IPAS project:

Providing a Knowledge Desktop

Gary Wills, Richard Crowder, Nigel Shadboltand Sylvia Wong July2008

Structure• Overview of the project’s aims

• Southampton’s aims

• Demonstrators

– One for each year

Why IPAS• A fundamental shift is occurring in many industries

away from the selling of products to the provision of services.

– Essential to the long-term success of businesses in this emerging global environment is the creation of new Integrated Products And Services (IPAS).

– These require knowledge transfer between three very different worlds:

• new service design, • new product design, and • the operation of existing products and services

in the field.

The primary objective of IPAS• “to develop and exploit technologies aligned to the

call, such as meta-data, semantics, ontologies, text mining, search, social interactions, knowledge representation and semantic web services to enable the right information to be provided to the right person in the right form at the right time”.

• Large heterogeneous resources, in many location around the world.

IPAS – the concept

IPAS

New Product Design

New Service Design

Operation of Existing

Products & Services

Involving:

- knowledge extraction

- process modelling

- life cycle cost

Partners• Partners

– University of Aberdeen: Ont0logy Management

– University of Cambridge: 2 groups Engineering Processes

– University of Leeds: Work Psychology

– University of Sheffield: NLP

– University of Southampton

• Semantic infrastructure (AKT)• Life Cycle Costing modelling (UTP)

– Epistemics

– Rolls Royce

– DS&S

IPAS Deliverables• IPAS deliverables include:

– a Designer Knowledge Desktop,

– defined work social issues and solutions,

– process simulations and optimisation,

– and a life cycle cost modelling toolkit.

Southampton’s aims

Southampton AKT: Project goals• Design a Semantic Web infrastructure for the

designer’s desktop

– Define services and applications from partners for integration

• Deliver and evaluate demonstrators with RR

• Inform industrial partners of the benefits of Semantic Web technology and Web Services.

Southampton (AKT) deliverables• Knowledge desktop demonstrator 1

– Based on existing AKT technologies

– easy to integrate third part tools (e.g. Google search API)

• Knowledge desktop demonstrator 2

– Development of middleware

– Limited set of web services to answer general question

• Knowledge desktop demonstrator 3

– Focused in solving a particular KM problem in RR

– Inclusion of further web services

Planned Architecture

Designdocuments

Servicereports

Otherdatabases

Collate data

User interactswith GUI

Semantically aware middleware

Reasoner accepts andreplies to query requests

Heterogeneous resources

Service Oriented Architecture

Web BrowserDesigner Desktop

Portal

UserApplications

Middleware

ExternalServices

Workflowengine

Serviceregistry

Applicationontologies

Authentication,access control

Web/Grid Service Communication FabricWeb/Grid Service Communication Fabric

Designdocument

archive

Servicereport

archive

Life cyclecost modeller

Ontologicalreasoning

engine

Demonstrators

Demonstrator one• Demonstrated how to integrate web services

– 20 web services based on AKTive space

– Simple semantic search using drop down boxes to control the vocabulary.

– Presented data in graphs

– Google search as an outside web service

– Just Southampton, other getting there technology together

Engine parts Engine From To

199619971998199920002001

199920002001200220032004

CompressionVariable vane

Bushing assemblyTurbine

HP turbine bladeHP nozzle guide v

……

Trent 500Trent 700Trent 800Trent 900

Year

Select for y-axis:Failures per million,

Hours delayed,Cost of repairs, etc

Links to docsin designdefinitionfolder –

DEMDDR

Comms sheet

Expert search

Select parameter

Select point of interest to link to supporting

documents

Demo 1

Demo 2:• Started to focus on the needs of RR more.

• Cambridge set out 39 questions that designers would like answered.

– Supported by interviews and literature survey

– Aberdeen, Sheffield and Soton provided services to supply answers to the 4 questions. These gave the widest functionality. i.e.

• What are the common failure mechanisms associated with part X.

• Can I see a picture showing a failed/damaged part?

Technologies Demonstrated 2– Dynamic pruning of tree menu for user

navigation of parts

– Automatic generation of summary statistics from RDF

– Retrieval of images from semantic annotation

– Semantic queries with reasoning

– Links to original documents (legacy documents)

– Creating new semantic (RDF) documents using forms and IPAS ontology

– Portal framework (liferay) used, and modular

Deterioration Mechanisms

FaultFound

Reports whereabove faultwere found

Creating new semantic (RDF) documents using forms and IPAS ontology

Editing repairabilityrequirements

Picture of Deteriorated Part

Demo 2:• Infrastructure not as wide as proposed

– Used Sesame for triple store.

– Workflow engine not required by RR.

– Any commercial partner needed to be careful about realising confidential documents.

– Not so easy to extract triples from legacy documents.

• Sparse data in lagacy documents

Demo 3:

• Focused on a RR business process.

• To demonstration an abstraction of the core technologies to permit the delivery of the IPAS vision.

• It must demonstrate how technology could be use to address a realistic number of questions from the service and design world.

Demonstrator 3 Overview

Service EngineerInformation

access & synthesis

Service DesignerIdentifies the fault

and contains the problem

Knowledge BuilderDevelops

Mechanism Records

Product DesignerDesigns

Problem Out

Knowledge BuilderPopulates

Solution folder

Definitions

• Mechanism Record

– Applies to specific fault on a specific part

• Solution folder

– Used to design “against”

– An audited collection of fault reports

– Applies to a part or system in a product

– Major parts only (circa 100 per product)

Demo 3:• The questions should be technology challenging to

address, and thereby highlighting the capabilities of the technologies within the demonstrator.

• To provide an environment that will permit the knowledge builder to build the Mechanism Record.

• It should be noted that the end user will not be knowledge specialist, but domain specialist (designer). The Knowledge builder will be considered a knowledge specialist.

Demonstrator 3 domain

Launch task

Create new Solutionfolder

Brainstorm new

mechanisms

Evidence search

Accept reject and group

mechanisms

Design for service toolIPAS document search

MaintainSolutionfolder

Create new Mechanism

Record

Mechanism Record

DocumentsSolutionfolder

Problem Investigate

problem

SolutionVerification

Mechanism Record

DocumentsSolutionfolder

Root cause analysis

Containproblem

Content Management System

Information on other servers

Mech

an

ism R

eco

rd

Mechanism Record

DocumentsSolutionfolder

Mech

an

ism R

eco

rd R

ep

osito

ry

IPAS Glue

Infrastructure – 3

Client

Server

Internet

Authentication Provenance Workflow

Middleware

Mechanism Record

Disruption IndexHelp

SolutionFolders

User Interface

PortalPortalFramework

Knowledge BuilderUpdate

Storage

Triple store

SesameK-Search

ServicesExternal

Resources

Enter new Mechanism Record

Enter free form text

Select from pull down

boxes

Select k-search

Search and Review

Search from pull down boxes

Advanced search

Review allreturns

Review Mechanism Record

Solution Mechanism Record

Folder name

Included Mechanism

Record

Excludes Mechanism Record

Include/excludeMechanism Record

Process

IPAS MRWindow

K-SearchProcess

IPAS MRWindow

Triplestore

K-SearchSearching legacy documents for snippets of information to include in a new mechanism record

K-Search is loosely coupled, allinteraction is via web services

Evaluation• Expert Review with 12 designers at Rolls Royce Derby

• Functionality evaluation was undertaken

• Limited to a knowledge view – how quickly could a designer extract knowledge to resolve a specific query

• Positive response, main points related to HCI, not the concept

• Further evaluation is underway

Summary• Demonstrators incorporate knowledge desktop functionality

• The desktop both creates and searches semantically enabled documents. On the creation side, each piece of information is stored as a triple, with the property + value pair as shown on screen .

• Documents entered can then be searched using the ontology. For example over the engine parts, feature, and mechanism axes.

Summary - 2 • The desktop also demonstrates the loose coupling

nature of web services.

• The server software is developed in Java and hosted on Linux. The user interface software is written in C# and hosted in Windows, demonstrating how two parts of the software can be developed and deployed on two different platforms using a language neutral interface.

Questions and Comments?