thesis for the modelling and implementation of design systems involving many equations. The method proposed enables equation manipulation and analysis using a combination of frames, semantic nets and production rules. The use of semantic nets for purposes other than for psychology and natural language interpretation, is quite new and represents one of the major contributions to knowledge by the author. The development of a purpose built shell program for this type of design problems was recommended as an extension of the research. Microsynics may usefully be used as a platform for this development.

Spatially structured cognitve models of semantic information:the implications for computerised databases

Existing theories of semantic cognition propose models of cognitive processing occurring in a conceptual space, where ‘meaning’ is derived from the spatial relationships between concepts’ mapped locations within the space. Information visualisation is a growing area of research within the field of information retrieval, and methods for presenting database contents visually in the form of spatial data management systems (SDMSs) are being developed. This thesis combined these two areas of research to investigate the benefits associated with employing spatial-semantic mapping (documents represented as objects in two- and three-dimensional virtual environments are proximally mapped dependent on the semantic similarity of their content) as a tool for improving retrieval performance and navigational efficiency when browsing for information within such systems. Positive effects associated with the quality of document mapping were observed; improved retrieval performance and browsing behaviour were witnessed when mapping was optimal. It was also shown using a third dimension for virtual environment (VE) presentation provides sufficient additional information regarding the semantic structure of the environment that performance is increased in comparison to using two-dimensions for mapping. A model that describes the relationship between retrieval performance and browsing behaviour was proposed on the basis of findings. Individual differences were not found to have any observable influence on retrieval performance or browsing behaviour when mapping quality was good. The findings from this work have implications for both cognitive modelling of semantic information, and for designing and testing information visualisation systems. These implications are discussed in the conclusions of this work.

A systems approach to students' motivation and academic achievement

This research followed earlier work (reported in a thesis presented in 1970) on factors associated with the academic performance of a sample of technical college students, which recommended the further study of students' motivation. The technical college then became part of a polytechnic, but the courses chosen for the continuation of the research were all of a specifically vocational character. The approach was influenced by Angyal (1941) in seeking to relate symbolic processes to broader behaviour patterns within a systems framework. Forms of semantic differential were developed to obtain the students' responses to words representing various activities and various people both within and outside the academic environment. Also, a "!growth motivation questionnaire" was produced using ideas from self-actualisation, job satisfaction and expectancy theory and examination marks were recorded. From pre-coded responses to the growth motivation questionnaire, scores on a 'study satisfaction' factor were calculated, and subsamples of students were taken at the extremes of this scale. Wriitten responses from the same questionnaire and semantic differential factor scores showed contrasting patterns between the two subsamples. Interpretation of these patterns suggested a diversity of approach to academic work among the students which calls for greater flexibility in the educational system serving them.

Transition of legacy systems to semantically enabled applications:TAO method and tools

Despite expectations being high, the industrial take-up of Semantic Web technologies in developing services and applications has been slower than expected. One of the main reasons is that many legacy systems have been developed without considering the potential of theWeb in integrating services and sharing resources.Without a systematic methodology and proper tool support, the migration from legacy systems to SemanticWeb Service-based systems can be a tedious and expensive process, which carries a significant risk of failure. There is an urgent need to provide strategies, allowing the migration of legacy systems to Semantic Web Services platforms, and also tools to support such strategies. In this paper we propose a methodology and its tool support for transitioning these applications to Semantic Web Services, which allow users to migrate their applications to Semantic Web Services platforms automatically or semi-automatically. The transition of the GATE system is used as a case study. © 2009 - IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved.

Automatic summary assessment for intelligent tutoring systems

Summary writing is an important part of many English Language Examinations. As grading students' summary writings is a very time-consuming task, computer-assisted assessment will help teachers carry out the grading more effectively. Several techniques such as latent semantic analysis (LSA), n-gram co-occurrence and BLEU have been proposed to support automatic evaluation of summaries. However, their performance is not satisfactory for assessing summary writings. To improve the performance, this paper proposes an ensemble approach that integrates LSA and n-gram co-occurrence. As a result, the proposed ensemble approach is able to achieve high accuracy and improve the performance quite substantially compared with current techniques. A summary assessment system based on the proposed approach has also been developed.

A formal model of the Semantic Web Service Ontology (WSMO)

Semantic Web Service, one of the most significant research areas within the Semantic Web vision, has attracted increasing attention from both the research community and industry. The Web Service Modelling Ontology (WSMO) has been proposed as an enabling framework for the total/partial automation of the tasks (e.g., discovery, selection, composition, mediation, execution, monitoring, etc.) involved in both intra- and inter-enterprise integration of Web services. To support the standardisation and tool support of WSMO, a formal model of the language is highly desirable. As several variants of WSMO have been proposed by the WSMO community, which are still under development, the syntax and semantics of WSMO should be formally defined to facilitate easy reuse and future development. In this paper, we present a formal Object-Z formal model of WSMO, where different aspects of the language have been precisely defined within one unified framework. This model not only provides a formal unambiguous model which can be used to develop tools and facilitate future development, but as demonstrated in this paper, can be used to identify and eliminate errors present in existing documentation.

An integrated environment for semantic knowledge work

In this demonstration, we will present a semantic environment called the K-Box. The K-Box supports the lightweight integration of knowledge tools, with a focus on semantic tools, but with the flexibility to integrate natural language and conventional tools. We discuss the implementation of the framework, and two existing applications, including details of a new application for developers of semantic workflows. The demonstration will be of interest to developers and researchers of ontology-based knowledge management systems, and semantic desktops, and to analysts working with cross-media information. © 2011 ACM.

PowerAqua:fishing the semantic web

The Semantic Web (SW) offers an opportunity to develop novel, sophisticated forms of question answering (QA). Specifically, the availability of distributed semantic markup on a large scale opens the way to QA systems which can make use of such semantic information to provide precise, formally derived answers to questions. At the same time the distributed, heterogeneous, large-scale nature of the semantic information introduces significant challenges. In this paper we describe the design of a QA system, PowerAqua, designed to exploit semantic markup on the web to provide answers to questions posed in natural language. PowerAqua does not assume that the user has any prior information about the semantic resources. The system takes as input a natural language query, translates it into a set of logical queries, which are then answered by consulting and aggregating information derived from multiple heterogeneous semantic sources.

An Ontology-based Approach to Student Skills in Multiagent e-Learning Systems

The main idea of our approach is that the domain ontology is not only the instrument of learning but an object of examining student skills. We propose for students to build the domain ontology of examine discipline and then compare it with etalon one. Analysis of student mistakes allows to propose them personalized recommendations and to improve the course materials in general. For knowledge interoperability we apply Semantic Web technologies. Application of agent-based technologies in e-learning provides the personification of students and tutors and saved all users from the routine operations.

An automated tool for semantic accessing to formal software models

Many software engineers have found that it is difficult to understand, incorporate and use different formal models consistently in the process of software developments, especially for large and complex software systems. This is mainly due to the complex mathematical nature of the formal methods and the lack of tool support. It is highly desirable to have software models and their related software artefacts systematically connected and used collaboratively, rather than in isolation. The success of the Semantic Web, as the next generation of Web technology, can have profound impact on the environment for formal software development. It allows both the software engineers and machines to understand the content of formal models and supports more effective software design in terms of understanding, sharing and reusing in a distributed manner. To realise the full potential of the Semantic Web in formal software development, effectively creating proper semantic metadata for formal software models and their related software artefacts is crucial. This paper proposed a framework that allows users to interconnect the knowledge about formal software models and other related documents using the semantic technology. We first propose a methodology with tool support is proposed to automatically derive ontological metadata from formal software models and semantically describe them. We then develop a Semantic Web environment for representing and sharing formal Z/OZ models. A method with prototype tool is presented to enhance semantic query to software models and other artefacts. © 2014.

Web-Based Information Systems in the Stock Market Financial Information Domain

The information domain is a recognised sphere for the influence, ownership, and control of information and it's specifications, format, exploitation and explanation (Thompson, 1967). The article presents a description of the financial information domain issues related to the organisation and operation of a stock market. We review the strategic, institutional and standards dimensions of the stock market information domain in relation to the current semantic web knowledge and how and whether this could be used in modern web based stock market information systems to provide the quality of information that their stakeholders want. The analysis is based on the FINE model (Blanas, 2003). The analysis leads to a number of research questions for future research.

Analogous Reasoning and Case-based Reasoning for Intelligent Decision Support Systems

Methods of analogous reasoning and case-based reasoning for intelligent decision support systems are considered. Special attention is drawn to methods based on a structural analogy that take the context into account. This work was supported by RFBR (projects 02-07-90042, 05-07-90232).

The On-board Operative Advisory Expert Systems for Anthropocentric Object

A class of intelligent systems located on anthropocentric objects that provide a crew with recommendations on the anthropocentric object's rational behavior in typical situations of operation is considered. We refer to this class of intelligent systems as onboard real-time advisory expert systems. Here, we present a formal model of the object domain, procedures for obtaining knowledge about the object domain, and a semantic structure of basic functional units of the onboard real-time advisory expert systems of typical situations. The stages of the development and improvement of knowledge bases for onboard real-time advisory expert systems of typical situations that are important in practice are considered.

BOWL:augmenting the semantic web with beliefs

As the Semantic Web is an open, complex and constantly evolving medium, it is the norm, but not exception that information at different sites is incomplete or inconsistent. This poses challenges for the engineering and development of agent systems on the Semantic Web, since autonomous software agents need to understand, process and aggregate this information. Ontology language OWL provides core language constructs to semantically markup resources on the Semantic Web, on which software agents interact and cooperate to accomplish complex tasks. However, as OWL was designed on top of (a subset of) classic predicate logic, it lacks the ability to reason about inconsistent or incomplete information. Belief-augmented Frames (BAF) is a frame-based logic system that associates with each frame a supporting and a refuting belief value. In this paper, we propose a new ontology language Belief-augmented OWL (BOWL) by integrating OWL DL and BAF to incorporate the notion of confidence. BOWL is paraconsistent, hence it can perform useful reasoning services in the presence of inconsistencies and incompleteness. We define the abstract syntax and semantics of BOWL by extending those of OWL. We have proposed reasoning algorithms for various reasoning tasks in the BOWL framework and we have implemented the algorithms using the constraint logic programming framework. One example in the sensor fusion domain is presented to demonstrate the application of BOWL.