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Tech Report kmi-99-11 Abstract


Creative designer: What & how? (Intelligent support for problem formalisation in engineering design)
Techreport ID: kmi-99-11
Date: 1999
Author(s): Martin Dzbor
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Engineering design is a kind of human activity that makes use of many different knowledge sources. Basically, this may be a well structured, explicit, and domain specific knowledge or tacit, implicit, and experience-based knowledge. Each type of knowledge has its particular role in design, and thus in knowledge-based design support systems. The aim of this document is to present a new view on the knowledge-based systems supporting design and designers especially in the early phases. Although the design support systems may be described and compared on many different levels, the knowledge-centred view in this document is emphasised by the three facets that describe the proposed approach: design knowledge representation, design process control, and analogous design cases retrieval and presentation.

Publication(s):

this is a revised and extended version of a paper that appeared at the 3rd IEEE Conference on Intelligent Engineering Systems, Slovakia, pp. 279-284
 
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Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...


Semantic Web and Knowledge Services
"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation" (Berners-Lee et al., 2001).

Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...

Our aim is to be at the forefront of both theoretical and practical developments on the Semantic Web not only by developing theories and models, but also by building concrete applications, for a variety of domains and user communities, including KMi and the Open University itself.