68 research outputs found
“Preface” in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Methodologies and Technologies for Networked Enterprises
No full textIntroduction in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Methodologies and Technologies for Networked Enterprises
No full textThe goals of flexibility and globalization force enterprises to decentralize their activities and continuously (re)structure their network of relationships, with respect to their productive "supply chain" as well as to their design and innovation processes. The scale of involved companies is often small, but, thanks to the synergies enabled by operating within a network, these companies are able to increase their competitiveness. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
Reference Case Study
No full textItalian winemaking industry provides a fruitful context for the empirical research on technological and organizational issues concerning the networked enterprise.
The structure of Italian economy is mainly based on networks of Small to Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), as the result of a specific historical process. Often these networks have assumed peculiar organizational forms (e.g. Italian industrial districts) inspiring new approaches to the management of inter-firms flows of data and resources.
The specific nature of SMEs, as incomplete organizational entities (e.g. limited investments in information systems, absence of internal technical staff units), forces SMEs entrepreneurs to strengthen relationships with external actors, especially in order to share complementary assets, like trade channels or R&D efforts.
Nevertheless, the winemaking industry shows some peculiar features of typical problems in the networked enterprises, since the complex relationships between all the actors of the supply chain concern not only virtual resources (e.g. marketing services), but also physical resources resulting from the interactions between agricultural activities, manufacturing processes and customer relationship management services
Keyword−based‚ context−aware selection of natural language query patterns
No full textPervasive access to distributed data sources by means of mobile devices is becoming a frequent realistic operational context in many application domains. In these scenarios data access may be thwarted by the scarce knowledge that users have of the application and of the underlying data schemas and complicated by limited query interfaces, due to the small size of the devices. A viable solution to this problem could be expressing the queries in natural language; however, in applications like medical emergencies, data management systems must obey requirements such as very fast and precise data access which make this solution infeasible. To reduce the time needed to get answers to user queries, the paper proposes a lightweight, context-aware approach based on the combination of keywords with natural language queries. The method employs ontologies and query patterns to support the users in formulating the most appropriate query for retrieving the desired data. Precision and query efficiency are further improved by focusing searches only to the data which are meaningful w.r.t. the current context, thus supporting the users' situation awareness. The approach has been integrated in the SAFE system, developed for mobile and Web, and has been applied in cardiology to support medical personnel in emergency interventions on patients affected by chronic cerebro-vascular diseases. Experimental results have shown that the proposed solution significantly reduces the time to get useful data w.r.t. traditional form-based approaches
Context-aware reactive systems based on runtime semantic models
No full textIoT, smart cities, cyber-physical systems and sensor networks are context-aware, highly dynamic and reactive systems. Their implementation should take into account the heterogeneity of their components and make easy the management of events unplanned at design time. According to these requirements, in this paper we propose an ontology-based approach to provide runtime models of the physical entities characterizing context-aware reactive systems. We extend SSN, a W3C standard ontology, to support complex reactive behaviors through the modeling of Logical Sensors and Actuators (LSA ontology); we also present a software architecture in which a knowledge base, structured coherently with this semantic model, is bound to real world entities by grounding (via web services) semantic elements to physical sensors and actuators. To validate the approach we discuss a case study related to smart buildings for cultural heritage preservation
Making Smart Buildings and Personal Systems Cooperate via Knowledge Base Overlays
No full textReactive IoT applications often have to deal with the data source Babel arising from their need to operate on context information originated from different data sources. Semantic knowledge bases can be fruitfully deployed to alleviate this problem: they provide a unified access point for context information including both long term (such as the structure of the environment) and transient (such as sensor readings) data thanks to their ability to host elements responding to different schemas within the same container. In previous works we introduced an architecture to create reactive IoT systems based on a semantic knowledge base that also hosts the definition of their behavior and on an accompanying reactive machinery. In this paper, we introduce the use of knowledge base overlays, i.e. containers providing a live, unified view over (parts of) different underlying knowledge bases, as a mechanism to enable interoperation between multiple IoT semantics-based systems. Specifically we explore the benefits of this approach in a case study in which a semantic IoT system governing a smart building interacts with the personal semantic systems of the people entering the building
Resilient reactive systems based on runtime semantic models
No full textIoT, smart cities, cyber-physical systems and sensor networks represent new classes of highly dynamic, complex systems. The behavior of these systems should be designed in order to react to external changes, i.e.They are reactive and context-Aware, and also to internal ones to be able to reconfigure themselves for handling possible anomalies. These requirements ask for a runtime representation of application logic and its context, enriched with variation points that associate different behaviors to possible changes. In this paper, we extend our previous work on the design of reactive, context-Aware systems with the support for resilience. According to our model, sensors and actuators can be physical, virtual or logical ones; the last two can be semantically described and dynamically configured to react with a proper behavior to context changes (e.g. faults). The proposal is validated with a use case aimed at designing an edge node for smart buildings dedicated to cultural heritage preservation
An architecture for context-aware reactive systems based on run-time semantic models
No full textIn recent years, new classes of highly dynamic, complex systems are gaining momentum. These systems are characterized by the need to express behaviors driven by external and/or internal changes, i.e. they are reactive and context-aware. These classes include, but are not limited to IoT, smart cities, cyber-physical systems and sensor networks. An important design feature of these systems should be the ability of adapting their behavior to environment changes. This requires handling a runtime representation of the context enriched with variation points that relate different behaviors to possible changes of the representation. In this paper, we present a reference architecture for reactive, context-aware systems able to handle contextual knowledge (that defines what the system perceives) by means of virtual sensors and able to react to environment changes by means of virtual actuators, both represented in a declarative manner through semantic web technologies. To improve the ability to react with a proper behavior to context changes (e.g. faults) that may influence the ability of the system to observe the environment, we allow the definition of logical sensors and actuators through an extension of the SSN ontology (a W3C standard). In our reference architecture a knowledge base of sensors and actuators (hosted by an RDF triple store) is bound to real world by grounding semantic elements to physical devices via REST APIs. The proposed architecture along with the defined ontology try to address the main problems of dynamically reconfigurable systems by exploiting a declarative, queryable approach to enable runtime reconfiguration with the help of (a) semantics to support discovery in heterogeneous environment, (b) composition logic to define alternative behaviors for variation points, (c) bi-causal connection life-cycle to avoid dangling links with the external environment. The proposal is validated in a case study aimed at designing an edge node for smart buildings dedicated to cultural heritage preservation
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