TCOZ Approach to OWL-S Process Model Design

title: A Z Approach in Validating ORA-SS Data Models
abstract: The rapid growth of the World Wide Web has resulted in more data being accessed over the Internet. In turn there is an increase in the use of semistructured data, which plays a crucial role in many web applications particularly with the introduction of XML and its related technologies. This increase in use makes the design of good semistructured data structures essential. The Object Relationship Attribute model for Semistructured data (ORA-SS) is a graphical notation for designing and representing semistructured data. In this paper, we demonstrate an approach to formally validate the ORA-SS data models in order to enhance the correctness of semistructured data design. A mathematical semantics for the ORA-SS notation is defined using the Z formal language, and further validation processes are carried out to check the correctness of the semistructured data models at both the schema and instance levels.

title: Validating Semistructured Data Using OWL
abstract: Semistructured data has become prevalent in both web applications and database systems. This rapid growth in use makes the design of good semistructured data essential. Formal semantics and automated reasoning tools enable us to reveal the inconsistencies in a semistructured data model and its instances. The Object Relationship Attribute model for Semistructured data (ORA-SS) is a graphical notation for designing and representing semistructured data. This paper presents a methodology of encoding the semantics of ORA-SS in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and automatically validating the semistructured data design using the OWL reasoning tool – RACER. Our methodology provides automated consistency checking of an ORA-SS data model at both the schema and instance levels.

title: Z Approach to Semantic Web
abstract: The Semantic Web (SW) service is a web application using Semantic Web techniques which usually involve cooperation between several intelligent agents. The design of SW systems requires precise modelling techniques to capture ontology domain properties and application functionalities. We believe that Z as a specification technique can contribute to the Semantic Web-based system development in many ways. In this paper, we firstly conduct a case study of applying Z to the design of a SW service system (online talk discovery), and then present translation techniques and tools which can extract the SW ontology from the Z model automatically. Furthermore, we discuss how existing Z tools, i.e. Z/EVES, can be used to improve the quality of SW ontology design.

title: A tools environment for developing and reasoning about ontologies
abstract: Started in the beginning of 2001, the semantic Web is regarded by many as the next generation of the Web. Ontology languages are the building blocks of semantic Web as they provide basic vocabularies for data markups: the ontologies. The correctness of shared ontologies is crucial to the proper functioning of agents. Hence ensuring the consistency of ontologies is a central issue in both the design and deployment phases of any semantic Web-aware application. Our experiences show that semantic Web is a novel and fruitful application domain for formal languages and their mature reasoning tool support. In order to ease the application of formal methods and tools to the semantic Web, we developed an integrated tools environment to support systematic development of OWL ontologies and then transformation, reasoning assistance and querying of them.

title: XML-Based Static Type Checking and Dynamic Visualization for TCOZ
abstract: Timed Communicating Object Z(TCOZ) combines Object-Z's strengths in modelling complex data and state with TCSP's strengths in modeling real-time concurrency. Based on our previous work on the XML environment for TCOZ, this paper firstly demonstrates the development of a type checker for detecting static semantic errors of the TCOZ specification, then illustrates a transformation tool to automatically project TCOZ models into UML statechart diagrams for visualising the dynamic system behaviour.

title: A Distributed Surveillance System to Improve Personal Security in Public Transport
abstract: This paper presents a distributed surveillance system to improve safety andsecurity in public transport environments such as metropolitan railways,airports etc. The system is constructed by a set of modules that provideadditional intelligence to detect potentially dangerous situations and providemore timely prevention and management of events. These modules includeCCTV video processing, audio detection, mobile smart cards, a range of otherpossible sensors and a supervisory front-end. The system design uses ideasfrom control engineering and distributed network communication resulting in aCORBA based architecture and XML messaging. The system components havebeen implemented and integrated in two major successful trials in metropolitanrailway stations (London and Paris) and at Newcastle International Airport, aspart of a major EU-funded project PRISMATICA (?PRo-active Integratedsystems for Security Management by Technological, Institutional andCommunication Assistance?).

title: On Class Visualisation for High Dimensional Data: Exploring Scientific Data Sets
abstract: Parametric Embedding (PE) has recently been proposed as a general-purpose algorithm for class visualisation. It takes class posteriors produced by a mixture-based clustering algorithm and projects them in 2D for visualisation. However, although this fully modularised combination of objectives (clustering and projection) is attractive for its conceptual simplicity, in the case of high dimensional data, we show that a more optimal combination of these objectives can be achieved by integrating them both into a consistent probabilistic model. In this way, the projection step will fulfil a role of regularisation, guarding against the curse of dimensionality. As a result, the tradeoff between clustering and visualisation turns out to enhance the predictive abilities of the overall model. We present results on both synthetic data and two real-world high-dimensional data sets: observed spectra of early-type galaxies and gene expression arrays.

title: Stereo Matching Using Belief Propagation
abstract: In this paper, we formulate the stereo matching problem as a Markov network consisting of three coupled Markov random fields (MRF's). These three MRF's model a smooth field for depth/disparity, a line process for depth discontinuity and a binary process for occlusion, respectively. After eliminating the line process and the binary process by introducing two robust functions, we obtain the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation in the Markov network by applying a Bayesian belief propagation (BP) algorithm. Furthermore, we extend our basic stereo model to incorporate other visual cues (e.g., image segmentation) that are not modeled in the three MRF's, and again obtain the MAP solution. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-art stereo algorithms for most test cases.

title: Hybrid Control of Automotive Powertrain Systems: A Case Study
abstract: In this paper, a hybrid control design approach is used to develop control strategies for coordination of automotive engine and transmission systems. The main goal is to improve system performance, fuel economy, robustness and other performance specifications. The method employs performance indices in guiding both analog and discrete control actions such that robust stability and performance of closed-loop hybrid systems are maintained, in the presence of modeling errors, disturbances and structural uncertainties.

title: The skip quadtree: a simple dynamic data structure for multidimensional data
abstract: We present a new multi-dimensional data structure, which we call the skip quadtree (for point data in R2) or the skip octree (for point data in Rd, with constant d > 2). Our data structure combines the best features of two well-known data structures, in that it has the well-defined "box"-shaped regions of region quadtrees and the logarithmic-height search and update hierarchical structure of skip lists. Indeed, the bottom level of our structure is exactly a region quadtree (or octree for higher dimensional data). We describe efficient algorithms for inserting and deleting points in a skip quadtree, as well as fast methods for performing point location, approximate range, and approximate nearest neighbor queries.