Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

We propose to use ORM and Lisa-D as means to formally reason about domains. Conceptual rule languages such as Lisa-D, RIDL and ConQuer allow for the specification of rules in a semi-natural language format that can more easily be understood by domain experts than languages such as predicate calculus, Z or OCL. If one would indeed be able to reason about properties of domains in terms of Lisa-D expressions, then this reasoning would be likely to be better accessible to people without a background in formal mathematics, such as “the average” domain expert. A potential application domain for such reasoning would be the field of . If we can reason about business rules formulated in a semi-natural language format, the formal equivalence of (sets of) business rules (i.e. various paraphrasings) can be discussed with domain experts in a language and a fashion that is familiar to them.

In this paper we introduce some terminology for comparing the expressiveness of conceptual data modeling techniques, such as ER, NIAM, PSM and ORM, that are finitely bounded by their underlying domains. Next we consider schema equivalence and discuss the effects of the sizes of the underlying domains.This leads to the introduction of the concept of finite equivalence, which may serve as a means to a better understanding of the fundamentals of modeling concepts (utility). We give some examples of finite equivalence and inequivalence in the context of ORM.

With this Symposium for PhD students associated with the “On The Move Federated Conferences” we present the second edition of an event stimulating PhD students to summarise and present their results on an international forum. The Symposium supports PhD students in their research by offering an internationally highly reputed publication channel, namely the Springer LNCS proceedings of the OTM workshops, and by providing an opportunity to gain ample feedback from prominent professors. More specifically, students receive general advice on making the most of their research environment, on how to focus their objectives, on how to establish their methods, and on how to adequately present their results. These eminent professors thus help establishing a dialogue setting of scientific interrogation, discussion, reflexion and guidance between students and mentors. For taking up this challenging task, we would like to vividly thank our team of accompanying professors, namely:

Enterprises are increasingly under pressure through globalization of markets, rapid advances in technology, and increasing customer expectations. In order to create and sustain a competitive advantage in this environment, adaptation of value generating activities is required. One of the value generating activities and the focus of the Ph.D. thesis is new product development (NPD). Especially the duration of NPD is a central success factor, as it has direct implications on its profitability and also on the strategic position of an enterprise. Efforts to accelerate NPD typically focus on increasing efficiency by exploiting potentials in the design of the product, the organizational structures, or the development process. Utilization of information and communication technology (ICT) for this purpose is dominated by support for actual engineering activities e.g. through computer-aided systems (CAx). The acceleration of NPD related processes supported by ICT especially beyond the boundaries of a single enterprise has received much less widespread acceptance and utilization so far. The specific question to be answered by the Ph.D. thesis in this context is therefore how to accelerate distributed NPD by exploiting ICT. The research results will be used for further development of existing software applications supporting NPD.

In our current connected wireless world, mobile devices are enabled to use various networking facilities. Although this enables mobile users to communicate , it may also be very intrusive. There is a high need to manage the information stream a user receives on his/her mobile device. Context-awareness seems to be a promising way to manage this information stream and to provide the means to communicate at .

Current context-aware applications benefit from the user context (e.g. location information), however, they do not consider the quality of service (QoS) offered by various networks (i.e. only best-effort QoS is considered). The research discussed in this paper focuses on a QoS- and context-aware service infrastructure supporting the development of mobile applications in a heterogeneous network environment. We argue that the use of context information helps to better capture the user’s required QoS and improves the delivered QoS.

Telemedicine, which is defined as providing healthcare and sharing of medical knowledge over distance using telecommunication means, is a promising approach to improve and enhance the healthcare provisioning process. However, only recently, technology has evolved (i.e. miniaturization of high power mobile devices that can use high bandwidth mobile communication mechanisms) such that feasible advanced telemedicine applications can be developed. Current telemedicine systems offer proprietary solutions that are used in specific disease domains. For the acceptation, rapid development and introduction of novel and advanced telemedicine applications, there is a need for architectural mechanisms that supports developers in rapidly developing such telemedicine applications. The research discussed in this paper, focuses on the development of such mechanisms.

In this paper, an overview of the PhD thesis with the same name will be presented. After an introduction of the subject and aim of the thesis, a couple of research questions will be asked. A brief overview of the state of the art in the domain will be done and then some problems that arise with it will be considered. Although the monolingual problematic is quite general and recurrent in most ontologies design tools, this thesis will focus on the approach used in DOGMA Studio. Some new terms and acronyms will be introduced : ”onternationalization”, ”concepton” and IMMO. Finally, some work issues for the thesis will be sketched then some conclusions will come before ending this document with some considerations about further problems that will follow the research.

The huge number of available documents on the Web makes finding relevant ones a challenging task. The quality of results that traditional full-text search engines provide is still not optimal for many types of user queries. Especially the vagueness of natural languages, abstract concepts, semantic relations and temporal issues are handled inadequately by full-text search. Ontologies and semantic metadata can provide a solution for these problems. This work examines how ontologies can be optimally exploited during the information retrieval process, and proposes a general framework which is based on ontology-supported semantic metadata generation and ontology-based query expansion. The framework can handle imperfect ontologies and metadata by combining results of simple heuristics, instead of relying on a “perfect” ontology. This allows integrating results from traditional full-text engines, and thus supports a gradual transition from classical full-text search engines to ontology-based ones.

The WWW has become a huge repository of information. For almost any knowledge domain there may exist thousands of available sources and billions of data instances. Many of these sources may publish irrelevant data. User-preference approaches have been defined to retrieve relevant data based on similarity, relevance or preference criteria specified by the user. Although many declarative languages can express user-preferences, considering this information during query optimization and evaluation remains as open problem. SQLf, Top-k and Skyline are three extensions of SQL to specify user-preferences. The first two filter irrelevant answers following a score-based paradigm. On the other hand, the latter produces relevant non-dominated answers using an order-based paradigm. The main objective of our work is to propose a unified approach that combines paradigms based on order and score. We propose physical operators for SQLf considering Skyline and Top-k features. Properties of those will be considered during query optimization and evaluation. We describe a Hybrid-Naive operator for producing only answers in the Pareto Curve with best score values. We have conducted initial experimental studies to compare the Hybrid operator, Skyline and SQLf.

Nowadays, ontology is applied as an integral part of many applications in several domains, especially in the world of law. The ontology based judicial support system is believed as a useful tool to support, for example, the legal argumentation assistant and legal decision taking in court. The privacy case analyzer is considered as one of the most interesting applications of ontology based privacy judicial support systems. The efficiency of privacy case analyzers depend on several factors such as how to tackle the problem of linking cases to legislations, how to imply the guidance of privacy principles, and how to improve the extraction of cases. This paper addresses those items and describes the research issues that will be investigated challenges of ontology based judicial support systems.