KMi Seminars
Towards a Science of Software Design
This event took place on Tuesday 19 April 2005 at 11:00

 
Professor John Mylopoulos University of Toronto/Trento

In his classic book titled "The Science of the Artificial" (published in 1969) Herbert Simon laments the fact that design is not taught in Engineering Schools, which instead clamor for scientific respectability. He then sketches what he calls a "Science of Design" whose basic ingredients include a logic of alternatives and a means-ends analysis for selecting "good enough" designs.

We review some of the history of Software Engineering since 1968 and discuss some the underlying concepts of Structured and Object-Oriented Software Development. We then focus on Agent-Oriented Software Development and argue that, unlike its older cousins, it supports the fundamental concepts that underly Simon's vision of a Science of Design. We also sketch a particular Agent-Orinted Software Development methodology, called Tropos, and the kind of tool support that it entails.

The research reported in this presentation was conducted with colleagues at the Universities of Toronto (Canada) and Trento (Italy).

 
KMi Seminars Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

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.