Ebook: Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases XXI

This paper presents a design and implementation for the “4D World Map System,” a knowledge representation system which enables semantic, temporal and spatial analysis of documents, and integrates and visualizes the analyzed results as a 4-dimentional dynamic historical atlas (4D World Map Set). The main feature of this system is to create various context-dependent patterns of historical/cultural stories according to a user's viewpoints dynamically. This system generates multiple views of semantic and temporal-spatial relationships among documents of the humanities and social sciences. This system organizes the relationships among documents into various historical/cultural stories by a user's viewpoints. A semantic associative search method is applied to this system for realizing the concept that “semantics” of words, documents, and events vary according to the “context”. Semantically-evaluated and analyzed document data are also mapped dynamically onto a time-series multi-geographical space. This system provides high visibility of semantic correlations between documents in time series variation with geographic information. In this paper, we also show several experiments by using news articles and International Relations documents to clarify the feasibility of the system.

In the last decades information modelling and knowledge bases have become important subjects not only in academic communities related to information systems and computer science but also in the business area where information technology is applied. The 19th European-Japanese Conference on Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases (EJC 2009) continues the series of events that originally started as a co-operation initiative between Japan and Finland, already in the last half of the 1980's. Later (1991) the geographical scope of these conferences expanded to cover the whole Europe and other countries as well.

The EJC conferences constitute a world-wide research forum for the exchange of scientific results and experiences achieved in computer science and other related disciplines using innovative methods and progressive approaches. In this way a platform has been established drawing together researchers as well as practitioners dealing with information modelling and knowledge bases. The main topics of EJC conferences target the variety of themes in the domain of information modelling, conceptual analysis, multimedia knowledge bases, design and specification of information systems, multimedia information modelling, multimedia systems, ontology, software engineering, knowledge and process management. We also aim at applying new progressive theories. To this end much attention is paid also to theoretical disciplines including cognitive science, artificial intelligence, logic, linguistics and analytical philosophy. In order to achieve EJC targets, an international program committee selected 14 full papers, 12 short papers, 4 position papers in a rigorous reviewing process from 40 submissions. The selected papers cover many areas of information modelling, namely theory of concepts, database semantics, knowledge representation, software engineering, WWW information management, multimedia information retrieval, ontological technology, image databases, temporal and spatial databases, document data management, process management, and many others.

The conference could not be a success without the effort of many people and organizations. In the Program Committee, 31 reputable researchers devoted a lot of effort to the review process selecting the best papers and creating the EJC 2009 program. We are very grateful to them. Professor Yasushi Kiyoki and Professor Takehiro Tokuda were acting as co-chairs of the program committee. Professor Tatjana Welzer-Družovec and her team were managing the conference venue and the local arrangement. Professor Hannu Jaakkola acted as a general organizing chair and Ms. Ulla Nevanranta as a conference secretary for general organizational things necessary for annually running the conference series. Dr. Naofumi Yoshida and his team in Program Coordination Team were managing the review process and the conference program. We gratefully appreciate also the efforts of all supporters, especially the Slovenian Research Agency, for supporting the arrangements of this annual event.

We believe that the conference was productive and fruitful in the advance of research and application of information modelling and knowledge bases. The presented book features upgraded papers as a result of the presentation and discussion at the conference.

The Editors

Tatjana Welzer Družovec

Hannu Jaakkola

Yasushi Kiyoki

Takehiro Tokuda

Naofumi Yoshida

This article depicts a system of analysis and description which focuses on children's conceptual thinking and learning in regard to certain selected natural phenomena during spontaneous exploration in a learning environment where the children used the PICCO pictorial multimedia simulation program. The objective of the analysis and description system is to examine and depict the processes of conceptual thinking and learning multi-dimensionally in such a way that social and cognitive factors, as well as their interdependencies and interrelations, are taken into account. In connection with the construction and introduction of the analysis and description system, the system is also illustrated on the basis of research material compiled on three children.

The starting point of this paper is the external surface of a word form, for example the agent-external acoustic perturbations constituting a language sign in speech or the dots on paper in the case of written language. The external surfaces are modality-dependent tokens which the hearer recognizes by means of (i) pattern-matching and (ii) a mapping into modality-independent types, and which the speaker produces by an inverse mapping from modality-independent types into tokens synthesized in a modality of choice.

The types are provided by a lexicon stored in the agent's memory. They include not only the necessary

Necessary as opposed to accidental (kata sumbebêkos), as used in the philosophical tradition of Aristotle.

Currently, a lot of news articles are published on the Web, and it is getting easier for us to read them. However, the number of articles are too large for us to read all of them. Although some Web sites cluster/classify news articles into some topics (categories), it is not enough since a large number of articles are still in each topic. Detecting difference between articles on one topic will be one of the solution to comprehend the whole topic. In this paper, we propose a method for detection of difference between news articles on the same topic. Articles are sequentially compared by three different comparison units: paragraphs, sentences, and simple sentences. Our method is evaluated by applying it to Japanese news articles.

Virtual communities rely primarily on ICT to connect their members to work together, and to share knowledge and practices. The importance of virtual collaborative work is increasing not only because of its economical and environmental benefits, but also due to its flexibility for establishing dynamically new cross-organizational and cross-cultural innovative teams. Virtual collaborative spaces should support their joint activities. In order to design and realize such spaces, an understanding of the tasks to be carried out by the virtual community is necessary, as well as an understanding of the related processes, contexts, and knowledge. In our paper, we introduce a reference model of a Cross-Cultural Cyber Space (CCS) for context-based knowledge creation and sharing between the members of the cross-cultural collaborative community. We also describe the prototype implementation of the CCS, a 3D cross-cultural art museum system.

This paper presents an architectural framework for incorporating knowledge management into service-oriented systems. One of the most important characteristics of service-oriented systems is automated orchestration of services into business processes, which we believe can be improved by knowledge management. The approach we discuss is an important step from isolated knowledge management systems to knowledge management integrated into daily work and is based on the observation that business process execution can be seen as an opportunity to capture the knowledge and merge it with the existing knowledge in the organizational memory. The proposed framework not only enables efficient and effective management of knowledge but also enables automation of certain knowledge-based human performed tasks, which is an important achievement in the area of business process management.

Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) enables us to extract conceptual information from data and to visualize its structure in a lattice form. Here, we apply FCA to the analysis of a series of documents published periodically, in order to capture drifts of formal concepts occurred in the series by shifting the corresponding formal context as a viewpoint by some constant amount of time little by little. The resulting concept drifts can reflect the change of topics frequently discussed at that time.

Database modelling is classically defining the database dictionary, database structuring and functionality within one singleton paradigm. This approach has led to sophisticated financial services, to enterprise information systems and other database-backed practical solution which are easy to handle, relatively simple to change and to implement and which satisfied the needs of business in the 90ies. At the same time a number of applications have been developed that used the potential within the data for analysis, for exchange and collaboration of systems, e.g. OLTP-OLAP systems, decision support systems, scientific information systems, collaborative information systems and web information systems. These applications do not use a singleton language for data storage, data computation and data delivery. Their languages use different paradigms. We therefore need a way for specification of database applications that provide facilities for appropriate modelling depending on the needs.

This paper aims in developing a framework for modelling and implementing layered database applications. It defines a database model for each of the layers and a facility for exchange of data throughout the different layers in a coherent form.

The paper introduces a method of transition from Transparent Intensional Logic (TIL) into Prolog system and vice versa, in order to utilize Prolog inference machine in the deductive system of TIL. Agents communicate in the TIL-Script language, a computational variant of the expressive TIL system, which serves as a content language of agents' messaging. However, since a great expressive power is inversely proportional to an easy implementation of a suitable automatic deductive system, we specify a subset of the set of TIL constructions the elements of which can be encoded in Prolog language. Moreover, due to the weaker expressivity of Prolog we have to build up a TIL functional overlay that makes it possible to realize the reverse transition from Prolog into TIL in a near to equivalent way.

Nowadays more and more Web sites generate Web pages containing client-side scripts such as JavaScript and Flash instead of ordinary static HTML pages. These scripts create dynamic HTML pages and provide modern interfaces to Web applications such as AJAX applications. Unfortunately, for partial information extraction of Web pages, existing methods cannot extract dynamic Web contents.

In this paper, we present a new partial information extraction method which can deal with not only static Web contents but also dynamic Web contents created by client-side scripts. As applications, we present personal mashup construction examples based on our extraction method. Our implementation shows that our extraction method is efficiently applicable to various types of Web sites such as news sites, country profile sites and weather sites.

The application area of image retrieval systems has widely spread to the WWW and multimedia database environments. This paper presents an image search system with analytical functions for combining shape, structure, and color features. The system pre-processes an image segmentation from hybrid color systems of HSL and CIELAB. This segmentation process includes a new mechanism for clustering the elements of high-resolution images in order to improve precision and reduce computation time. The system extracts three features of an image which are color, shape and structure. We apply the 3D Color Vector Quantization for the color feature extraction. The shape properties of an image which include eccentricity, area, equivalent diameter, and convex area, are analyzed for extracting the shape feature. The image structure is identified by applying 2D Forward Mirror-Extended Curvelet Transform. Another distinctive idea introduced in this paper is a new distance metric which represents a semantic similarity. This paper has evaluations of the system using 1000 JPEG images from COREL image collections. The experimental results clarify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed system to improve accuracy for image retrieval.

Image-query creation for expressing user's intentions is essential for efficient utilization of massive digital image resources. This paper presents an image-query creation method for expressing user's query intentions by combining multiple images for Content-based Image Retrieval. The image-query for expressing intentions is created by combining image resources in image aspects such as colors and objects. This method realizes image-query creation by the drawing on user's imagination to express intentions such as the addition of the color, the removal of the object, the conversion and the scaling. This method uses multiple actual images and applies several query-creation operators calculating image features for expressing intentions to those images. This paper shows implementation of the experimental system where image queries are expressed with specific intentions to clarify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method with experimental results.

This paper presents an interconnection method for heterogeneous knowledge bases depending on user's interests as a context. Various knowledge bases have been created in each field by using collaborative working environments such as Wiki. One of the important issues is how to interconnect these knowledge bases and represent the relationships between various concepts in heterogeneous fields. An event affects various aspects of an area, field, or community. In order to understand an arbitrary event or concept, it is necessary to find various relationships over heterogeneous fields. Generally, the relationships over heterogeneous fields strongly depend on contexts and situations. It is important to realize the dynamic interconnection of knowledge bases depending on contexts and situations. Therefore, we design an interrelation management function (IMF) that defines the operator for interconnection data. In this paper, we propose a framework for a context-dependent dynamic interconnection method by using the interrelation management function.

In order to increase the expressiveness of XML query languages we define an XML object model that provides a rich description of XML data using the notions of class schema and class tuple. Based on this model we develop a novel query language, the XML Identity Query Language (XIQL) based on identifier generation and fixed-point computation. However, XIQL cannot deal with finite tree duplicates in an XML object graph. To solve this problem we extend XIQL by integrating terms denoting hereditarily finite sets. With respect to determinate transformations the extended XIQL⁺ is still incomplete, but becomes complete with respect to a modified completeness criterion for XML database transformations, which aims at capturing more non-determinism.

This paper deals with the problem with consistency of the information model of a business system. This paper results from the methodology used in a business system's information modelling based on the idea of the two basic dimensions of the business system model. This approach combines the conceptual model with the process model. The problem with the consistency of particular models (diagrams) is discussed using the formal specification of business system modelling. Particular attention is paid to the consistency of structures: the so-called “structural consistency”, which is based on the work of M.A.Jackson.

This paper provides a technique that enables embedding of path and twig query evaluation in an application server built on top of a small footprint data manager. The technique proposed offers increased flexibility, enabling seamless integration of business rules with low level evaluation facilities. This flexibility compares with that supported by stored procedures in SQL, not available for XML. Our method leverages deferred processing of a Structural Join (SJ) that we modify so as to achieve the minimum number of IO operations. Our recursive composition technique takes advantage of FIFO order processing, what results in a significant performance boost.

In this paper, we propose a real-time and collaborative hyper-media system that introduces database-enhanced collaborative models and multimedia processing models for creating improvised performances in the Opera of Meaning. The system provides a main story media and a corresponding shared canvas that is shared among Internet-wide user communities. Our shared canvas mechanisms make it possible to describe and share users' ideas and impressions about the main story media. The key technology of this system is a timeline-dependent and script-driven live performance engine, which provides users with ECA rules to express and characterize the users' ideas and impressions by using existing multimedia data such as video files and image files. The system provides directors and participants of improvised performance with a set of database operators for controlling and contributing to the performance. The system motivates users to contribute to the performance by exploiting users' own media libraries and existing web services. We have implemented the prototype system which is applicable to the existing video and image files on the Web.

In order to optimize working processes of medical and healthcare organizations, the most recent trends in software development suggest the use of distributed, autonomous software services combined into specific information system, where various users can access the information they need in an easy and straight-forward manner. Semantic web technologies are state-of-the-art approach that should fulfill these requirements, but they are not a silver bullet. Therefore, in this paper we present some results of our endeavors in adopting SWT for medical software and services. First, SWT are incorporated with SOA principles and semantic web services execution ontology is defined, then the system architecture for automated execution of SWS in accordance with SWSEO is designed, and finally the improved SWT based system architecture is presented for developing unified medical software system and services.

The retrieval problem is one of the main reasoning problems for ontology based systems. The retrieval problem for concept C consists in finding all individuals a which satisfy C(a). We present ontology transformation which can help to improve evaluating queries over (sublanguage of) OWL ontologies. Our solution is based on translating retrieval concepts into relational algebra expressions and consequently to SQL queries over a database constructed from the original ontology. Ontology transformation into database is ontology-dependent but fully automatic and it is provided by system TORQue.

The applications of ontologies are mainly restricted to academia while successful employment in business environments is rare. Existing methodologies are complex and require technical expertise on language syntax and knowledge of the process. We propose Rapid Ontology Development (ROD) approach for ontology construction, where steps are constantly evaluated and the user is guided throughout the process. Following ROD approach the required technical knowledge for ontology modeling is minimized and the process doesn't end with the last successful iteration, but continues with post-development activities of using ontology as a functional component in other systems.

A huge amount of interaction knowledge among biological materials has been accumulated and it is most urgent that they are properly used to discover hidden phenomena in life. These data of interactions describe those among many kinds of objects and reactions on different levels of life or different time scales in similar way. In this paper, we formalize two general concepts of biological interaction functions i.e. inhibition and activation, and present a formal system of the ontology of them. This formal system is an axiomatic system which represents the general concepts of interactions not only between objects but also between reactions and on pathways of reactions. We demonstrate the applicability of the formal system to the real world phenomena of drugs poisoning in pharmacy.

In this paper we are proposing a view of modelling which is based on a process-ontological modelling. Firstly we will consider different kinds of definitions for processes, and how these influence thinking in software engineering. Secondly, we define the basic modelling situation and different ways of its using. Thirdly, we will describe the problem of a common process connected with a mechanical view of processes, which we are compared with an alternative view based on process-ontological view. Lastly, we will introduce a Process-Ontological Model, (POM), according to which everything can be seen as processes. We are proposing that by means of process-ontological modelling we are able make a wider and more flexible view to modelling situations.

In this paper, we describe the concept, practice, and support systems of “design with discourse” that is a method to design from the “ethics level.” First, we place the ethics level in the hierarchical representation of artifacts. Second, we systematize the concept of design with discourse. Third, we describe practice of design with discourse with two examples. Then, we present an overview of support systems that embody the concept of design with discourse. Finally, we conclude that design with discourse contributes to systematic design from the ethics level.

Clinical Algorithms (CAs) are obtained from Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) using all the healthcare knowledge available to assist patients that suffer from one or several diseases. For some diseases CAs can be explicitly given, while for others we have to use other mechanisms for their generation. Explicitly given CAs use to be atemporal. To provide the time dimension of CAs it is necessary to obtain temporal knowledge from physicians or by some other mechanism. Often, physicians have difficulties in providing temporal knowledge or the knowledge engineering mechanism and tools used are difficult to apply or extremely time consuming. However, as data saved in clinical databases are time dependent, they can be used to implicitly obtain temporal constraints for CAs. We have identified two sorts of temporal constraints (micro- and macro-temporality) and have proposed an approach to generate micro-temporalities that complements previous works. We have decided to use the SDA (state-decision-action) formalism for CA representation. The generated micro-temporality constraints are introduced in the SDA representation of a particular CA. As the final CAs have a time dimension, they are no longer atemporal, which helps physicians making temporal predictions in healthcare procedures.