Ontology of Collaborative Supply Chain for Quality Management

In the highly competitive and rapidly changing global marketplace, independent organizations and enterprises often come together and form a temporary alignment of virtual enterprise in a supply chain to better provide products or service. As firms adopt the systems approach implicit in supply chain management, they must manage the quality from both internal process control and external control of supplier quality and customer requirements. How to incorporate quality management of upstream and downstream supply chain partners into their own quality management system has recently received a great deal of attention from both academic and practice. This paper investigate the collaborative feature and the entities- relationship in a supply chain, and presents an ontology of collaborative supply chain from an approach of aligning service-oriented framework with service-dominant logic. This perspective facilitates the segregation of material flow management from manufacturing capability management, which provides a foundation for the coordination and integration of the business process to measure, analyze, and continually improve the quality of products, services, and process. Further, this approach characterizes the different interests of supply chain partners, providing an innovative approach to analyze the collaborative features of supply chain. Furthermore, this ontology is the foundation to develop quality management system which internalizes the quality management in upstream and downstream supply chain partners and manages the quality in supply chain systematically.

Secure Data Aggregation Using Clusters in Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor network can be applied to both abominable and military environments. A primary goal in the design of wireless sensor networks is lifetime maximization, constrained by the energy capacity of batteries. One well-known method to reduce energy consumption in such networks is data aggregation. Providing efcient data aggregation while preserving data privacy is a challenging problem in wireless sensor networks research. In this paper, we present privacy-preserving data aggregation scheme for additive aggregation functions. The Cluster-based Private Data Aggregation (CPDA)leverages clustering protocol and algebraic properties of polynomials. It has the advantage of incurring less communication overhead. The goal of our work is to bridge the gap between collaborative data collection by wireless sensor networks and data privacy. We present simulation results of our schemes and compare their performance to a typical data aggregation scheme TAG, where no data privacy protection is provided. Results show the efficacy and efficiency of our schemes.

The Innovative Information System for Systemic Approach of the Sustainability in the Enterprise

This paper presents an innovative computer system that contributes to sustainable development of the enterprise. The research refers to a rethinking of traditional systems of collaboration and risk assessment, present in any organization, leading to a sustainable enterprise. This concept integrates emerging tools that allow the implementation and exploitation of the collective intelligence of the enterprise, allowing the exchange of contextual, agile and simplified information, and collaboration with networks of customers and partners in an environment where risks are controlled. Risk assessment is done in a systemic way: the enterprise as the system compared to the contained departments and the enterprise as a subsystem compared to: families of international standards and sustainability-s responsibilities. The enterprise, in this systemic vision, responds to the requirements that any existing system to operate continuously in an indefinite future without reaching key resource depletion. The research is done by integrating collaborative science, engineering, management, psychology, obtaining thus a cornerstone of sustainable development of the enterprise.

Do Firms Need Strategic Alliances?

This study develops a relation to explore the factors influencing management and technology capabilities in strategic alliances. Alliances between firms are recognizing increasingly popular as a vehicle to create and extract greater value from the market. Firm’s alliance can be described as the collaborative problem solving process to solve problems jointly. This study starts from research questions what factors of firm’s management and technology characteristics affect performance of firms which are formed alliances. In this study, we investigated the effect of strategic alliances on company performance. That is, we try to identify whether firms made an alliance with other organizations are differed by characteristics of management and technology. And we test that alliance type and alliance experiences moderate the relationship between firm’s capabilities and its performance. We employ problem-solving perspective and resource-based view perspective to shed light on this research questions. The empirical work is based on the Survey of Business Activities conducted from2006 to 2008 by Statistics Korea. We verify correlations between to point out that these results contribute new empirical evidence on the effect of strategic alliances on company performance.

Rule-Based Message Passing for Collaborative Application in Distributed Environments

In this paper, we describe a rule-based message passing method to support developing collaborative applications, in which multiple users share resources in distributed environments. Message communications of applications in collaborative environments tend to be very complex because of the necessity to manage context situations such as sharing events, access controlling of users, and network places. In this paper, we propose a message communications method based on unification of artificial intelligence and logic programming for defining rules of such context information in a procedural object-oriented programming language. We also present an implementation of the method as java classes.

Collaborative Education Practice in a Data Structure E-Learning Course

This paper presented a collaborative education model, which consists four parts: collaborative teaching, collaborative working, collaborative training and interaction. Supported by an e-learning platform, collaborative education was practiced in a data structure e-learning course. Data collected shows that most of students accept collaborative education. This paper goes one step attempting to determine which aspects appear to be most important or helpful in collaborative education.

Collaborative and Content-based Recommender System for Social Bookmarking Website

This study proposes a new recommender system based on the collaborative folksonomy. The purpose of the proposed system is to recommend Internet resources (such as books, articles, documents, pictures, audio and video) to users. The proposed method includes four steps: creating the user profile based on the tags, grouping the similar users into clusters using an agglomerative hierarchical clustering, finding similar resources based on the user-s past collections by using content-based filtering, and recommending similar items to the target user. This study examines the system-s performance for the dataset collected from “del.icio.us," which is a famous social bookmarking website. Experimental results show that the proposed tag-based collaborative and content-based filtering hybridized recommender system is promising and effectiveness in the folksonomy-based bookmarking website.

A Generic, Functionally Comprehensive Approach to Maintaining an Ontology as a Relational Database

An ontology is a data model that represents a set of concepts in a given field and the relationships among those concepts. As the emphasis on achieving a semantic web continues to escalate, ontologies for all types of domains increasingly will be developed. These ontologies may become large and complex, and as their size and complexity grows, so will the need for multi-user interfaces for ontology curation. Herein a functionally comprehensive, generic approach to maintaining an ontology as a relational database is presented. Unlike many other ontology editors that utilize a database, this approach is entirely domain-generic and fully supports Webbased, collaborative editing including the designation of different levels of authorization for users.

LAYMOD; A Layered and Modular Platform for CAx Collaboration Management and Supporting Product data Integration based on STEP Standard

Nowadays companies strive to survive in a competitive global environment. To speed up product development/modifications, it is suggested to adopt a collaborative product development approach. However, despite the advantages of new IT improvements still many CAx systems work separately and locally. Collaborative design and manufacture requires a product information model that supports related CAx product data models. To solve this problem many solutions are proposed, which the most successful one is adopting the STEP standard as a product data model to develop a collaborative CAx platform. However, the improvement of the STEP-s Application Protocols (APs) over the time, huge number of STEP AP-s and cc-s, the high costs of implementation, costly process for conversion of older CAx software files to the STEP neutral file format; and lack of STEP knowledge, that usually slows down the implementation of the STEP standard in collaborative data exchange, management and integration should be considered. In this paper the requirements for a successful collaborative CAx system is discussed. The STEP standard capability for product data integration and its shortcomings as well as the dominant platforms for supporting CAx collaboration management and product data integration are reviewed. Finally a platform named LAYMOD to fulfil the requirements of CAx collaborative environment and integrating the product data is proposed. The platform is a layered platform to enable global collaboration among different CAx software packages/developers. It also adopts the STEP modular architecture and the XML data structures to enable collaboration between CAx software packages as well as overcoming the STEP standard limitations. The architecture and procedures of LAYMOD platform to manage collaboration and avoid contradicts in product data integration are introduced.

A Collaborative Framework for Visual Modeling on Web 2.0

Cooperative visual modeling is more and more necessary in our complicated world. A collaborative environment which supports interactive operation and communication is required to increase work efficiency. We present a collaborative visual modeling framework which collaborative platform could be built on. On this platform, cooperation and communication is available for designers from different regions. This framework, which is different from other collaborative frameworks, contains a uniform message format, a message handling mechanism and other functions such as message pretreatment and Role-Communication-Token Access Control (RCTAC). We also show our implementation of this framework called Orchestra Designer, which support BPLE workflow modeling cooperatively online.

Toward a Use of Ontology to Reinforcing Semantic Classification of Message Based On LSA

For best collaboration, Asynchronous tools and particularly the discussion forums are the most used thanks to their flexibility in terms of time. To convey only the messages that belong to a theme of interest of the tutor in order to help him during his tutoring work, use of a tool for classification of these messages is indispensable. For this we have proposed a semantics classification tool of messages of a discussion forum that is based on LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis), which includes a thesaurus to organize the vocabulary. Benefits offered by formal ontology can overcome the insufficiencies that a thesaurus generates during its use and encourage us then to use it in our semantic classifier. In this work we propose the use of some functionalities that a OWL ontology proposes. We then explain how functionalities like “ObjectProperty", "SubClassOf" and “Datatype" property make our classification more intelligent by way of integrating new terms. New terms found are generated based on the first terms introduced by tutor and semantic relations described by OWL formalism.

High Wire Act: the Perils, Pitfalls and Possibilities of Online Discussions

Online discussions are an important component of both blended and online courses. This paper examines the varieties of online discussions and the perils, pitfalls and possibilities of this rather new technological tool for enhanced learning. The discussion begins with possible perils and pitfalls inherent in this educational tool and moves to a consideration of the advantages of the varieties of online discussions feasible for use in teacher education programs.

Managing Handheld Devices in Ad-Hoc Collaborative Computing Environments

The noticeable advance in the area of computer technology has paved the way for the invention of powerful mobile devices. However, limited storage, short battery life, and relatively low computational power define the major problems of such devices. Due to the ever increasing computational requirements, such devices may fail to process needed tasks under certain constraints. One of the proposed solutions to this drawback is the introduction of Collaborative Computing, a new concept dealing with the distribution of computational tasks amongst several handhelds. This paper introduces the basics of Collaborative Computing, and proposes a new protocol that aims at managing and optimizing computing tasks in Ad-Hoc Collaborative Computing Environments.

Concept Indexing using Ontology and Supervised Machine Learning

Nowadays, ontologies are the only widely accepted paradigm for the management of sharable and reusable knowledge in a way that allows its automatic interpretation. They are collaboratively created across the Web and used to index, search and annotate documents. The vast majority of the ontology based approaches, however, focus on indexing texts at document level. Recently, with the advances in ontological engineering, it became clear that information indexing can largely benefit from the use of general purpose ontologies which aid the indexing of documents at word level. This paper presents a concept indexing algorithm, which adds ontology information to words and phrases and allows full text to be searched, browsed and analyzed at different levels of abstraction. This algorithm uses a general purpose ontology, OntoRo, and an ontologically tagged corpus, OntoCorp, both developed for the purpose of this research. OntoRo and OntoCorp are used in a two-stage supervised machine learning process aimed at generating ontology tagging rules. The first experimental tests show a tagging accuracy of 78.91% which is encouraging in terms of the further improvement of the algorithm.

Scientific Workflow Interoperability Evaluation

There is wide range of scientific workflow systems today, each one designed to resolve problems at a specific level. In large collaborative projects, it is often necessary to recognize the heterogeneous workflow systems already in use by various partners and any potential collaboration between these systems requires workflow interoperability. Publish/Subscribe Scientific Workflow Interoperability Framework (PS-SWIF) approach was proposed to achieve workflow interoperability among workflow systems. This paper evaluates the PS-SWIF approach and its system to achieve workflow interoperability using Web Services with asynchronous notification messages represented by WS-Eventing standard. This experiment covers different types of communication models provided by Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC). These models are: Chained processes, Nested synchronous sub-processes, Event synchronous sub-processes, and Nested sub-processes (Polling/Deferred Synchronous). Also, this experiment shows the flexibility and simplicity of the PS-SWIF approach when applied to a variety of workflow systems (Triana, Taverna, Kepler) in local and remote environments.

Use of Semantic Networks as Learning Material and Evaluation of the Approach by Students

This article first summarizes reasons why current approaches supporting Open Learning and Distance Education need to be complemented by tools permitting lecturers, researchers and students to cooperatively organize the semantic content of Learning related materials (courses, discussions, etc.) into a fine-grained shared semantic network. This first part of the article also quickly describes the approach adopted to permit such a collaborative work. Then, examples of such semantic networks are presented. Finally, an evaluation of the approach by students is provided and analyzed.

MovieReco: A Recommendation System

Recommender Systems act as personalized decision guides, aiding users in decisions on matters related to personal taste. Most previous research on Recommender Systems has focused on the statistical accuracy of the algorithms driving the systems, with no emphasis on the trustworthiness of the user. RS depends on information provided by different users to gather its knowledge. We believe, if a large group of users provide wrong information it will not be possible for the RS to arrive in an accurate conclusion. The system described in this paper introduce the concept of Testing the knowledge of user to filter out these “bad users". This paper emphasizes on the mechanism used to provide robust and effective recommendation.

An AR/VR Based Approach Towards the Intuitive Control of Mobile Rescue Robots

An intuitive user interface for the teleoperation of mobile rescue robots is one key feature for a successful exploration of inaccessible and no-go areas. Therefore, we have developed a novel framework to embed a flexible and modular user interface into a complete 3-D virtual reality simulation system. Our approach is based on a client-server architecture to allow for a collaborative control of the rescue robot together with multiple clients on demand. Further, it is important that the user interface is not restricted to any specific type of mobile robot. Therefore, our flexible approach allows for the operation of different robot types with a consistent concept and user interface. In laboratory tests, we have evaluated the validity and effectiveness of our approach with the help of two different robot platforms and several input devices. As a result, an untrained person can intuitively teleoperate both robots without needing a familiarization time when changing the operating robot.

A Model of Technological Platform for the Knowledge Management Organization

This paper describes an experience of research, development and innovation applied in Industrial Naval at (Science and Technology Corporation for the Development of Shipbuilding Industry, Naval in Colombia (COTECMAR) particularly through processes of research, innovation and technological development, based on theoretical models related to organizational knowledge management, technology management and management of human talent and integration of technology platforms. It seeks ways to facilitate the initial establishment of environments rich in information, knowledge and content-supported collaborative strategies on dynamic processes missionary, seeking further development in the context of research, development and innovation of the Naval Engineering in Colombia, making it a distinct basis for the generation of knowledge assets from COTECMAR. The integration of information and communication technologies, supported on emerging technologies (mobile technologies, wireless, digital content via PDA, and content delivery services on the Web 2.0 and Web 3.0) as a view of the strategic thrusts in any organization facilitates the redefinition of processes for managing information and knowledge, enabling the redesign of workflows, the adaptation of new forms of organization - preferably in networking and support the creation of symbolic-inside-knowledge promotes the development of new skills, knowledge and attitudes of the knowledge worker

e/b-Learning Activities and High School Pedagogy

This article presents the implementation of several different e/b-Learning collaborative activities, used to improve the students learning process in an high school Polytechnic Institution. A new learning model arises, based on a combination between face-toface and distance leaning. Learning is now becoming centered with the development of collaborative activities, and its actors (teachers and students) have to be re-socialized to a new e/b-Learning paradigm. Measuring approaches are proposed for this model and results are presented, showing prospective correlation between students learning success and the use of online collaborative activities.