Showing all 235 Tech Reports linked to
LiteMap Outreach and Usage by Brazilian Universities
LiteMap is a cloud-based application for collaborative and individual knowledge mapping developed by the Knowledge Media Institute team led by Dr. Anna De Liddo in 2012. It was translated to Portuguese by the Colearn Community as part of the European ENGAGE project in Brazil in 2015. This report analyse data gathered from the COLEARN Community over two years - November 2015 to November 2017. It describes the range of users from Brazil who accessed LiteMap, their interests and expectations for...read more
Early Detection and Forecasting of Research Trends
Identifying and forecasting research trends is of critical importance for a variety of stakeholders, including researchers, academic publishers, institutional funding bodies, companies operating in the innovation space and others. Currently, this task is typically performed by domain experts, with the assistance of tools for exploring research data. The overall increase of research data in the past decade makes the use of automatic approaches more suitable for this purpose. However, automatic...read more
Extracting URI Patterns from SPARQL Endpoints
Understanding the structure of identifiers in a particular dataset is critical for users/applications that want to use such a dataset, and connect to it. This is especially true in Linked Data where, while benefiting from having the structure of URIs, identifiers are also designed according to specific conventions, which are rarely made explicit and documented. In this paper, we present an automatic method to extract such URI patterns which is based on adapting formal concept analysis...read more
ID: kmi-15-01
Date: 2015
Author(s): Mathieu d'Aquin,Alessandro Adamou,Enrico Daga,Nicolas Jay
Resources:
Describing semantic web applications through relations between data nodes
Semantic Web Applications can only be understood if the complex data flows they implement are clearly described. However, application developers have very little support at the moment for documenting such data flows and their rationale, in an appropriately formal and conceptual manner. In this paper, we propose to apply a knowledge engineering approach to the formal description of Semantic Web Applications. Following an ontology building methodology based on the analysis of several existing...read more
Cognition, ontologies and description logics
This report describes work undertaken and planned, the goal of which is to better understand how people comprehend and use complex ontologies, in particular those employing Description Logics (DLs). Two research questions are posed: 1. In what way can the difficulties experienced in using Description Logics be understood in terms of an underlying theory, e.g. theories of reasoning already developed within the cognitive psychology community? 2. In what way could such a theory contribute to...read more
Ontology patterns: a survey into their use
This report describes the results of a survey into the use of ontology patterns. Responses came from industry, research institutes and academia and covered a range of different application areas. The survey covered: pattern characteristics and sources; pattern usage; and pattern identification, creation and storage. Pattern size and domain specificity appear to be correlated. There was a significant rank correlation between specificity and number of classes in the pattern, and a close to...read more
Mining Research Publication Networks for Impact
The question of how to evaluate the quality of research publications is very difficult to answer and despite decades of research, there is still no standard solution to this problem. Particularly at present, with the amount of scholarly literature rapidly expanding, it might become very difficult and time consuming to recognise what is the key research that presents the most important contributions to science. Furthermore, this question is highly relevant not only to researchers, but also...read more
Learning Analytics for Epistemic Commitments in a Collaborative Information Seeking Environment
This report argues that information seeking – the searching, frequently conducted on search engines such as Google, in order to retrieve information for some needs – should be of interest to education. It further suggests that such interest should focus on information commitments, which are implicated in the ways that people find, and process, information. Building on literature researching collaboration in both education and information seeking research, I claim that Collaborative...read more
Epistemic Networks for Epistemic Commitments
The ways in which people seek and process information are fundamentally epistemic in nature. Existing epistemic cognition research has tended towards characterizing this fundamental relationship as cognitive or belief-based in nature. This paper builds on recent calls for a shift towards activity-oriented perspectives on epistemic cognition and proposes a new theory of ‘epistemic commitments’. An additional contribution of this paper comes from an analytic approach to this recast construct of...read more
ID: kmi-13-03
Date: 2013
Author(s): Simon Knight, Golnaz Arastoopour, David Williamson Shaffer, Simon Buckingham Shum, Karen Littleton
Resources:
On the Privacy Implications of Releasing Consumer-Activity Data
There is growing awareness among web users that online organisations are collecting vast amounts of information about them and their activities. With this awareness is an implicit expectation that such data, generally called consumer data, should also be made accessible to the users themselves, and for their own benefit. Generally, it is considered not only fair that such data is not kept locked and out of user's reach, but also that it would lead to greater transparency and accountability of...read more
Ontology Users' Survey - Summary of Results
This report describes initial findings from the Ontology Users’ Survey conducted in early 2013. The next six sections follow the structure of the survey, providing information about the respondents; their ontologies; their ontology tools; the ontology languages and language features they use; the use of ontology patterns; and their final general comments. These responses were obtained by using a number of contacts and relevant mailing lists. The latter included: - ontolog-forum...read more
Consumer Activity Data: Usages and Challenges
Interacting online with various organisations (eCommerce, employer, etc.) is nowadays unavoidable. There is a current trend both in academia and the industry taking as a starting point that such personal data is of value to the user, and that putting them out of his/her control might have problematic implications. A proposed solution here is to provide them with greater access to and control over personal data collected out of their interactions with an organisation. It is worth noticing that...read more
Sentiment Analysis of Microblogs
In the past years, we have witnessed an increased interest in microblogs as a hot research topic in the domain of sentiment analysis and opinion mining. Through platforms like Twitter and Facebook, millions of status updates and tweet messages, which reflect people’s opinions and attitudes, are created and sent every day. This has recently brought great potentials and created unlimited opportunities where companies can detect the level of satisfaction or intensity of complaints about certain...read more
The State of Learning Analytics in 2012: A Review and Future Challenges
Learning analytics is a significant area of technology‐enhanced learning that has emerged during the last decade. This review of the field begins with an examination of the technological, educational and political factors that have driven the development of analytics in educational settings. It goes on to chart the emergence of learning analytics, including their origins in the 20th century, the development of data-driven analytics, the rise of learning-focused perspectives and the...read more
An investigation into grassroots initiated networked communities as a means of addressing the digital divide
Despite two decades of government and commercial intervention, a digital divide persists in the UK. Access to internet connectivity and the associated tools and services that permit full participation in the information society greatly varies. Researchers argue that a more complex set of insufficiencies must be overcome and continually re-addressed to enable individuals and communities to make meaningful usage of the internet to enhance their activities. This thesis examines the discourse...read more
Making Representations Matter: Understanding Practitioner Experience in Participatory Sensemaking
Appropriating new technologies in order to foster collaboration and participatory engagement is a focus for many fields, but there is relatively little research on the experience of practitioners who do so. The role of technology-use mediators is to help make such technologies amenable and of value to the people who interact with them and each other. When the nature of the technology is to provide textual and visual representations of ideas and discussions, issues of form and shaping arise,...read more
Unsupervised data linking using a genetic algorithm
As commonly accepted identifiers for data instances in semantic datasets (such as ISBN codes or DOI identifiers) are often not available, discovering links between overlapping datasets on the Web is generally realised through the use of fuzzy similarity measures. Configuring such measures, i.e. deciding which similarity function to apply to which data properties with which parameters, is often a non-trivial task that depends on the domain, ontological schemas, and formatting conventions in...read more
Social Learning Analytics
We propose that the design and implementation of effective Social Learning Analytics presents significant challenges and opportunities for both research and enterprise, in three important respects. The first is the challenge of implementing analytics that have pedagogical and ethical integrity, in a context where power and control over data is now of primary importance. The second challenge is that the educational landscape is extraordinarily turbulent at present, in no small part due to...read more
Problem solving and mathematical knowledge
This report describes the research goals, and intermediate milestones related to an investigation of the relationship between problem solving and mathematical knowledge in an online mathematics community. The proposal is to build a problem-solving layer over the encyclopedia layer that comprises the central feature of the current PlanetMath.org. Research will proceed by examining the activities of people in this space (e.g. connecting, discussing, working, recording, sharing, learning,...read more
Bayesian Models for Sentence-Level Subjectivity Detection
This paper proposes subjLDA for sentence-level subjectivity detection by modifying the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model through adding an additional layer to model sentence-level subjectivity labels. A variant, called joint-subjLDA, has also been described. The model inference and parameter estimation algorithms, and Gibbs sampling procedure are presented.read more
On the Integration of Services with the Web of Data
Research on Semantic Web Services has pursued the automation of tasks on the Web by enriching Web services technologies with semantics. Thus far, however, Semantic Web Services have failed to gain a significant uptake due to a big extent to the complexity of the solutions proposed and the limited amount of high quality data and ontologies that were available until recently. In this report we explore the relationship between Semantic Web Services and the Web of Data. We identify the potential...read more
Open Services on the Web
The goal of the here described research is to explore the possibilities of combining Semantic Web technologies and fundamental Web principles, including URIs and HTTP, and to apply these on open services on the Web, in order to contribute to a Semantic Web, which is not only an extension of the current Web with more semantic descriptions of data but is rather more dynamic and seamlessly integrates services as sources of that data, which can be automatically discovered, composed and...read more
Modelling Scholarly Debate: Conceptual Foundations for Knowledge Domain Analysis Technology
Knowledge Domain Analysis (KDA) research investigates computational support for users who desire to understand and/or participate in the scholarly inquiry of a given academic knowledge domain. KDA technology supports this task by allowing users to identify important features of the knowledge domain such as the predominant research topics, the experts in the domain, and the most influential researchers. This thesis develops the conceptual foundations to integrate two identifiable strands of KDA...read more
Multi-Perspective Annotation of Digital Stories for Professional Knowledge Sharing within Health Care: Appendices
[We] dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate, and love by narrative. Barbara Hardy, 1977.
This technical report contains supplementary data and findings from PhD research*, summarised in the abstract as follows:
"This thesis investigates the potential of narrative theory to inform the design of tools for sharing and annotating stories, in the context of...read more
Multi-Perspective Annotation of Digital Stories for Professional Knowledge Sharing within Health Care
[We] dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate, and love by narrative. Barbara Hardy, 1977.
This thesis investigates the potential of narrative theory to inform the design of tools for sharing and annotating stories, in the context of professional knowledge sharing. We begin with a detailed review of the literature on modelling narrative, to establish the theoretical...read more
Concept learning - investigating the possibilities for a human-machine dialogue
Everyone around us learns. As a flower needs to adapt to the light, an animal to its environment, we people need to adjust to our complex social or personal conditions of life. Because of that we definitely learn during our entirely life. So, we could say that is better to start learning anytime. We could say that learning process is one of the most important parts of our existence. For examples teenagers are more likely to be receptive to the learning environment than older people. Then, what...read more
The Use of Ontologies for Improving Image Retrieval and Annotation
Nowadays, digital photography is a common technology for capturing and archiving images due to the falling price of storage devices and the wide availability of digital cameras. Without efficient retrieval methods the search of images in large collections is becoming a painstaking work. Most of the traditional image search engines rely on keyword-based annotations because they lack the ability to examine image content. However, “a picture is worth a thousand words”, this means that up to a...read more
A Process Memory Platform to Support Participatory Planning and Deliberation
The communicative turn in planning theory argues that knowledge in planning is a social construction, emphasizing that knowledge is built in social contexts, by a plurality of actors, through their interactions. This new understanding of knowledge is built around the need of plurality of reasons and voices to inform and legitimate planning actions. However this knowledge is often difficult to capture and integrate within the wider knowledge base that planners generate in the planning process....read more
Semantic Enrichment of Folksonomies
The goal of this research is to explore the potential of combining the heterogeneous technologies of Semantic Web and Web2.0 in order to contribute to an open and intelligent World Wide Web. This document is the second year research report of this PhD study on integrating Web2.0 and the Semantic Web.read more
Probabilistic Methods for Data Integration in a Multi-Agent Query Answering System
This report describes the progress that has been achieved during the second year (full time equivalent 1 July 2006 - 1 July 2008) of our Ph.D. research. All the work has been built upon the achievements of the first year and confirmed that the original research objectives were correctly identified at the beginning of the research. We have successfully participated in the Ontology Mapping Evaluation Initiative 2006 and 2007 (2008 ongoing activity), which provided a qualitative...read more
Evolva: Towards Automatic Ontology Evolution
Ontologies form the core of Semantic Web systems, and as such, they need to evolve to meet the changing needs of the system and its users. Information is exponentially increasing in organizations' intranets as well as on the web, especially with the increased popularity of tools facilitating content generation such as wikis, blogs and social software. In such dynamic environments, evolving ontologies should be agile, i.e. with the least knowledge experts' input, for reflecting fast changes...read more
Modelling social context to improve online multimedia search
As the cost of production, storage and dissemination has plummeted for images, audio and video, challenges have arisen regarding how to most e?ectively handle this wealth of information. Digital recording devices have become cheaper, more widely available and are able to recording in better quality than ever before. Media representation has given us lossy and lossless file formats suitable for many different situations, from satellite broadcast to mobile streaming, each with their unique...read more
Designing the Ontological Foundations for Knowledge Domain Analysis Technology: An Interim Report
Research into tools to support both quantitative and qualitative analysis of specialist knowledge domains has been undertaken within the two broadly independent traditions of Bibliometrics and Knowledge Management. The ‘knowledge domain analysis’ (KDA) tools within the first tradition follow a citation-based approach to representing knowledge domains and use citation links as the basis for identifying patterns in the relationships among authors and publications. KDA tools within the second,...read more
ID: kmi-08-02
Date: 2008
Author(s): Neil Benn, Simon Buckingham Shum, John Domingue, Clara Mancini
Resources: From Aristotle to Gabriel: A Summary of the Narratology Literature for Story Technologies
This purpose of this report is to provide a practical guide for story technologists. The report is organised in two parts. In the first part we explore, more or less chronologically, past and contemporary story models and in the second part we look at more recent theories and implementations examined in a story-making context.
In recent years there has been resurgence of interest in the both the medium and message of the story. However, we shall confine our discussion to...read more
Multi-Perspective Annotation of Digital Stories for Professional Knowledge Sharing within Health Care: Appendices
This report presents the data appendices analysed in the Doctoral Dissertation "Multi-Perspective Annotation of Digital Stories for Professional Knowledge Sharing within Health Care". Submitted to the Open University Dec. 2007, Revised March 2009.read more
State of the art on Semantic Question Answering
We analyze the contributions, challenges and dimensions of question answering on the Semantic Web by looking at the state of the art on semantic question answering systems, and the implications in traditional methods on ontology selection, mapping and semantic similarity measures to balance the heterogeneity and large scale semantic data with run time performanceread more
ID: kmi-07-03
Date: 2007
Author(s): Vanessa Lopez, Enrico Motta, Victoria Uren, Marta Sabou
Resources: The Open University at TREC 2006 Enterprise Track Expert Search Task
The Multimedia and Information Systems group at the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University par-ticipated in the Expert Search task of the Enterprise Track in TREC 2006. We have proposed to address three main innovative points in a two-stage language model, which consists of a document relevance model and a co-occurrence model, in order to improve the performance of expert search. The three innovative points are based on characteristics of documents. First, document authority in terms...read more
ID: kmi-07-02
Date: 2007
Author(s): Jianhan Zhu, Dawei Song, Stefan Rüger, Marc Eisenstadt, Enrico Motta
Resources: Symmetrical support in FlashMeeting: a naturalistic study of live online peer-to-peer learning via software videoconferencing
This paper reports on a naturalistic study of peer-to-peer learning, in a live, online-video meeting context. Over a 6-month period a group of international students of animation attended 99 live, online study group events amounting to around 120 hours of live broadcast meeting time. Some meetings were very large, with up to 34 participants, but the average participation was 10 students. These events were entirely self-organized, policed and managed by the student community. Some students...read more
Visualising Discourse Coherence in Non-Linear Documents
To produce coherent linear documents, Natural Language Generation systems have traditionally exploited the structuring role of textual discourse markers such as relational and referential phrases. These coherence markers of the traditional notion of text, however, do not work in non-linear documents: a new set of graphical devices is needed together with formation rules to govern their usage, supported by sound theoretical frameworks. If in linear documents graphical devices such as layout and...read more
User Interaction and Uptake Challenges to Successfully Deploying Semantic Web Technologies
The Semantic Web community could benefit greatly from 'eating its own dog food' in order to better understand the challenges and opportunities of a Semantic Web from the user perspective. In this paper we describe the deployment of Semantic Web applications and services at the 3rd European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC2006), before presenting results of an evaluation into how these technologies were experienced by delegates. Based on themes identified in the evaluation we highlight seven user...read more
Relation Extraction for Semantic Intranet Annotations
We present an approach for ontology driven extraction of relations from texts aimed mainly to produce enriched semantic annotations for the Semantic Web. The approach exploits linguistic and empirical strategies, by means of a pipeline method involving processes such as a parser, part-of-speech tagger, named entity recognition system, and pattern-based classification, and resources including ontology, knowledge and lexical databases. A preliminary evaluation with 25 sentences showed that the...read more
Sensemaking on the Pragmatic Web: A Hypermedia Discourse Perspective
Abstract: The complexity of the dilemmas we face on an organizational, societal and global scale forces us into sensemaking activity. We need tools for expressing and contesting perspectives flexible enough for real time use in meetings, structured enough to help manage longer term memory, and powerful enough to filter the complexity of extended deliberation and debate on an organizational or global scale. This has been the motivation for a programme of basic and applied action research into...read more
ERA (Enabling Remote Activity): A KMi designed system to support remote participation by mobility disabled students in geology field trips
This paper describes the design and initial field testing of the ERA (Enabling Remote Activity) system - a mobile wireless network devised by the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) to support participation by mobility impaired students in geology fieldwork trips. We describe our approach and its relevance in educational and network research. We describe the set of tools implemented to facilitate remote learning, report on trial tests and lessons learnt. Finally we suggest future possible...read more
Modelling Discourse in Contested Domains: A Semiotic and Cognitive Framework
This paper examines the representational requirements for interactive, collaborative systems intended to support sensemaking and argumentation over contested issues. We argue that a perspective supported by semiotic and cognitively oriented discourse analyses offers both theoretical insights and motivates representational requirements for the semantics of tools for contesting meaning. We introduce our semiotic approach, highlighting its implications for discourse representation, before...read more
A Document-Centric Semantic Annotation Environment to Support Sense-Making
Prototype Internet infrastructures for scholarly publishing are offering powerful new services over the interconnected ideas and arguments in a literature. However, such services depend on documents being semantically annotated with readers' interpretations, which up until now has been a manual process due to the complexity of such analysis. This thesis investigates the challenge of designing computer-support for document annotation in the context of potentially diverse, contested views about a...read more
Fusing automatically extracted annotations for the Semantic Web
One of the necessary preconditions of the Semantic Web initiative is the availability of semantic data. The Web already contains large amounts of information intended for human users. This information is mainly stored as hypertext, which must be semantically annotated to make it accessible for software agents. The amount of information on the Web makes it impossible to solve the annotation task manually. Therefore the use of automatic information extraction algorithms is essential. These...read more
SemSearch: A Search Engine for the Semantic Web
Semantic search promises to produce precise answers to user queries by taking advantage of the availability of explicit semantics of information in the context of the semantic web. Existing tools have been primarily designed to enhance the performance of traditional search technologies but with little support for naive users, i.e., ordinary end users who are not necessarily familiar with domain specific semantic data, ontologies, or SQL-like query languages. This paper presents SemSearch, a...read more
Knowledge work in nursing and midwifery: an evaluation through computer mediated communication
Recent changes in policy and culture require health workers to incorporate ??knowledge work?? as a routine component of professional practice. Innovative computer-mediated communication technologies provide the opportunity to evaluate the nature of ??knowledge work?? within nursing and midwifery. This study embedded an online discussion system into an acute NHS Trust to support interaction within communities of practice. The complete record of online communications was analysed. Nurses were...read more
LRD: Latent Relation Discovery for Vector Space Expansion and Information Retrieval
In this paper, we propose a text mining method called LRD (latent relation discovery), which extends the traditional vector space model of document representation in order to improve information retrieval (IR) on documents and document clustering. Our LRD method extracts terms and entities, such as person, organization, or project names, and discovers relationships between them by taking into account their co-occurrence in textual corpora. Given a target entity, LRD discovers other entities...read more
ID: kmi-06-09
Date: 2006
Author(s): Alexandre Gonçalves, Jianhan Zhu, Dawei Song, Victoria Uren, Roberto Pacheco
Resources: Probabilistic Methods for Data Integration in a Multi-Agent Query Answering System
This report describes a proposal for a multi agent ontology-mapping framework that makes use of probabilistic information in order to enhance the correctness of the mapping. The proposed research focuses on two correlated areas namely similarity measures with its representation as a Dempster-Shafer belief function and usability of different optimalisation methods for combining these belief functions in a distributed environment. The main goal of our proposed research is to establish a multi...read more
Co-OPR: Design and Evaluation of Collaborative Sensemaking and Planning Tools for Personnel Recovery
Personnel recovery teams must operate under intense pressure, taking into account not only hard logistics, but 'messy' factors such as the social or political implications of a decision. The Collaborative Operations for Personnel Recovery (Co-OPR) project has developed decision-support for sensemaking in such scenarios, seeking to exploit the complementary strengths of human and machine reasoning. Co-OPR integrates the Compendium sensemaking-support tool for real time information and...read more
ID: KMI-06-07
Date: 2006
Author(s): Austin Tate, Simon Buckingham Shum, Jeff Dalton, Clara Mancini, Albert Selvin
Resources: Memetic: An Infrastructure for Meeting Memory
This paper introduces the Memetic toolkit for recording the normally ephemeral interactions conducted via internet video conferencing, and making these navigable and manipulable in linear and non-linear ways. We introduce two complementary interaction visualizations: argumentation-based concept maps to elucidate the conceptual structure of the discourse using a visual language, and interactive event timelines generated from the meeting metadata. We discuss in detail the affordances of Memetics...read more
ID: KMI-06-02
Date: 2006
Author(s): Simon Buckingham Shum, Roger Slack, Michael Daw, Ben Juby, Andrew Rowley, Michelle Bachler, Clara Mancini, Danius Michaelides, Rob Procter, David De Roure, Tim Chown, Terry Hewitt
Resources: Exploiting Semantic Association To Answer Vague Queries
Although today's web search engines are very powerful, they still fail to provide intuitively relevant results for many types of queries, especially ones that are vaguely-formed in the user's own mind. We argue that associations between terms in a search query can reveal the underlying information needs in the users' mind and should be taken into account in search. We propose a multi-faceted approach to detect and exploit such associations. The CORDER method measures the association strength...read more
ID: KMI-06-01
Date: 2006
Author(s): Jianhan Zhu, Marc Eisenstadt, Dawei Song, Chris Denham
Resources: Hypermedia Support for Argumentation-Based Rationale: 15 Years on from gIBIS and QOC
Having developed, used and evaluated some of the early IBIS-based approaches to design rationale (DR) such as gIBIS and QOC in the late 1980s/mid-1990s, we describe the subsequent evolution of the argumentation-based paradigm through software support, and per-spectives drawn from modeling and meeting facilitation. Particular attention is given to the challenge of negotiating the overheads of capturing this form of rationale. Our approach has maintained a strong emphasis on keeping the...read more
ID: kmi-05-18
Date: 2005
Author(s): Simon J. Buckingham Shum, Albert M. Selvin, Maarten Sierhuis, Jeffrey Conklin, Charles B. Haley, Bashar Nuseibeh
Resources: Aesthetic and Ethical Implications of Participatory Hypermedia Practice
This report summarizes my first year of doctoral study at KMi and presents a proposal for the remaining work leading up to the dissertation. My research concerns expert human performance in helping people construct representations of difficult problems a practice I refer to as participatory hypermedia construction (PHC). I am particularly interested in what happens when practitioners encounter sensemaking moments, when they must improvise in order to move forward, and in the aesthetics and...read more
Extracting Domain Ontologies with CORDER
The CORDER web mining engine developed at the Knowledge Media Institute computes a lexical coocurrence network out of websites - a binary relation R. A natural extension of CORDER would be that of learning an ontology. However, our work shows that coocurrence proves insufficient to discover concepts and conceptual taxonomies (i.e. very simple ontologies) out of this network. To tackle this problem two unsupervised learning methods were studied based, on the one hand, on set similarity (and thus...read more
BuddyFinder-CORDER: Leveraging Social Networks for Matchmaking by Opportunistic Discovery
Online social networking tools are extremely popular, but can miss potential discoveries latent in the social 'fabric'. Matchmaking services can do naive profile matching with old database technology, and modern ontological markup, though powerful, can be onerous at data-input time. In this paper, we present a system called BuddyFinder-CORDER which can automatically produce a ranked list of buddies to match a user's search requirements specified in a term-based query, even in the absence of...read more
ID: kmi-05-13
Date: 2005
Author(s): Jianhan Zhu, Marc Eisenstadt, Alexandre Goncalves, Chris Denham
Resources: An Ontological Formalization of the Planning Task
In this report we propose a generic task ontology, which formalizes the space of planning problems. Although planning is one of the oldest researched areas in Artificial Intelligence and attempts have been made in the past at developing task ontologies for planning, these formalizations suffer from serious limitations: they do not exhibit the required level of formalization and precision and they usually fail to include some of the key concepts required for specifying planning problems. In...read more
A Generic Library of Problem Solving Methods for Scheduling Applications
In this report we propose a generic library of problem-solving methods for solving scheduling applications. Some attempts have been made in the past at developing a library scheduling problem-solvers but in some cases these earlier proposals subscribe to a specific application domain of scheduling, which restricted their reusability, while in some other cases they subscribe to the specific problem-solving technique which may be applicable only to a subset of the space of scheduling problems....read more
ID: kmi-05-11
Date: 2005
Author(s): Dnyanesh Rajpathak, Enrico Motta, Zdenek Zdrahal, and Rajkumar Roy
Resources: The Modelling, Capture, and Use of Social Context in Online Tasks
This report consists of three parts. Part I reviews how users online tasks have been conceptualised in previous literature, and how researchers have defined and used context in support of user tasks. Novel conceptualisations of user tasks online and user context factors are then presented and contrasted with earlier work, before a discussion of how these context factors have been supported in previous applications. The modelling of social context is then considered in greater detail, with...read more
Sensemaking Tools for Understanding Research Literatures: Design, Implementation and User Evaluation
This paper describes the work undertaken in the Scholarly Ontologies Project. The aim of the project has been to develop a computational approach to support scholarly sensemaking, through interpretation and argumentation, enabling researchers to make claims: to describe and debate their view of a document's key contributions and relationships to the literature. The project has investigated the technicalities and practicalities of capturing conceptual relations, within and between conventional...read more
ID: kmi-05-09
Date: 2005
Author(s): Victoria Uren, Simon Buckingham Shum, Michelle Bachler, Gangmin Li
Resources: Hypermedia as a Productivity Tool for Doctoral Research
This technical note illustrates a number of uses of a hypermedia tool that serve various dimensions of individual PhD study, such as organizing notes, generating literature reviews, performing experiments, analyzing results, publishing and presenting materials, and collaborating with supervisors and colleagues.read more
Semantic Learning Narratives: An Investigation of the Usage of Semantic Web Technologies to Support Learning
This report is about the intersections between narrative hypermedia and semantic web technologies for eLearning. Although various research has enhanced the hypermedia field by making use of semantic web technologies, there is little work in order to pitch this approach to an educational perspective. Actual eLearning technologies, focusing on the definition and re-use of learning objects (LO), often sacrifice the expressiveness of the metadata descriptors to the reusability of a resource. This...read more
A Complete Axiomatisation of Observation Congruence for Deterministic Time under Maximal Progress
This report presents a process calculus CaSE, derived from CCS by extension with transitions, labelled in multiple abstract clocks, that are both deterministic and governed by maximal progress. Two open problems in the literature have prevented a complete axiomatisation of the coarsest congruence within weak bisimulation in such a system. The main result contained here is the proof of soundness and completeness of an axiom system with respect to this congruence.read more
Integrating Scholarly Argumentation, Texts and Community: Towards an Ontology and Services
Abstract - This paper reports work in progress on an ontology-based approach to modelling the argumentative discourse, texts and community in an academic domain in order to support semantic browsing and search. We describe how diverse research into these aspects can be integrated in an ontology, and step through an example of the kind of service that can be provided given such an integrated model of a research field. We also begin to explore mechanisms for enriching the ontology with the...read more
Experiences of Two Task Driven User Studies of Hypermedia Information Systems
We present two small scale user studies of hypermedia information systems: a hypermedia discourse system designed as an environment for researchers to summarize and share key ideas from research papers as a claim network, and a web browser plug-in which annotates terms related to a selected ontology on the fly. The first study investigated whether a claim network created by one user could help others learn about a domain. The second study investigated whether information extraction techniques...read more
ID: kmi-05-04
Date: 2005
Author(s): Victoria Uren, Philipp Cimiano, Simon Buckingham Shum, Enrico Motta
Resources: Ontology Mapping with domain specific agents in the AQUA Question Answering system
This paper describes a domain specific multi-agent ontology-mapping solution in the AQUA query answering system. In order to incorporate uncertainty inherent to the mapping process, the system uses the Dempster-Shafer model for dealing with incomplete and uncertain information produced during the mapping. A novel approach is presented how specialized agents with partial local knowledge of the particular domain achieve ontology mapping without creating global or reference ontology. Our approach...read more
Text Mining Methods for Event Recognition in Stories
Navigating an online story collection requires a system which can make connections between the stories and their elements. One known way of accomplishing this is by annotating the stories, which can be a costly process. Finding methods for providing computer support for this process is a tactic for bringing the cost down. This paper describes several experiments which tested a variety of text mining methods for viability in accurately assisting the classification and annotation of stories in a...read more
Heroic failures in disseminating novel e-learning technologies to corporate clients: a case study of interactive webcasting
In principle, it should be easier to disseminate novel learning concepts based in technology enhanced learning to companies. Unfortunately, many corporations seem to be extremely risk averse, and the challenges inherent in the new models seem to be very hard for them to accept. This paper uses the deployment of interactive webcasting systems to present a series of case studies of dissemination successes and failures. We will suggest that the key to successful deployment is in making critical...read more
Towards 'Cinematic' Hypertext
This paper proposes the paradigm of 'Cinematic' Hypertext (CH), in which discourse form is represented following principles that underpin the expression of narrative patterns in cinema. Primarily tackling hypertext discourse coherence in the non-linear medium, CH is conceived as a way of thinking the hypertext medium that is consistent with its characteristics. CH envisages the consistent and concurrent use of the medium's formal features, grounded in structuring principles, in order to allow...read more
Adaptive Named Entity Recognition for Social Network Analysis and Domain Ontology Maintenance
We present a system which unearths relationships between named entities from information in Web pages. We use an adaptive named entity recognition system, ESpotter, which recognizes entities of various types with high precision and recall from various domains on the Web, to generate entity data such as peoples' names. Given an entity, we apply a link analysis algorithm to the entity data for finding other entities which are closely related to it. We present our results to people whose names had...read more
ClaimSpotter: an Environment to Support Sensemaking with Knowledge Triples
Annotating a document with an interpretation of its contents raises a number of challenges that we are hoping to address via the creation of a supporting environment. We present these challenges and motivate an approach based on the notion of suggestions to support document annotation, hoping these suggestions would act as leads to follow for annotators, therefore reducing some of the difficulties inherent to the task. The environment resulting from this approach, ClaimSpotter, is presented....read more
Modelling Naturalistic Argumentation in Research Literatures: Representation and Interaction Design Issues
This paper characterises key weaknesses in the ability of current digital libraries to support scholarly inquiry, and as a way to address these, proposes computational services grounded in semiformal models of the naturalistic argumentation commonly found in research lteratures. It is argued that a design priority is to balance formal expressiveness with usability, making it critical to co-evolve the modelling scheme with appropriate user interfaces for argument construction and analysis. We...read more
ID: kmi-04-28
Date: 2004
Author(s): Simon J. Buckingham Shum, Victoria Uren, Gangmin Li, Bertrand Sereno, Clara Mancini
Resources: Date: 2004
Author(s): Peter Scott
Resources: From Buddyspace to CitiTag: Large-scale Symbolic Presence for Community Building and Spontaneous Play
In this paper we discuss the conceptual framework and principles that guide our work in the design of large-scale informal environments for collaborative work, learning and play, aiming to foster social bonds and to provide an exciting testbed for emergent social behaviours. We present three different applications we have developed: Buddyspace, an Instant Messaging environment for community building, BumperCars, an online presence-based multiplayer game and CitiTag, an experimental wireless...read more
ID: kmi-04-25
Date: 2004
Author(s): Yanna Vogiazou, Marc Eisenstadt, Martin Dzbor and Jiri Komzak
Resources: Urban space as a large-scale group playground
In this paper, I describe CitiTag, a research project aiming to explore the potential of spontaneous social behaviour and playful group interaction in public spaces through the use of mobile technologies. I discuss briefly the idea and motivating themes, the design of CitiTag, a wireless location based multiplayer game and findings from two user studies.read more
Designing Multiplayer Games to Facilitate Emergent Social Behaviours Online
This paper discusses an exploratory case study of the design of games that facilitate spontaneous social interaction and group behaviours among distributed individuals, based largely on symbolic presence state changes. We present the principles guiding the design of our game environment: presence as a symbolic phenomenon, the importance of good visualization and the potential for spontaneous self-organization among groups of people. Our game environment, comprising a family of multiplayer...read more
Play based on Presence Awareness: Facilitating Emergent Social Behaviours Online
In this paper, we present our underlying principles for the design of technology mediated social experiences based on the presence awareness of large numbers of people. We describe our environment for spontaneous play and recreational activities online, which aims to enhance group interaction and we discuss preliminary findings from three online multiplayer game experiments.read more
Healthcare Compunetics: An End-to-End Architecture for Self-Care Service Provision
Extending healthcare to the community introduces a number of new challenges for the development of information technology infrastructures. A core component of the new self-care infrastructures will be wearable or implantable sensors and actuators that monitor vital signs and take proactive actions to respond to observed clinical conditions. In this paper, we introduce the three core elements of the Healthcare Compunetics architecture developed with a view to support the new self-care services:...read more
AQUA: A Question Answering System for Heterogeneous Sources
This paper describes AQUA our question answering over the Web. AQUA was designed to work over heterogeneous sources. This means that AQUA is equipped to work as closed domain and in addition to open-domain question answering. As a first instance, AQUA tries to answer a question using a Knowledge base. If a query cannot be satisfied over a knowledge base/database. Then, AQUA tries to find an answer on web pages (i.e. it uses as corpus the internet as resource). Our system uses NLP (Natural...read more
Ontosophie: A Semi-Automatic System for Ontology Population from Text
This paper describes a system for semi-automatic population of ontologies with instances from unstructured text. It is based on supervised learning, learns extraction rules from annotated text and then applies those rules on new articles for ontology population. Therefore, the system classifies stories and populates a hand-crafted ontology with new instances of classes defined in it. It is based on three components: Marmot - a natural language processor; Crystal - a dictionary induction tool;...read more
Semi-Automatic Population of Ontologies from Text
This paper describes a system for semi-automatic population of ontologies with instances from unstructured text. The system is based on supervised learning and therefore learns extraction rules from annotated text and then applies those rules on newly documents for ontology population. It is based on three componentes: Marmot, a natural language processor; Crystal, a dictionary induction tool; and Badger, an information extraction tool. The important part of the entire cycle is a user who...read more
A Knowledge-Based Approach to Ontologies Data Integration
This paper describes a proposal of multiple ontology data integration system for a question answering framework called AQUA. We propose an approach for mediating between a given query and a set of resources. This method is based on a Meta-ontology (which contains contents of each individual sources) and our similarity algorithm based on analysis of neighborhood of classes. We argue that AQUA can perform mappings between queries and an ontological space by using a mediator agent based on a...read more
An Ontology-Driven Similarity Algorithm
This paper presents our similarity algorithm between relations in a user query written in FOL (first order logic) and ontological relations. Our similarity algorithm takes two graphs and produces a mapping between elements of the two graphs (i.e. graphs associated to the query, a subsection of ontology relevant to the query). The algorithm assesses structural similarity and concept similarity. An evaluation of our algorithm using the KMi Planet ontology is presented. We also carried out an...read more
AQUA: A Knowledge-Based Architecture for a Question Answering System
This paper describes AQUA, a question answering system. AQUA combines Natural Language processing (NLP), Ontologies, Logic, and Information Retrieval technologies in a uniform framework. AQUA makes intensive use of an ontology (which encodes knowledge) in several parts of the question answering system. The ontology is used in the refinement of the initial query, the reasoning process (a generalization/specialization process using classes and subclasses from the ontology), and in the novel...read more
Event Recognition on News Stories and Semi-Automatic Population of an Ontology
This paper describes a system which recognizes events on news stories. Our system classifies stories and populates a hand-crafted ontology with new instances of classes defined in it. Currently, our system recognizes events which can be classified as belonging to a single category and it also recognizes overlapping events within one article (more than one event is recognized). In each case, the system provides a confidence value associated to the suggested classification. Our system uses...read more
Document retrieval based on intelligent query formulation
This paper presents a proposal for an open domain question answering coupled with ontological integrated space. It uses Latent Semantic Indexing (LSA) in conjunction with ontologies and First order Logic (FOL) to locate relevant documents to a query in a collection of documents. The main strength of the suggested approach relies in the use of contextual information, embedded in an integrated ontological space, to perform intelligent document retrieval.read more
ESpotter: Adaptive Named Entity Recognition for Web Browsing
Web users are facing information overload problems, i.e., it is hard for them to find desired information on the web. Hence the growing interest in named entity recognition (NER) for discovering relevant information on users behalf. We present a browser plug-in called ESpotter which adapts lexicons and patterns to a domain hierarchy consisting of domains on the web and user preferences for accurate and efficient NER. Mappings are created from domain independent types to domain...read more
Semi-Automatic Construction of Ontologies from Text
The Master's Thesis deals with semi-automatic construction of ontologies from text. While the core of the thesis was to develop an integrated system for ontology population with instances extracted from text, it also discusses and analyzes two major existing approaches in this area. The system is based on supervised learning and therefore learns extraction rules from annotated text and then applies those rules on new documents for the extraction. The important part of the entire cycle of...read more
ID: kmi-04-11
Date: 2004
Author(s): David Celjuska
Supervisors: Maria Vargas-Vera, Jan Paralic
Modelling Agents Behaviour in Automated Negotiation
This paper presents a learning mechanism that applies nonlinear regression analysis to model a negotiation agents behaviour based only on the opponent's previous offers. The behaviour of negotiation agents in this study is determined by their tactics in the form of decision functions. Heuristics based on estimates of an agents tactics are drawn from a series of experiments. By applying the nonlinear regression and the obtained heuristic knowledge, an agent can improve their overall...read more
Assisted Electronic Communication in Nursing
This Assisted Electronic Communication research project explored the potential of information technologies to change communication behaviours and facilitate improvements in health care practice and service delivery. A central concern of this work has been the impact of new technology on communication processes and structures within the nursing professions. To explore this issue, we created, administered and evaluated a core document discussion space system supported by the deployment of a...read more
ID: kmi-04-09
Date: 2004
Author(s): Peter Scott, Fiona Brooks, Kevin Quick, Maria Macintyre, Christine Rospopa
Resources: Indexing Student Essays Paragraphs Using LSA Over an Integrated Ontological Space
A full understanding of text is out of reach of current human language technology. However, a shallow Natural Language Processing (NLP) approach can be used to provide automated help in the evaluation of essays. The main idea of this paper is that Latent Semantic Indexing (LSA) can be used in conjunction with ontologies and First order Logic (FOL) to locate segments relevant to a question in a student essay. Our test bed, in a first instance, is a set of ontologies such the AKT reference...read more
CitiTag Multiplayer Infrastructure
This report gives a technical overview of the program logic and the architecture for the CitiTag game, a wireless location based game, developed by the Knowledge Media Institute's Centre for New Media in collaboration with HP Labs' Mobile Bristol team. CitiTag is a real-time multiplayer team game, played outdoors using GPS (Global Positioning System) and handheld, PocketPCs connected to a wireless network. CitiTag aims to encourage social experiences and group play in public spaces, based on...read more
Towards Cinematic Hypertext: a Theoretical and Empirical Investigation
Hypertext's non-linearity has critical implications for scholarly discourse and argumentation, where it is commonly considered important to control the reader's exposure to the line of reasoning in order to communicate complex ideas and maximise rhetorical impact. Hypertext's non-linearity has been seen to threaten authors' control over discourse order and the coherence of their argumentative discourse. Existing hypertext paradigms offer different solutions to the problem of preserving...read more
Ontology-driven Question Answering in AquaLog
The semantic web vision is one in which rich, ontology-based semantic markup is widely available, both to enable sophisticated interoperability among agents and to support human web users in locating and making sense of informa-tion. The availability of semantic markup on the web also opens the way to novel, sophisticated forms of question answering. AquaLog is a portable question-answering system which takes queries expressed in natural language and an ontol-ogy as input and...read more
Semantic Learning Webs
If current research is successful there will be a plethora of e-learning platforms making use of a varied menu of reusable educational material or learning objects. For the learner, the semanticized Web will, in addition, offer rich seams of diverse learning resources over and above the course materials (or learning objects) specified by course designers. This much is already in development. But we can go much further. Semantic technologies make it possible not only to reason about the Web as...read more
'You got tagged!': the city as a playground
This paper introduces CitiTag, a collaborative project focused on social experiences and group play in public spaces, based on the awareness of other peoples' presence, through the use of mobile technology. Cititag is a wireless location based multiplayer game inspired by the concept of playground 'tag' and motivated by the hypothesis that simple rules based on presence states can result in an enjoyable and variable social experience, stimulated by real world interaction among players and group...read more
ID: kmi-04-03
Date: 2004
Author(s): Yanna Vogiazou, Bas Raijmakers, Ben Clayton, Marc Eisenstadt, Erik Geelhoed, Jon Linney, Kevin Quick, Josephine Reid, Peter Scott
Resources: Nootropia: a Self-Organising Agent for Adaptive Document Filtering
This paper presents Nootropia, a self-organising information agent, capable of evaluating documents according to a user's multiple and changing interests. In Nootropia, a hierarchical term network that takes into account term dependencies is used to represent a user's multiple topics of interest. Non-linear document evaluation is established on that network based on a directed spreading activation model. We then introduce a process for adjusting the network in response to changes in user...read more
ID: kmi-04-02
Date: 2004
Author(s): Nikolaos Nanas, Victoria Uren, Anne de Roeck, John Domingue
Resources: Semantic Annotation Support in the Absence of Consensus
We are interested in the annotation of knowledge which does not necessarily require a consensus. Scholarly debate is an example of such a category of knowledge where disagreement and contest are widespread and desirable, and unlike many Semantic Web approaches, we are interested in the capture and the compilation of these conflicting viewpoints and perspectives. The Scholarly Ontologies project provides the underlying formalism to represent this meta-knowledge, and we will look at ways to...read more
ID: kmi-04-01
Date: 2004
Author(s): Bertrand Sereno, Victoria Uren, Simon Buckingham Shum, Enrico Motta
Resources: Buddyspace: Large-Scale Presence for Communities at Work and Play
Presence awareness' of peer-group members can enhance the emotional well-being of isolated learners and create a sense of community, fostering group communication and interaction. This paper presents our research framework in the design of presence-based applications for collaborative, learning and social environments and investigates the design of innovative playful and group learning activities for large numbers of people, based primarily on their mere presence. To promote the deployment of...read more
ID: kmi-03-14
Date: 2003
Author(s): Yanna Vogiazou, Martin Dzbor, Jiri Komzak and Marc Eisenstadt
Resources: Presence Based Play Towards a Design for Large Group Social Interaction
This poster addresses the fundamental research questions that guide our first steps in the design of innovative playful activities for large numbers of people, based primarily on their mere presence. Our research framework draws upon the areas of multiplayer games, instant messaging, social psychology and group behaviour. We introduce the concept of 'presence based play' to describe the way social interaction based on the simultaneous presence of many people can be enhanced as a meaningful and...read more
Semantic Services in e-Learning: an Argumentation Case Study
This paper outlines an e-Learning services architecture offering semantic-based services to students and tutors, in particular ways to browse and obtain information through web services. Services could include registration, authentication, tutoring systems, smart question answering for students' queries, automated marking systems and a student essay service. These services - which might be added incrementally to the portal - could be integrated with various ontologies such as ontologies of...read more
Ontology-driven Event Recognition on Stories
This paper describes a system which recognizes events on stories. Our system classifies stories and populates a KMi Planet ontology with new instances of classes defined in it. Currently, the system recognizes events which can be classified as belonging to a single category and it also recognizes overlapping events (more than one event is recognized in the story). In each case, the system provides a confidence value associated to the suggested classification. In our event recognition system we...read more
Event Recognition using Information Extraction Techniques
This paper describes a system which recognizes events on stories. Our system classifies stories and populates a KMi Planet ontology with new instances of classes defined in it. Currently, the system recognizes events which can be classified as belonging to a single category and it also recognizes overlapping events (more than one event is recognized in the story). In each case, the system provides a confidence value associated to the suggested classification. In our event recognition system we...read more
MnM: A Tool for Automatic Support on Semantic Markup
An important precondition for realizing the goal of a semantic web is the ability to annotate web resources with semantic information. In order to carry out this task, users need appropriate representation languages, ontologies, and support tools. In this paper we present MnM, an annotation tool which provides both automated and semi-automated support for annotating web pages with semantic contents. MnM integrates a web browser with an ontology editor and provides open APIs to link to ontology...read more
ID: kmi-03-09
Date: 2003
Author(s): Maria Vargas-Vera, Enrico Motta, John Domingue, Mattia Lanzoni, Arthur Stutt, Fabio Ciravegna
Resources: A Question-Answering System Using Argumentation
This paper presents a novel approach to question answering: the use of argumentation techniques. Our question answering system deals with argumentation in student essays: it sees an essay as an answer to a question and gauges its quality on the basis of the argumentation found in it. Thus, the system looks for expected types of argumentation in essays (i.e. the expectation is that the kind of argumentation in an essay is correlated to the type of question). Another key feature of our work is...read more
AQUA - Ontology-based Question Answering System
This paper describes AQUA, an experimental question answering system. AQUA combines Natural Language processing (NLP), Ontologies, Logic, and Information Retrieval technologies in a uniform framework. AQUA makes intensive use of an ontology in several parts of the question answering system. The ontology is used in the refinement of the initial query, the reasoning process (a generalization or specialization process using classes and subclasses from the ontology), and in the novel similarity...read more
Interfaces for Capturing Interpretations of Research Literature
The ClaiMaker collaborative sense-making and annotation tools allow single users and groups to build and query hypertextual argument maps of research literatures. We describe the discourse ontology used by the system, and four design principles that were followed to make it usable for non-knowledge engineers. We present several generations of capture interfaces showing how they are evolving to make ClaiMaker more accessible for novice users.read more
ID: kmi-03-06
Date: 2003
Author(s): Victoria Uren, Bertrand Sereno, Simon Buckingham Shum, Gangmin Li
Resources: An Ontology-Driven Question Answering System (AQUA)
This paper describes AQUA, an experimental question answering system. AQUA combines Natural Language processing (NLP), Ontologies, Logic, and Information Retrieval technologies in a uniform framework. AQUA makes intensive use of an ontology in several parts of the question answering system. The ontology is used in the refinement of the initial query, the reasoning process (a generalization/specialization process using classes and subclasses from the ontology), and in the novel similarity...read more
A Comparative Study of Term Weighting Methods for Information Filtering
The users of an information filtering system can only be expected to provide a small amount of information to initialize their user profile. Therefore, term weighting methods for information filtering have somewhat different requirements to those for information retrieval and text categorization. We present a comparative evaluation of term weighting methods, including one novel method, relative document frequency, designed specifically for information filtering. The best weighting methods...read more
Scholarly Publishing and Argument in Hyperspace
The World Wide Web is opening up access to documents and data for scholars. However it has not yet impacted on one of the primary activities in research: assessing new findings in the light of current knowledge and debating it with colleagues. The ClaiMaker system uses a directed graph model with similarities to hypertext, in which new ideas are published as nodes, which other contributors can build on or challenge in a variety of ways by linking to them. Nodes and links have semantic structure...read more
ID: kmi-03-03
Date: 2003
Author(s): Victoria Uren, Simon Buckingham Shum, Gangmin Li, John Domingue, Enrico Motta
Resources: ClaiMaker:Weaving a Semantic Web of Research Papers
The usability of research papers on the Web would be enhanced by a system that explicitly modelled the rhetorical relations between claims in related papers. We describe ClaiMaker, a system for modelling readers' interpretations of the core content of papers. ClaiMaker provides tools to build a Semantic Web representation of the claims in research papers using an ontology of relations. We demonstrate how the system can be used to make inter-document queries.read more
ID: kmi-03-02
Date: 2003
Author(s): Gangmin Li, Victoria Uren, Enrico Motta, Simon Buckingham Shum, John Domingue
Resources: Semantic Layering with Magpie
Browsing the web involves two main tasks: finding the right web page and then making sense of its content. A significant amount of research has gone into supporting the task of finding web resources through ‘standard’ information retrieval mechanisms, or semantics-enhanced search. Much less attention has been paid to the second problem. In this paper we describe Magpie, a tool which supports the interpretation of web pages. Magpie acts as a complementary knowledge source, which a reader can...read more
Wireless Presence and Instant Messaging
The advances of new technologies and the convergence of different communication media are changing not only our means and modes of communication with other people, but the notion of connectivity itself. ‘Presence’ awareness is becoming a key issue, facilitated by Instant Messaging applications, mobile phones, wireless handheld devices and location tracking. This report aims to identify the most important issues related to Instant Messaging and Presence enabled applications for wireless...read more
A Spreading Activation Framework for Ontology-enhanced Adaptive Information Access
This research investigates a unique Indexing Structure and Navigational Interface which make use of (1) ontology-driven knowledge (2) statistically derived indexing parameters, and (3) experts' feedback into a single Spreading Activation Framework to harness knowledge from heterogeneous knowledge assets within an organisation. Organisational ontologies capture precise knowledge about organisational entities: people, projects, activities, information sources and so on. We extract useful entities...read more
ID: kmi-02-06
Date: 2002
Author(s): Md Maruf Hasan, Motta, E., Domingue, J.B., Buckingham-Shum, S., Vargas-Vera, M. and Lanzoni, M.
Resources: Visualization of Dynamic Chat Communication
This work is aimed at visualizing the dynamic behaviour of very large communication networks. The visualization of large graphs and networks is a crucial part of many applications, for which typical approaches are too demanding of computational resources. Since one of the most important issues is a visualization of the dynamic behaviour of graphs, special aspects of the visualization of huge graphs with dynamic behaviour are discussed. The paper describes an algorithm that speeds up the...read more
Intelligent scheduling - A Literature Review
The literature review builds the initial foundation in understanding our domain of interest, i.e. knowledge-intensive approach for the scheduling application. In order to comprehend the nature of scheduling problem more soundly it is important to understand the nature of planning paradigm, which goes hand in hand with the scheduling problem. Usually, the scheduling problem comes in a variety of flavours and hence it is vital to know the development of various aspects that are involved in...read more
The Task Ontology Component of the Scheduling Library
Scheduling is a ubiquitous task spanning over many activities in day to day life. Usually, a scheduling problem comes in a variety of flavours, which makes it a hard problem both in theory as well as in practice. The scheduling task concerns with the assignment of jobs to the resources and time ranges within a pre-defined time framework while maintaining various constraints and satisfying requirements. Due to the diverse nature of scheduling problem the nature of its main building blocks...read more
Presence Based Massively Multiplayer Games Exploration of a new concept
The advances of new technologies and the convergence of different communication media are constantly changing not only our means and modes of communication with other people, but the notion of connectivity itself. Rather that being online or offline, we can be ‘connected’ in many different ways and without directly interacting with technology itself. ‘Presence’ awareness, facilitated by Instant Messaging applications, mobile phones, wireless handheld devices, location tracking and so on, makes...read more
Conceptualising work activity for CAL systems design
As computing technology has increasingly become relevant to people ’s everyday lives, emphasis is being placed on ensuring Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) tools support users in ways that are meaningful to them. This requirement has highlighted the need to understand the complex and often dynamic social and cultural organisation of collaborating individuals in context. Here, the aim is to conceptualise the natural flow and evolution of work practices so as to inform the design of these...read more
Visualisation Of Entity Distribution In Very Large Scale Spatial And Geographic Information Systems
The aim of this paper is to summarise entity distribution visualisation problems in very large-scale spatial and geographic information systems. The motivation for this theme arises from the challenge of visualising the geographic and logical distribution of many tens of thousands of distance-learning students at the UK's Open University. At the beginning, the paper describes the algorithms and data structures used by current geographic and spatial information systems. These include...read more
Hierarchical clustering speed up using position lists and data position hierarchy
The aim of this paper is to address the nature of hierarchical clustering problems in systems with very large numbers of entities, and to propose specific speed improvements in the clustering algorithm. The motivation for this theme arises from the challenge of visualising the geographic and logical distribution of many tens of thousands of distance-learning students at the UK's Open University. A general algorithm for solving hierarchical clustering is mentioned at the beginning. Then the...read more
Research Proposal: An Adaptive, Evolutionary User Profile for Knowledge Management.
In order to provide the knowledge worker with potentially useful information, we propose an architecture for the development of an adaptive, evolutionary user profile. The profile has the ability to adapt to modest, frequent changes to the individual's information needs and in addition to evolve, in order to adjust to more radical but less frequent changes. In order to descrive the architecture, we discuss the profile's initialization, its evolutionary mechanism, the way it evaluates documents...read more
Literature Review: Information Filtering for Knowledge Management
It is already realized that we have entered the knowledge era: A time when the economic value of knowledge has become greater than the value of physical products. In this context, Knowledge Management (KM), i.e. the combination of management principles and technology that seeks to improve the performance of individuals and organizations by maintaining and leveraging the value of knowledge assets, has emerged into a managerial megatrend. We present the foundational concepts of Knowledge...read more
Facilitated Hypertext for Collective Sensemaking: 15 Years on from gIBIS
Hypertext research in the mid-1980s on representing argumentation for design rationale (DR) foreshadowed what are now dominant concerns in knowledge management: representing, codifying and manipulating semiformal concepts, the use of formalisms to mediate collective sensemaking, and the construction of group memory. With the benefit of 15 years' hindsight, we can see the failure of so many hypertext DR systems to be adopted as symptomatic of the more general problem of fostering 'hypertext...read more
ID: kmi-01-15
Date: 2001
Author(s): Jeff Conklin, Albert Selvin, Simon Buckingham Shum and Maarten Sierhuis
Resources: Beyond Rigid KA Metatools: An Initial Proposal for a KR-Independent, Adaptive, Customizable, Ontology-based KA Metatool
This paper proposes a new knowledge-acquisition metatool, KRIACO, a Web-based, Knowledge Representation Independent, Adaptive, Customizable, Ontology-based Knowledge Acquisition Metatool, which aims to overcome sorts of shortcomings of current knowledge acquisition metatools. To achieve its goal, KRIACO will adopt OKBC as an underlying knowledge representation model to overcome the restriction caused by a specific knowledge representation system. It will use an ontology-driven tool...read more
Cognitive Coherence Relations and Hypertext: From Cinematic Patterns to Scholarly Discourse
In previous work we argued that cinematic language may provide insights into the construction of narrative coherence in hypertext, and we identified in the shot juxtaposition of rhetorical patterns the source of coherence for cinematic discourse. Here we deepen our analysis, to show how the mechanisms that underpin cinematic rhetorical patterns are the same as those providing coherence in written text. We draw on computational and psycholinguistic analyses of texts which have derived a set of...read more
Integration of Information Extraction with an Ontology
This paper describes the integration of an ontology with an information extraction (IE) tool. Our main goal is extract knowledge from text to populate the ontology, and so alleviate the problem of ontology maintenance. The IE tool extracts information using partial parsing and machine learning techniques. Our domain of study is ``KMi Planet'', a Web-based news server that helps to communicate relevant information between members in our institute. Currently our system finds instances of...read more
ID: kmi-01-12
Date: 2001
Author(s): Maria Vargas-Vera, John Domingue, Yannis Kalfoglou, Enrico Motta and Simon Buckingham Shum
Resources: On the integration of technologies for capturing and navigating knowledge with ontology-driven services
"Nowadays, many distinct communities are researching on technologies for knowledge capturing, modelling, and navigation. Moreover, advances in Internet technology makes it possible to perform most of these tasks on heterogeneous and distributed environments such as the Web. These advances though, have raise the need for knowledge services to accommodate the ever increasing number of Web users. To provide such a service one needs to combine key technologies for different aspects of knowledge...read more
ID: kmi-01-11
Date: 2001
Author(s): Yannis Kalfoglou, John Domingue, Leslie Carr, Enrico Motta, Maria Vargas-Vera, Simon Buckingham Shum
Resources: Towards a Logical Framework for Sequential Design
Engineering design is usually seen as a knowledge-intensive process that driven by certain objectives eventually delivers an artefact having the desired properties or functions. Design is inherently iterative and the design goals evolve together with the solutions. Many current design theories present more or less efficient ways for finding a suitable solution to the given goals. However, they often leave open the question of the 'solution talkback'. Under 'solution talkback' we understand the...read more
Towards a Framework for Acquisition of Design Knowledge
Engineering design is a knowledge-intensive process driven by various design objectives. Design is an iterative process where the objectives evolve together with the solutions in order to deliver an artefact with the desired properties and functions. Many design theories developed so far suggest more or less efficient ways for finding a suitable solution to the given goals. However, they often leave open the issue of 'solution talk-back'. Discovery of new design objectives and amendment of the...read more
Template-Driven Information Extraction for Populating Ontologies
We address the integration of information extraction (IE) and ontologies. In particular, using an ontology to aid the IE process, and using the IE results to help populate the ontology. We perform IE by means of domain specific templates and the lightweight use of Natural Languages Processing techniques (NLP). Our main goal is to learn information from text by the use of templates and in this way to alleviate the main bottleneck in creating knowledge-base systems that is ``the...read more
ID: kmi-01-08
Date: 2001
Author(s): Maria Vargas-Vera, John Domingue, Yannis Kalfoglou, Enrico Motta and Simon Buckingham-Shum
Resources: Where Theory meets Practice: A Case for an Activity Theory based Methodology to guide Computer System Design
Computer system developers are increasingly being challenged to develop tools that are not only usable, but more importantly useful in the sense of assisting the user to achieve desired goals. This requirement has highlighted the importance of accounting for the social and cultural issues of the computer tool user when developing a computer system. Activity Theory (AT) has emerged as a suitable framework for analysing social and cultural issues because it provides a language to describe what...read more
Compendium: Making Meetings into Knowledge Events
In this paper, we describe the Compendium methodology and suite of tools. Compendium is the result of over a decade's research and development at the intersection of collaborative modeling, organizational memory, computer-supported argumentation and meeting facilitation. We claim that Compendium offers innovative strategies for tackling several of the key challenges in managing knowledge: · improving communication between disparate communities tackling ill-structured problems · ...read more
ID: kmi-01-06
Date: 2001
Author(s): Albert Selvin, Simon Buckingham Shum, Maarten Sierhuis, Jeff Conklin, Beatrix Zimmermann, Charles Palus, Wilfred Drath, David Horth, John Domingue, Enrico Motta and Gangmin Li
Resources: myPlanet: an ontology-driven Web-based personalised news service
In this paper we present myPlanet, an ontology-driven personalised Web-based service. We extended the existing infrastructure of the PlanetOnto news publishing system. Our concerns were mainly to provide lightweight means for ontology maintenance and ease the access to repositories of news items, a rich resource for information sharing. We reason about the information being shared by providing an ontology-driven interest-profiling tool which enable users to specify their interests. We also...read more
Changing Tools, Changing Attitudes: Effects of introducing a CSCL system to promote learning at work
The use of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) tools to manage and support learning at work offers a lot of advantages, such as the increase in the availability and access to knowledge. However, computer systems also introduce new ways of doing things, which may impact on their acceptability and usage in an organisation. The study considers the issue of re-mediating human activity through the introduction of a CSCL system to support collaborative organisational learning (COL)...read more
Lyceum: Internet Voice Groupware for Distance Learning
This paper describes the design, implementation and deployment of Lyceum, a groupware system providing students and tutors with real time voice conferencing and visual workspace tools, over the standard internet. Lyceum uses a Java client/server architecture to tackle a formidable set of networking requirements: multi-way voice communication with synchronous shared displays, scalable to potentially thousands of simultaneous users, running over normal modem connections via unknown internet...read more
ID: kmi-01-03
Date: 2001
Author(s): Simon Buckingham Shum, Samuel Marshall, John Brier and Tony Evans
Resources: JIME: An Interactive Journal for Interactive Media
How can new media positively transform scholarly practices? In this article, we describe the Journal of Interactive Media in Education (JIME: www-jime.open.ac.uk). JIME's peer review process is designed to promote multidisciplinary dialogue through the use of a purpose-designed Web document-discussion interface. This innovative peer review model and the resulting 'enriched' digital documents illustrate some of the possibilities for promoting knowledge construction and preserving intellectual...read more
Structuring Discourse for Collective Interpretation
This paper reflects on three examples of a discourse-oriented approach to supporting collective interpretation. By this, we mean activities involving two or more people who are trying to make sense of an issue. The common theme linking the examples is that each mediates interpretive activity via a software environment which structures discourse: participants construct their interpretation within a representational framework which in return provides computational services. As a by-product, this...read more
Feature Reduction for Document Clustering and Classification
Often users receive search results which contain a wide range of documents, only some of which are relevant to their information needs. To address this problem, ever more systems not only locate information for users, but also organise that information on their behalf. We look at two main automatic approaches to information organisation: interactive clustering of search results and pre-categorising documents to provide hierarchical browsing structures. To be feasible in real world applications,...read more
Using genre to support active participation in learning communities
Many communities exist that learn and share information either partly or wholly online. These (wholly or partially) on-line communities share messages, documents, and other artefacts that contain useful community knowledge. Members of the community learn through this sharing process, and the growing archive they create forms a valuable learning resource for existing and new members of the community. Two main kinds of approach exist to support community members in accessing resources. The first...read more
Redesigning the Peer Review Process: A Developmental Theory-in-Action
We are looking at how new forms of document interface can be used to support new forms of scholarly discourse, and ultimately, new models of scholarly publishing. Towards this end, we have been using specially designed computer-meditated conferencing technology to realize an innovative peer review model within an academic e-journal - The Journal of Interactive Media in Education. In essence, through re-design of social processes and technical products, we have tried to shift...read more
ID: kmi-00-12
Date: 2000
Author(s): Tamara Sumner, Simon Buckingham Shum, Michael Wright, Nathalie Bonnardel and Aline Chevalier
Resources: Mind the Gap: Activity Theory and Design
This paper describes the application of the Activity Theory framework to the analysis of work practices in an organisation, to inform the design of a computer system for supporting collaborative learning in the workplace. A study involving the analysis of an organisation and using Engestrs
Knowledge Management in a Distributed Organisation
Knowledge has become an important asset in a modern enterprise. Straightforward and fast access to knowledge possessed by its employees may significantly influence the competitiveness of an enterprise. It has become very important for advanced organisations to make the best use of information gathered from various document sources inside companies and from external sources like the Internet. There are many technologies under de-velopment, which address knowledge discovery. On the other hand,...read more
Scholarly Discourse as Computable Structure
In their initial proposal for structural computing (SC), NŸrnberg et al. [18] point to hypertext argumentation systems as an example of an application domain in which structure is of first-order importance. In this paper we summarise the goals and implementation of a knowledge based hypertext environment called ScholOnto (for Scholarly Ontologies), which aims to provide researchers with computational support in representing and analysing the structure of scholarly claims, argumentation and...read more
Rapid Knowledge Construction: A Case Study in Corporate Contingency Planning Using Collaborative Hypermedia
Many knowledge management (KM) efforts revolve around managing documents in a repository or enabling better real-time communication. An ideal approach would combine these with the ability to create knowledge content that can be either formal or informal in nature, in a rapid, real-time manner. We will call this Rapid Knowledge Construction (RKC). This paper describes the concepts underpinning our approach to RKC, and provides a case study of the approach in an industry context. The Compendium...read more
Robust Outcome Prediction for Intensive-Care Patients
Missing data are a major plague of medical databases in general, and of Intensive Care Units databases in particular. The time pressure of work in an Intensive Care Unit pushes the physicians to omit randomly or selectively record data. These different omission strategies give rise to different patterns of missing data and the recommended approach of completing the database using median imputation and fitting a logistic regression model can lead to significant biases. This paper applies a new...read more
Profiling your Customers using Bayesian Networks
This report describes a complete Knowledge Discovery session using Bayesware Discoverer, a program for the induction of Bayesian networks from incomplete data. We build two causal models to help an American Charitable Organization understand the characteristics of respondents to direct mail fund raising campaigns. The first model is a Bayesian network induced from the database of 96,376 Lapsed donors to the June '97 renewal mailing. The network describes the dependency of the probability of...read more
Sequence Learning via Bayesian Clustering by Dynamics
This chapter introduces a Bayesian method for clustering dynamic processes. The method models dynamics as Markov chains and then applies an agglomerative clustering procedure to discover the most probable set of clusters capturing different dynamics. To increase efficiency, the algorithm uses an entropy-based heuristic search strategy. When applied to clustering sensor data from mobile robots, the algorithm produces clusters that are meaningful in the domains of application. 1. Department...read more
Multivariate Clustering by Dynamics
We present a Bayesian clustering algorithm for multivariate time series. A clustering is regarded as a probabilistic model in which the unknown auto-correlation structure of a time series is approximated by a first order Markov Chain and the overall joint distribution of the variables is simplified by conditional independence assumptions. The algorithm searches for the most probable set of clusters given the data using a entropy-based heuristic search method. The algorithm is evaluated on a set...read more
From Cinematographic to Hypertext Narrative
This paper argues that cinematographic language may provide insights into the construction of narrative coherence in hypertext. Brief examples of cinematic representation models are mapped onto the hypertext domain.read more
VAEBuilder - A General Purpose Software Tool for the Description and Implementation of Virtual Audio Environments
This document describes the issues relating to the design and implementation of a software tool for creating and exploring arbitrary virtual audio environments (referred to hereinafter as VAEs). A prototype package called VAEBuilder has been developed with some of the functionality described in this document. VAEBuilder is implemented in Visual C++ using MFC and comes with full hypertext or printed documentation for the sources. It is a work in progress, as many of the features and ideas...read more
Contextually-enriched Documents: Publishing for Organizational Learning
We are looking at how new tools and forms of document interface can be used to support document centered discourse, to enrich documents with contextual information, and ultimately, to support models of organizational learning. Building on the Digital Document Discourse Environment (D3E) we have developed tools to support the publishing of digital documents tightly coupled with discussion spaces supporting the sharing of knowledge both throughout organizations and geographically dispersed...read more
Creative designer: What & how? (Intelligent support for problem formalisation in engineering design)
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...read more
Knowledge-intensive design support: An enquiry into the role of the ontologies and analogous thinking in design support
This literature review builds a base for the further research of knowledge-intensive approach for the design problem formalisation. Engineering design is in general a complex activity; therefore, the document will focus on one specific part of the design process, namely the problem formalisation. The review discusses the following points: (i) various approaches to design and nature of design tasks; (ii) knowledge modelling research and its place in design support; and (iii) implications drawn...read more
Oracles, Bards, and Village Gossips, or, Social Roles and Meta Knowledge Management
Knowledge management systems are used widely in many different organisations, yet there are few models and theories which can be used to help introduce and apply them successfully. In this paper, we analyse some of the more common problems for knowledge management systems. Using this background, we adapt models and theories from social and organisational psychology and computer supported collaborative work, and discuss a variety of different knowledge management systems in these contexts. We...read more
Case Studies in Ontology-Driven Document Enrichment
In this paper we present an approach to document enrichment, which consists of associating formal knowledge models to archives of documents, to provide intelligent knowledge retrieval and (possibly) additional knowledge services, beyond what is available using 'standard' information retrieval and search facilities. The approach is ontology-driven, in the sense that the construction of the knowledge model is carried out in a top-down fashion, by populating a given ontology, rather than in a...read more
Representing Scholarly Claims in Internet Digital Libraries: A Knowledge Modelling Approach
This paper is concerned with tracking and interpreting scholarly documents in distributed research communities. We argue that current approaches to document description, and current technological infrastructures particularly over the World Wide Web, provide poor support for these tasks. We describe the design of a digital library server which will enable authors to submit a summary of the contributions they claim their documents makes, and its relations to the literature. We describe a...read more
An Introduction to the Robust Bayesian Classifier
Bayesian supervised classifiers are one of the most promising data mining techniques for large scale applications. When the database is complete, they provide an efficient and scalable solution to classification problems. When some data are missing in the training set, methods exist to learn these classifiers, albeit less efficiently, under the assumption that data are missing at random. This paper describes the implementation of RoC, a Bayesian classifier able handle incomplete databases with...read more
Bayesian Clustering by Dynamics
This paper introduces a Bayesian method for clustering dynamic processes. The method models dynamics as Markov chains and then applies an agglomerative clustering procedure to discover the most probable set of clusters capturing different dynamics. To increase efficiency, the method uses an entropy-based heuristic search strategy. An experiment suggests that the method is very accurate when applied to artificial time series in a broad range of conditions. When the method is applied to...read more
ID: kmi-99-05
Date: 1999
Author(s): Marco Ramoni, Paola Sebastiani, Paul Cohen, John Warwick and James Davis
Resources: Discovering Dynamics using Bayesian Clustering
This paper introduces a Bayesian method for clustering dynamic processes and applies it to the characterization of the dynamics of a military scenario. The method models dynamics as Markov chains and then applies an agglomerative clustering procedure to discover the most probable set of clusters capturing the different dynamics. To increase efficiency, the method uses an entropy-based heuristic search strategy. 1. Department of Statistics, The Open University. 2. Knowledge Media...read more
ID: kmi-99-04
Date: 1999
Author(s): Paola Sebastiani, Marco Ramoni, Paul Cohen, John Warwick and James Davis
Resources: Bayesian Clustering of Sensory Inputs by Dynamics
This paper introduces a Bayesian method for unsupervised clustering of dynamic processes and applies it to the abstraction of sensory inputs of a mobile robot. The method starts by transforming the sensory inputs into Markov chains and then applies an agglomerative clustering procedure to discover the most probable set of clusters capturing the robot's experiences. To increase efficiency, the method uses an entropy-based heuristic search strategy. 1. Department of Statistics, The Open...read more
Constituencies for Users: How to Develop them by Interpreting Logs of Web Site Access
The number of electronic journals is growing as rapidly as the World Wide Web on which many are published. Readership of an electronic journal is important to quantify, just as it is for a printed journal. In maintaining the Journal of Interactive Media in Education (JIME), a scholarly electronic journal open to all, we require readership statistics more meaningful than the variations on the theme of "number of hits" given by many log analysis packages. Important aspects of JIME's open access...read more
Collaborative Sense-Making in Design: Involving Stakeholders via Representational Morphing
A central concern in CSCW research is to understand, and represent, the perspectives of the different stakeholders in the design process. This paper suggests collaborative sense-making as a way to view the process toward creating mutually intelligible representations. In order to do this, we describe the types of obstacles that can impede representational literacy across communities of practice coming together in a design effort. We then offer representational morphing as a strategy for...read more
Date: 1998
Author(s): Chris McKillop
Resources:Has anyone seen this program? Synchronous and asynchronous help for novice programmers
This paper describes recent developments in our approach to teaching computer programming in the context of a part-time Masters course taught at a distance. Within our course, students are sent a pack which contains integrated text, software and video course material, using a uniform graphical representation to tell a consistent story of how the programming language works. The students communicate with their tutors over the phone and email. The main problem with relying on the telephone and...read more
Date: 1998
Author(s): Zdenek Zdrahal and John Domingue
Resources:Tadzebao and WebOnto: Discussing, browsing, and editing ontologies on the web
In this paper I describe two systems which, in different ways, address the shortcomings of current approaches to enabling ontology construction and use via the World-Wide Web. The first system Tadzebao, enables knowledge engineers to hold synchronous and asynchronous discussions about ontologies. Tadzebao addresses the fact that an integral part of communal design, dialogue, has largely been ignored by the community. The second system WebOnto uses a Java based client to alleviate the...read more
Evolving the Web for Scientific Knowledge: First Steps Towards an "HCI Knowledge Web"
In this article, I consider the challenge of building a Web-based infrastructure for scholarly research which moves beyond the basic dissemination and linking of documents, to support more powerful searching and analysis of the cumulative knowledge in the literature1s documents. Taking the HCI research community as an example, the goal would be to enable HCI researchers to search for interesting documents and phenomena, and discover previously unknown but conceptually related research, for...read more
Improving the quality of the student’s learning experience: an agent-based approach to on-line study guides
Study guides are a valuable resource for the distance education student. With the growing trend of putting courses on-line there an increase in the number of on-line study guides. This paper looks at how distance education students interact with their learning materials and considers ways of making this more engaging and effective by looking at the importance of affective responses. The use of an agent-based approach to on-line study guides is proposed as a way of achieving this. This approach...read more
Training Software Engineers in a Novel Usability Evaluation Technique
Novel approaches to designing or analysing systems only become useful when they are usable by practitioners in the field, and not just by their originators. Design techniques often fail to make the transition from research to practice because insufficient attention is paid to understanding and communicating the skills required to use them. This paper reports on work to train software engineering students to use a user-centred language for describing and analysing interface designs called the...read more
ID: kmi-98-09
Date: 1998
Author(s): Ann Blandford, Simon Buckingham Shum and Richard Young
Resources: Bayesian Methods for Intelligent Data Analysis
This paper provides an introduction to Bayesian statistics as methodological tool for intelligent data analysis, knowledge discovery, and machine learning. The paper starts from the basic concepts of Bayesian statistics and reaches the presentation of most recent developments of the field, such as Bayesian Belief Networks. Knowledge of basic statistical concepts is required. 1. Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University. 2. Department of Statistics, The Open University.read more
Model Folding for Data Subject to Nonresponse
This paper presents a new model selection method, called Model Folding, for regression models with partially classified categorical data in which only the dependent variable is subject to non response. 1. Department of Actuarial Science and Statistics, City University. 2. Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University.read more
Model Selection and Model Averaging with Missing Data
Missing data can impair the reliability of statistical inference as they may affect the representativity of the sample. Nonetheless, under some conditions guaranteeing that the missing data mechanism is ignorable, reliable conclusions can be still drawn from the incomplete sample. Ignorability conditions are well-understood for parameter estimation but when the inference task involves the computation of the posterior probability of a data model, as required by Bayesian model selection and...read more
Learning Conditional Probabilities from Incomplete Data: An Experimental Comparison
This paper reports some experimental results comparing three parametric methods, Gibbs Sampling, EM algorithm and Bound and Collapse, for the estimation of conditional probability distributions from incomplete databases. 1. Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University. 2. Department of Actuarial Science and Statistics, City University.read more
Decision Theoretic Foundations of Graphical Model Selection
This paper describes a decision theoretic formulation of learning the graphical structure of a Bayesian Belief Network from data. This framework subsumes the standard Bayesian approach of choosing the model with the largest posterior probability as the solution of a decision problem with a 0-1 loss function and allows the use of more general loss functions able to trade-off the complexity of the selected model and the error of choosing an over-simplified model. A new class of loss functions,...read more
Managing Persistent Discourse: Organizational Goals and Digital Texts
Prior to digital communications media, texts were primarily judged using hidden but assumed institutional practices (e.g., journal peer review processes, editorial mediation). Increasingly, digital communications media can make these previously invisible discursive practices visible in a persistent medium. Doing so transforms these discourses into texts where they are subject to: (1) a reader's interpretation and judgment and (2) explicit manipulation by writers or publishers seeking to...read more
ID: kmi-98-03
Date: 1998
Author(s): Tamara Sumner, Simeon Yates, Simon Buckingham Shum and Jane Perrone
Resources: Seeing things as people: anthropomorphism and common-sense psychology
This thesis is about common-sense psychology and its role in cognitive science. Put simply, the argument is that common-sense psychology is important because it offers clues to some complex problems in cognitive science, and because common-sense psychology has significant effects on our intuitions, both in science and on an everyday level. The thesis develops a theory of anthropomorphism in common-sense psychology. Anthropomorphism, the natural human tendency to ascribe human...read more
Enriching Representations of Work to Support Organisational Learning
The ENRICH project will develop tools and methodologies supporting organisational learning addressing three core business needs: * Supporting individuals and groups to continuously reflect on and improve work practices. * Supporting distributed groups to share 'best practices' and improve their coordination efforts. * Promoting the establishment of 'virtual centres of excellence' that serve to identify core competencies and nurture their development by bringing people together (across...read more
Parameter Estimation in Bayesian Networks from Incomplete Databases
Current methods to learn Bayesian Networks from incomplete databases share the common assumption that the unreported data are missing at random. This paper describes a method - called Bound and Collapse (BC) - to learn Bayesian Networks from incomplete databases which allows the analyst to efficiently integrate the information provided by the database and the exogenous knowledge about the pattern of missing data. BC starts by bounding he set of estimates consistent with the available...read more
Bayesian Inference with Missing Data Using Bound and Collapse
Current Bayesian methods to estimate conditional probabilities from samples with missing data pose serious problems of robustness and computational efficiency. This paper introduces a new method, called Bound and Collapse (BC), able to overcome these problems. When no information is available on the pattern of missing data, BC turns {em bounds} on the possible estimates consistent with the available information. These bounds can be then collapsed to a point estimate using information about the...read more
Publishing, Interpreting and Negotiating Scholarly Hypertexts: Evolution of an Approach and Toolkit
This paper describes the evolution of our approach to scholarly hypertext publishing, which is developing a social model of document usage that places particular emphasis on supporting the interpretation and negotiation of documents. The first part of the paper describes principles derived from hypertext research that underpin a toolkit called D3E which we use to publish an electronic journal. This provides a Web environment that tightly integrates publications with review discussion. In part...read more
From Documents to Discourse: Shifting Conceptions of Scholarly Publishing
We are looking at how new forms of document interface can be used to support new forms of scholarly discourse, and ultimately, new models of scholarly publishing. The vehicle we use to conduct this research is the Digital Document Discourse Environment (D3E). D3E is an experimental system supporting the publication of web-based documents with integrated discourse facilities and embedded interactive components. We report here on two cases - an e-journal and a 'new form' of conference - where we...read more
On-line study guides for distance education students: can 'advisor' agents help?
This project focussed on the construction of a prototype on-line study guide for the 'M206 Computing: An Object-oriented Approach' distance education course provided by the Open University (UK). The specific problems students encounter while studying a course with a complex media mix such as this course have been looked at, as well as the wider issues concerning the problems distance education students encounter whilst studying. A comparison between the difficulties distance education and...read more
Reusable Components for Knowledge Modelling
This book addresses issues of knowledge modelling and reuse.What is the appropriate framework for modelling intelligent problem solving? How best to model reusable knowledge resources? How should libraries of reusable components be organized? I try to answer these questions by describing a comprehensive approach to the specification, organization, configuration and use of reusable components for knowledge models. Hence, the book addresses both theoretical and engineering issues. It proposes a...read more
Talking About Multimedia: A Layered Design Framework
These days there are numerous examples of educational multimedia; e.g., Homer, Virtual Microscope, Art Explorer, EncartaTM and so on. While these are all "educational multimedia", most users, multimedia designers, and educators would agree that these examples represent very different types of applications. However, most people would probably have a difficult time cogently explaining why they are different and, more importantly, the implications of these differences both for effective use and...read more
The Interactive Course Map
When forecasting the learning situation of the future, we often envision students working with a wide array of on-line tools - ranging from standard office productivity tools, to various kinds of communication software, to specialised learning environments tailored to particular curricular needs. In this scenario, learners are not only trying to master the subject or domain content, they must also cope with: (1) mastering a potentially complex assortment of software tools, and (2) developing...read more
Understanding Evolutionary Computing: A hands on approach
Evolutionary computing is the study of robust search algorithms based on the principles of evolution. An Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) searches a problem space in order to find possible solutions to a given problem. This paper is intended to highlight the advantages of using software visualization techniques in evolutionary computing: Firstly it describes how a high-dimensional problem space can be represented in two (or more) dimensions, suitable for visualization; secondly it introduces how EA...read more
New Media, New Practices: Experiences in Open Learning Course Design
We explore some of the complex issues surrounding the design and use of multimedia and Internet-based learning resources in distance education courses. We do so by analysing our experiences designing a diverse array of learning media for a large scale, distance learning course in introductory computing. During the project, we had to significantly rethink the design and production of our learning resources as we shifted from a paper-based teaching model to an interactive teaching model. This...read more
Negotiating the Construction and Reconstruction of Organisational Memories
This paper describes an approach to capturing organisational memory, which serves to ground an analysis of human issues that knowledge management (KM) technologies raise. In the approach presented, teams construct graphical webs of the arguments and documents relating to key issues they are facing. This supports collaborative processes which are central to knowledge work, and provides a group memory of this intellectual investment. This approach emphasises the centrality of negotiation in...read more
The Virtual Participant: Lessons to be Learned from a Case-Based Tutor's Assistant
We describe a system which uses an agent-based approach to support teaching in the collaborative setting of asynchronous plain-text electronic conferencing. We have identified areas within which tutors who use conferencing need support and developed a system which helps out in an opportunistic manner. The agent we have developed uses a case-based approach to instruction by offering help on common student problems. The cases used are examples of problems experienced by students in previous years...read more
Summary of M206 Map Developmental Testing
This document reports on the results of the developmental testing of the Interactive Course Map prototype being creating for the M206 course (Computing: An object-oriented approach).read more
Discovering Bayesian Networks in Incomplete Databases
Bayesian Belief Networks (BBNs) are becoming increasingly popular in the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining community. A BBN is defined by a graphical structure of conditional dependencies among the domain variables and a set of probability distributions defining these dependencies. In this way, BBNs provide a compact formalism - grounded in the well-developed mathematics of probability theory - able to predict variable values, explain observations, and visualize dependencies among variables....read more
The World Wide Design Lab: An Environment for Distributed Collaborative Design
In ever increasing frequency, designers are required to collaborate across large geographical boundaries. This collaboration presents the participants with new challenges. In this paper we describe how we have addressed two of these challenges using Internet technology. The first challenge is "How can designers discuss complex design artifacts at a distance?". Designers' discussions have a complex structure. For example, a designer can refute, justify, or revise a design proposal. These...read more
The Use of Exogenous Knowledge to Learn Bayesian Networks from Incomplete Databases
Current methods to learn Bayesian Networks from incomplete databases share the common assumption that the unreported data are missing at random. This paper describes a method - called Bound and Collapse (BC) - to learn Bayesian Networks from incomplete databases which allows the analyst to efficiently integrate the information provided by the database and the exogenous knowledge about the pattern of missing data. BC starts by bounding he set of estimates consistent with the available...read more
Learning Bayesian Networks from Incomplete Databases
Bayesian approaches to learn the graphical structure of Bayesian Belief Networks (BBNs) from databases share the assumption that the database is complete, that is, no entry is reported as unknown. Attempts to relax this assumption often involve the use of expensive iterative methods to discriminate among different structures. This paper introduces a deterministic method to learn the graphical structure of a BBN from a possibly incomplete database. Experimental evaluations show a significant...read more
Graphical Argumentation and Design Cognition
Many efforts have been made to exploit the properties of graphical notations to support argument construction and communication. In the context of design rationale capture, we are interested in graphical argumentation structures as cognitive tools to support individual and collaborative design in real time. This context of use requires a detailed understanding of how a new representational structure integrates into the cognitive and discursive flow of design, that is, whether it provides...read more
ID: kmi-97-05
Date: 1997
Author(s): Simon Buckingham Shum, Allan MacLean, Victoria Bellotti and Nick Hammond
Resources: Accessing Artificial Intelligence Applications over the World-Wide Web
In this paper we will show how LispWeb, an HTTP server entirely written in Common Lisp, can be used to access Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications over the World-Wide Web (WWW). We will discuss how an AI application can benefit from being accessible in the WWW environment, and the requirements it must satisfy in order to be usable through the WWW interaction paradigm. We will describe how a Lisp systems can be accessed through a Web-based interface, and an extension to the HTTP protocol...read more
Efficient Parameter Learning in Bayesian Networks from Incomplete Databases
Current methods to learn conditional probabilities from incomplete databases use a common strategy: they complete the database by inferring somehow the missing data from the available information and then learn from the completed database. This paper introduces a new method - called bound and collapse (BC) - which does not follow this strategy. BC starts by bounding the set of estimates consistent with the available information and then collapses the resulting set to a point estimate via a...read more
Representing Hard-to-Formalise, Contextualised, Multidisciplinary, Organisational Knowledge
Much organisational knowledge is multidisciplinary, hard to formalise, and generated in discussions with competing viewpoints. Knowledge Management (KM) technologies need to be able to capture and share such knowledge. This short paper begins by characterising 'knowledge work' - are there salient features that we can identify? Next, an approach is described by which teams analyse and discuss problems, building graphical argument spaces as competing ideas are debated. Hypermedia groupware...read more
Balancing Formality with Informality: User-Centred Requirements for Knowledge Management Technologies
Numerous disciplines are now trying to analyse and represent the processes and products of organisational memory, in order to clarify what tangible representations future knowledge managers will work with. This short paper begins by reflecting briefly on the nature of systematic representations, as a reminder of the commitments that are made in any classification process. It is argued that there are important political dimensions to such classification, with implications for knowledge...read more
The Cognitive Ergonomics of Knowledge-Based Design Support Systems
Critiquing systems are a type of active, knowledge-based design support system. They propose to positively influence designers' cognitive processes by pointing out potential problems and contentious issues while designers work. To investigate the effects such systems have on the activities of professional designers, a design environment containing a critiquing system was designed, built, and evaluated for a specific area: phone-based interface design. Four professional designers were observed...read more
ID: kmi-96-16
Date: 1996
Author(s): Tamara Sumner, Nathalie Bonnardel and Benedikte Harstad
Resources: Digital Genres and the New Burden of Fixity
Stability in the production and transmission of texts has been a taken-for-granted feature of communicative acts for much of history. In the past, this fixity (i.e., the reliability of texts not to change over space and time) has arisen from the interaction between immutable technologies (used to produce text) and social rigidity (in the structure and practices of discourse communities where texts are produced and consumed). These interactions provided stable settings fostering the gradual...read more
Artificial Societies and Psychological Agents
Agents have for a while been a key concept in artificial intelligence, but often all that the word refers to is a computational process or task with a capability for autonomous action, either alone or in an artificial society of similar agents. But the artificial nature of these societies restricts the flexibility of agents to a point where social interaction between people and agents is blocked by significant social and psychological factors not usually considered in artificial intelligence...read more
KMi Stadium: Web-based Audio/Visual Interaction as Reusable Organisational Expertise
KMi Stadium is a Java-implemented medium for hosting distributed events on a very large scale on the Internet (or an Intranet), allowing thousands of simultaneous participants even over 28.8Kbps dial-up modems. Stadium makes available as a reusable resource audio, coordinated visuals, and secondary resources such as relevant documents, demonstrations and Web sites. Client-based desktop computers and set-top boxes with appropriate browsers can download custom applets which enable the client...read more
ID: kmi-96-13
Date: 1996
Author(s): Marc Eisenstadt, Simon Buckingham Shum and Adam Freeman
Resources: Negotiating the Construction of Organisational Memory Using Hypermedia Argument Spaces
This paper describes an approach to capturing organisational memory in which teams use a hypermedia tool to analyse and discuss complex problems. Graphical argument spaces are constructed as competing ideas are debated. Firstly this supports the processes of discussion and negotiation which are central to knowledge work, typically as problems are defined, project constraints shift, and teams reconcile competing agendas. Graphical argumentation provides a shared working memory in meetings by...read more
Genotypic-Space Mapping: Population Visualization for Genetic Algorithms
This paper presents one proposed method for representing the population data of Genetic Algorithms (GAs). Typical population data from GAs are large high-dimensional sets of binary, decimal, real or string, state values. This makes their representation by two or three spatial dimensions somewhat difficult. Several attempts at population visualization have been made but have failed to efficiently solve this high dimensional to 2/3 dimensional space mapping problem. The use of the proposed...read more
Integrating Working and Learning: Two Models of Computer Support
This paper describes theories and computer systems illustrating two innovative models of computer support for integrating working and learning. The VDDE system illustrates the design critiquing model helping individual professionals in analyzing current work situations, applying existing knowledge to these situations, and articulating new knowledge. The SmartMedia system illustrates the domain construction model helping communities of practice to collaboratively evolve new ways of working.read more
Robust Parameter Learning in Bayesian Networks with Missing Data
Bayesian belief Networks (BBNs) are a powerful formalism for knowledge representation and reasoning under uncertainty. During the past few years, Artificial Intelligence met Statistics in the quest to develop effective methods to learn BBNs directly from real-world databases. Unfortunately, real-world databases include missing and/or unreported data whose presence challenges traditional learning techniques, from both the theoretical and computational point of view. This paper outlines a new...read more
Robust Learning with Missing Data
Bayesian methods are becoming increasingly popular in the development of intelligent machines. Bayesian Belief Networks (BBNs) are nowaday a prominent reasoning method and, during the past few years, several efforts have been addressed to develop methods able to learn BBNs directly from databases. However, all these methods assume that the database is complete or, at least, that unreported data are missing at random. Unfortunately, real-world databases are rarely complete and the "Missing at...read more
Evolution, Not Revolution: PD in the Toolbelt Era
An emerging software development context
Improving Competence by Integrating Case-Based Reasoning and Heuristic Search
We analyse the behaviour of a Propose & Revise architecture in the VT elevator design problem and we show that this problem solving method cannot solve all possible cases covered by the available domain knowledge. We investigate this problem and we show that this limitation is caused by the restricted search regime employed by the method and that the competence of the method cannot be improved by acquiring additional domain knowledge. We therefore propose an alternative design problem solver,...read more
Parametric Design Problem Solving
The aim of this paper is to understand what is involved in parametric design problem solving. In order to achieve this goal, in this paper i) we identify and detail the conceptual elements defining a parametric design task specification; ii) we illustrate how these elements are interpreted and operationalised during the design process; and iii) we formulate a generic model of parametric design problem solving. We then re-describe a number of problem solving methods in terms of the proposed...read more
On the Future of Journals: Digital Publishing and Argumentation
The emergence of the internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) have profound implications for the dissemination of scholarly work, particularly in the area of submission, review, and publication of journals. However to date, much of the impact of these new technologies has been on digitising the products of journal publication; the scholarly processes involved in reviewing journal publications remain unchanged and unsupported. We are using computer-supported collaborative argumentation (CSCA) tools...read more
ID: kmi-96-04
Date: 1996
Author(s): Simon Buckingham Shum, Tamara Sumner and Diana Laurillard
Resources:Multidisciplinary Modelling for User-Centred System Design: An Air-Traffic Control Case Study
This paper reports work investigating how user and system modelling techniques can be integrated to support the design of advanced interactive systems, and how such modelling can be effectively communicated to design practitioners in order to evaluate their potential. We describe a large scale modelling exercise concerning a flight sequencing tool for air-traffic controllers. We outline the kinds of system and user analysis possible with the different modelling techniques, and the approach used...read more
ID: kmi-96-03
Date: 1996
Author(s): Simon Buckingham Shum, Ann Blandford, David Duke, Jason Good, Jon May, Fabio Paterno' and Richard Young
Resources:Supporting Evaluation in Design
Design problem-solving requires designers to be creative and to express evaluative judgments. Designers propose successive partial solutions and evaluate these solutions with respect to various criteria and constraints. Evaluation plays a major role in design because each successive evaluation step guides the course of design activity. However, evaluation of design solutions is difficult for both experienced and inexperienced designers because: (1) in complex domains, no single person can know...read more
A Taxonomy of Intellectual Capital and a Methodology for Auditing It
Ownership of intellectual property is rarely measured. While many companies spend huge amounts of money filing and protecting patents, too often that activity is defensive. Patents are not exercised and do not generate wealth for the inventor. Their windows of opportunity remain a mystery to their owners, as does their value. Organisations that are unaware of the value of their intellectual property are missing an important asset that ought to be included in any exercise which aims to measure...read more
Design Argumentation as Design Rationale
A design rationale (DR) is a representation of the reasoning behind the design of an artifact. In recent years, the use of semiformal notations for organising arguments about design decisions has attracted much interest within the software engineering and human-computer interaction communities, leading to the development of a number of DR notations and tool environments. This article begins by reviewing the motivation for expressing DR as design argumentation, and then surveys evidence from...read more
Analysing the Usability of a Design Rationale Notation
Semiformal, argumentation-based notations are one of the main classes of formalism currently being used to represent design rationale (DR). However, our understanding of the demands on designers of using such representations has to date been drawn largely from informal and anecdotal evidence. One way to tackle the fundamental challenge of reducing DR's representational overheads, is to understand the relationship between designing, and the idea structuring tasks introduced by a semiformal DR...read more
The Visualization of Genetic Algorithms - Related Work
Genetic Algorithms are robust search algorithms capable of finding multiple solutions to complex problems. In order to ensure that the algorithm is working correctly, it is necessary to examine the steps involved in its execution and the results produced at each stage. It is proposed that Software Visualization may be one technique that could support this task. This review examines a number of Software Visualization systems, discusses the key features that may prove useful for visualizing...read more
Teaching Through Electronic Mail
In November 1994 we (members of the former Human Cognition Research Laboratory) ran an experimental version of the Masters level course DM863, "Common Lisp for Artificial Intelligence," taught as far as possible entirely through the Internet. This report describes this course and outlines some of the experiences and ideas that evolved during this course.read more
Imagining with multimedia
The computer was first seen as a calculating engine, and only more recently as a way to view and manipulate the dynamic media. Now as a tool for imagining the computer allows us to explore and think "What if?" about imagined objects and situations. In this paper an analysis is made of the image types that best support engaged multimedia interactivity and which can contribute to the perception of multimedia as a resource for imaginative teaching and learning.read more
Solving VT in VITAL: A Study in Model Construction and Knowledge Reuse
In this paper we discuss a solution to the Sisyphus II elevator design problem developed using the VITAL approach to structured knowledge-based system development. In particular we illustrate in detail the process by which an initial model of Propose&Revise problem solving was constructed using a generative grammar of model fragments and then refined and operationalised in the VITAL operational conceptual modelling language (OCML). In the paper we also discuss in detail the properties of a...read more
ID: kmi-95-09
Date: 1995
Author(s): Enrico Motta, *Kieron O'Hara, *Nigel Shadbolt, Arthur Stutt and Zdenek Zdrahal
Resources:Software Visualization Based KBS validation
The validation of a Knowledge Based System (KBS) involves comparisons between an external reference model and a system's component parts. In this paper I describe how such comparisons can be aided by the application of software visualization technology. Software visualization is the use of filmcraft, cartoon animation and graphic design techniques to display data structures, programs, and algorithms. The described approach eases the task of mapping between the comparates by the use of dynamic...read more
The Naive Psychology Manifesto
This paper argues that artificial intelligence has failed to address the whole problem of common sense, and that this is the cause of a recent stagnation in the field. The big gap is in common sense---or naive---psychology, our natural human ability to see one another as minds rather than as bodies. This is especially important to artificial intelligence because AI must eventually enable us humans to see computers not as grey boxes, but as minds. The paper proposes that AI study exactly...read more
The Knowledge Media Generation
This article describes the philosophy behind the Knowledge Media Institute's approach to teaching and learning. KMI emphasizes 'knowledge' rather than media 'content', and is looking at the role of knowledge assets and diverse technologies as they impact on life-long learning. The article includes an overview of KMI's past successes, including the Virtual Summer School and Virtual Microscope, as well as future research plans.read more
Multiple Agent Systems for Configuration Design
This paper investigates how the task of configuration design can be carried out using concepts of multiple agency. Configuration design is the task of selecting components from a predefined set to complete a system which meets a given functional specification and other design constraints. It is a class of task which is conventionally solved using a single agent reflecting an arbitrary balance of the design criteria chosen by the system designer. To study the efficacy of the multiple agent...read more
The VITAL Bug Tool Report
This document describes the software support for debugging and validation within the vital workbench. The support is based around a set of tools for creating domain, design and code level visualizations of a knowledge based system. Validation is carried out by comparing KBS based visualizations against expert scripted visualizations.read more
Recording the design decisions of knowledge engineers to facilitate re-use of design models
In this paper we focus on the process of constructing reusable knowledge level models by augmenting an explicit process model of KBS design with a means of recording the argumentation about design decisions. Our method includes a set of design principles and an expressive design language for representing design components (such as tasks and roles) with an extension for decision descriptions. We present a concrete example of the application of our design methodology which illustrates how our...read more
The Trouble with What: Issues in method-independent task specifications
In this paper we discuss some issues concerning the organization of knowledge for reuse and we critically examine the ideas of knowledge separation and minimal ontological commitments.. Because knowledge structures can play multiple roles in a domain, it is not necessarily the case that search-control knowledge can be neatly separated from a domain ontology. This is particularly the case when only procedural descriptions of a task are available. Because expert knowledge is often `messy', clean...read more
Using Software Visualization Technology in the validation of Knowledge Based Systems
The validation of a Knowledge Based System (KBS) involves comparisons between an external reference model and a system's component parts. In this paper I describe how such comparisons can be aided by the application of software visualization technology. Software visualization is the use of filmcraft, cartoon animation and graphic design techniques to display data structures, programs, and algorithms. The described approach eases the task of mapping between the comparates by the use of dynamic...read more
Reusable and Maintainable KBS Design
The VITAL Design Methodology is augmented with a means of recording argumentation so as to produce reusable knowledge level models.read more
Froglet: A Source Level Stepper for Lisp
Froglet is a source-level stepper for Common Lisp. Unlike previous steppers, which used pretty-printed reconstructions of definitions to show the progress of execution, Froglet uses the text from which the definition was read. This means that forms can be shown under evaluation in the right context, complete with comments and related functions. It also provides views onto the stack and onto the lexical environment of the form currently being evaluated. This paper describes the background to...read more
The Emerging VITAL Workbench
VITAL is a research and development project which aims to provide methodological and software support for developing large, embedded KBS applications. VITAL is novel in that its ambition is to develop a methodology-based workbench covering the whole KBS life-cycle, from requirements specification to implementation, and to integrate and deploy a number of techniques drawn from artificial intelligence, as well as software engineering and human-computer interaction fields of research. In this...read more
VITAL Bug Location Methodology
Knowledge Engineers (KEs) will use the VITAL workbench to develop large Knowledge Bases. During the course of the development of a KB bugs will be produced. The task of locating bugs within large software modules has long been acknowledged as a difficult and time consuming chore. This has been alleviated, in the VITAL tradition, by providing methodologically based software support, which we call the VITAL Bug Location Methodology.read more
