An ontological approach to designers’ idea explanation style: Towards supporting the sharing of kansei-ideas in textile design

In human-centered design activities, each designer has his or her own ideas about emotional aspect (or kansei) of new products. It is a key issue to share this vague kansei-idea appropriately at the earliest stage of design activities. This paper shows a novel ontological engineering approach to support kansei-idea sharing. The approach focuses on an idea explanation style as the wisdom of the design team. Ontological engineering has been making contributions to systematize knowledge and vocabulary by modeling them. Needless to say, it is difficult to model the vague kansei-idea itself. However, if the modeled object is shifted from the kansei-idea to the kansei-idea explanation style, it can provide the benefit of modeling. We investigated the effectiveness of the ontological engineering approach, and concluded that to construct an ontological framework of designers’ explanations is especially useful regarding these points: clarification of the essence of the explanation style, discovery of problems in explanations, and analyzing difficulties in acquiring explanation style for novices. From the investigation, what we can support and how a support system should be designed became clear. Furthermore, we built a kansei-idea sharing support system, and obtained the results of its initial trials.     

An agent-based paradigm for building intelligent CAD systems

The present paper proposes a hybrid approach based on reactive agent technology as a post-object paradigm for building intelligent CAD systems. It represents an evolution of previous positions and articles by the authors motivated by a clear need to provide forms of active support for the design process rather than seeking full design automation purposes. Key concepts about agency and reactivity, as well as their usefulness in design systems, are presented. Also a basic tool called XLOG+, for developing agent-based systems, comprising logic and object oriented approaches, is discussed. Finally, the proposed hybrid agents are embedded in a new integrated CAD system architecture and an implemented prototype example in the area of solid modelling is briefly presented.     

An organism-oriented modeling approach to support the analysis and design of intelligent manufacturing systems

In this paper a generic macroscopic object, termed an organism, is introduced. An organism defines a high-level modeling object that has the capabilities for organizational networking, standardization or characteristics specifications, decoupling of editing and visualization as well as temporal management. Organism-oriented models inherit from their parent object-oriented and object/agent-oriented models a simplified representation of the manufacturing entities as well as a capacity for many levels of abstraction. Moreover, the organism-oriented modeling approach enriches these models by not only considering basic manufacturing objects and agents, but also the fact that each of these objects and agents may itself be an organization and also part of one or several organizations. The paper first surveys some of the current approaches used for modeling and analysing manufacturing systems: structured analysis, Petri nets, object and object/ agent models. The object model behind the organism-oriented modeling approach is then presented and its application to a manufacturing case is illustrated.     

Work-centered support systems: a human-centered approach to intelligent system design

The work-centered support system approach to human-centered computing focuses on analyzing and supporting the multiple facets of work. The WCSS for global weather management developed to support weather forecasting and monitoring in an airlift service organization, exemplifies this approach. A hallmark of human-centered computing (HCC) is its focus on domain practitioners and their field of practice. Human-centered design depends on a deep analysis of a field's cognitive and collaborative demands and how people work individually, in groups, and in organizations to meet those demands. The objective is to leverage what we know about human cognitive and collaborative processes to create systems that optimize the affordances (direct perception of meanings) and effectivities (knowledge-driven actions) for humans. The WCSS paradigm offers an approach for incorporating software agent technology in a manner that helps the user keep the head in the work and reduces the possibility that software agent states or actions surprise the user.     

Assessing process in CSCL: An ontological approach

Educational technology innovations enable students to collaborate in online educational tasks, across individual, institutional, and national boundaries. However, online interactions across these boundaries are seldom transparent to each other. As a result, students are not motivated to share their best learning practices. Also, there is no singular basis on which one can compare learning practices of multiple students. In addressing these problems, we offer a solution that encourages students to record and share their learning interactions using our ontology-oriented theory-centric software tool. In doing so, students not only observe the products of their learning but also the process of how they learnt. These unique and computationally formal recordings of learning interactions not only allow educators to observe how learners learn, but also provide opportunities for learners to reflect on their understanding of meta-cognitive processes that they employed or neglected in their learning. Further, these recordings feed our software system to autonomously analyze students’ learning behaviour and to actively promote self- and co-regulation among learners. This article presents the need for such a system, the architecture of the system, and concludes with key experimental observations from software prototypes.     

Modeling self-efficacy in intelligent tutoring systems: An inductive approach

Self-efficacy is an individual’s belief about her ability to perform well in a given situation. Because self-efficacious students are effective learners, endowing intelligent tutoring systems with the ability to diagnose self-efficacy could lead to improved pedagogy. Self-efficacy is influenced by (and influences) affective state. Thus, physiological data might be used to predict a student’s level of self-efficacy. This article investigates an inductive approach to automatically constructing models of self-efficacy that can be used at runtime to inform pedagogical decisions. It reports on two complementary empirical studies. In the first study, two families of self-efficacy models were induced: a static self-efficacy model, learned solely from pre-test (non-intrusively collected) data, and a dynamic self-efficacy model, learned from both pre-test data as well as runtime physiological data collected with a biofeedback apparatus. In the second empirical study, a similar experimental design was applied to an interactive narrative-centered learning environment. Self-efficacy models were induced from combinations of static and dynamic information, including pre-test data, physiological data, and observations of student behavior in the learning environment. The highest performing induced naïve Bayes models correctly classified 85.2% of instances in the first empirical study and 82.1% of instances in the second empirical study. The highest performing decision tree models correctly classified 86.9% of instances in the first study and 87.3% of instances in the second study.     

A dishwasher design system: An application of tailor-made CAD systems versus commercial systems

In a company, for a given product and its process, CAD systems can be either adapted from a commercial one or tailor-made. Although in most of the cases there is not doubt in the choice, sometimes it's not obvious which system is the most suitable for the company's product and process.

In this paper, the features of both types of CAD systems are discussed, its advantages and disadvantages and the reasons for selecting one or another. After this, a tailor-made CAD system of a dishwasher designed and built in Ikerlan is explained in detail. Finally, a series of examples about other tailor-made CAD systems built in Ikerlan are shown.     

An ontological approach to describe the SQL:2003 object-relational features

The SQL (Structured Query Language) is currently available in most database management systems and is the focus of an intense standardization process resulting in the latest version of the SQL:2003 standard. Standards are fundamental, but often they are difficult to use, due to their lack of understandability and the occurrence of inconsistencies. An ontology is useful for clarifying the elements of a standard, along with their interrelationships, as well as for detecting inconsistencies. In this paper we propose an ontology for the object-relational features of the new SQL:2003 standard, formalized with UML 2.0 class diagrams and OCL well-formedness rules. The ontology is instantiated with an example in which most of the new object-relational features of the SQL:2003 standard are presented.     

An intelligent control and decision approach for adaptive systems

An intelligent control and decision-making (ICD) approach that integrates expert systems technology with adaptive algorithms is presented. The controller parameters of adaptive systems can be determined using human expertise and knowledge, and they can also be adjusted based on active monitoring and identification. Decision-making, fine tuning and inexact reasoning provide the end-user and the control engineers with a natural and integrated methodology for use with intelligent control systems. Computer simulation results demonstrate the utility of the proposed technique that is an effective intelligent control and decision approach. The ICD system is implemented using a Lisp based expert system shell on an IBM PC.     

Towards the design of secure systems

Within a programmed system, we may distinguish between different kinds of information in order to control the use of each kind by separate security policies, where each policy is tailored to the sensitivity and desired dissemination of that one kind of information. This paper analyses the implications of implementing security policies and describes mechanisms which can be used as the basis for constructing operating systems with the desired security attributes.     

On the ontological expressiveness of information systems analysis and design grammars

Abstract. Information systems analysis and design (ISAD) methodologies provide facilities for describing existing or conceived real-world systems. These facilities are ontologically expressive if they are capable of describing all real-world phenomena completely and clearly. In this paper we formally examine the notion of the ontological expressiveness of a grammar and discuss some of its implications for the design and use of ISAD methodologies. We identify some generic ways in which ontological expressiveness may be undermined in a grammar and some potential consequences of these violations. We also examine ontological expressiveness within the context of some other desirable features that might be considered in the design of ISAD methodologies.     

An operational approach to the design of workflow systems

We construct models as an aid to our thought process. A particular class of models, operational models, can be used for simulation and prototyping. The OPJ modeling language is suitable for building operational models of complex software systems.The notion of operational parameterized building block is the key point of the approach, which focuses on two major phases: domain modeling and system modeling. Domain modeling consists in providing the classes of the building blocks grouped into different schemata. System modeling consists in building an actual model using the building blocks taken from the above-mentioned schemata; such building blocks are connected to each other according to the rules expressed in the schemata and are given actual parameters.As an example, a workflow management system supporting business process managing travel authorizations is presented. The workflow system is modeled and then used to synthesize a distributed prototype.     

Towards intelligent autonomous control systems: Architecture and fundamental issues

Autonomous control systems are designed to perform well under significant uncertainties in the system and environment for extended periods of time, and they must be able to compensate for system failures without external intervention. Intelligent autonomous control systems use techniques from the field of artificial intelligence to achieve this autonomy. Such control systems evolve from conventional control systems by adding intelligent components, and their development requires interdisciplinary research. A hierarchical functional intelligent autonomous control architecture is introduced here and its functions are described in detail. The fundamental issues in autonomous control system modelling and analysis are discussed.     

An ontological approach to support legal information modeling

Support for information, knowledge exchange and share is a key issue in the information society. Coming into contact with global sharing of resources, mutual well-understood knowledge of intellectual property is worthy of attention. However, there is a lack of systematic information-modeling methodology for the issue; closely connected to this problem is that most of the intelligent legal systems are undesirable and ineffective for multinational semantic mapping of article information. We propose an ontology-guided approach that provides semantic primitive representation of legal information with intention perspective. The domain ontology we developed is used as a fundamental conceptual framework to maintain the consistency among diverse legal representation.     

Compromise: An effective approach for the hierarchical design of structural systems

In this paper the use of the compromise decision support problem in hierarchical design of structural systems is described. In the past we had postulated the hierarchical decision support problem for use in hierarchical design. In this paper, for the first time, the mathematical template that supports the underlying precepts of hierarchical design in the context of the Decision Support Problem Technique is presented. A structural example that demonstrates the efficacy of the approach is included.