While the study of psychology has offered little in the way of explaining the creative process, Koestler examines the idea that we are at our most creative when rational thought is suspended--for example, in dreams and trancelike states. All who read The Act of Creation will find it a compelling and illuminating book.

The Act of Creation

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

The fast development of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology in recent years has supported connections of numerous smart things along with sensors and established seamless data exchange between them, so it leads to a stringy requirement for data analysis and data storage platform such as cloud computing and fog computing. Healthcare is one of the application domains in IoT that draws enormous interest from industry, the research community, and the public sector. The development of IoT and cloud computing is improving patient safety, staff satisfaction, and operational efficiency in the medical industry. This survey is conducted to analyze the latest IoT components, applications, and market trends of IoT in healthcare, as well as study current development in IoT and cloud computing-based healthcare applications since 2015. We also consider how promising technologies such as cloud computing, ambient assisted living, big data, and wearables are being applied in the healthcare industry and discover various IoT, e-health regulations and policies worldwide to determine how they assist the sustainable development of IoT and cloud computing in the healthcare industry. Moreover, an in-depth review of IoT privacy and security issues, including potential threats, attack types, and security setups from a healthcare viewpoint is conducted. Finally, this paper analyzes previous well-known security models to deal with security risks and provides trends, highlighted opportunities, and challenges for the IoT-based healthcare future development.

https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/8/7/768/pdf

A Survey on Internet of Things and Cloud Computing for Healthcare

In 2004 we published in this journal an article describing OntoLearn, one of the first systems to automatically induce a taxonomy from documents and Web sites. Since then, OntoLearn has continued to be an active area of research in our group and has become a reference work within the community. In this paper we describe our next-generation taxonomy learning methodology, which we name OntoLearn Reloaded. Unlike many taxonomy learning approaches in the literature, our novel algorithm learns both concepts and relations entirely from scratch via the automated extraction of terms, definitions, and hypernyms. This results in a very dense, cyclic and potentially disconnected hypernym graph. The algorithm then induces a taxonomy from this graph via optimal branching and a novel weighting policy. Our experiments show that we obtain high-quality results, both when building brand-new taxonomies and when reconstructing sub-hierarchies of existing taxonomies.

/pdf/ontolearn-reloaded-a-graph-based-algorithm-for-taxonomy-105vc8gpth.pdf

OntoLearn Reloaded: A Graph-Based Algorithm for Taxonomy Induction

Michael N. Huhns University of South Carolina The Zen of the Web In contrast to the original Web’s content, which was designed for human use and comprehension, the Semantic Web’s1 content is for computer use and understanding. To date, however, most such efforts have focused on the understanding rather than use. This special issue of IC focuses on the use of the Web by computer systems and agents. By supporting the notion of “getting work done,” the Semantic Web will become more useful, valuable, and pragmatic. Many organizations are attempting to make the Web computer-friendly via Web services, but current incarnations of these technologies are subject to several limitations:

Ontologies and the Semantic Web

A software engineering approach to ontology building

Ontologies are the backbone of the Semantic Web, a semantic-aware version of the World Wide Web. To the end of making available large-scale, high quality domain ontologies, effective and usable methodologies are needed to facilitate the process of Ontology Building. Many of the methods proposed so far only partly refer to well-known and widely used standards from other areas, like software engineering and knowledge representation. In this paper we present UPON, a methodology for ontology building derived from the Unified Software Development Process. A comparative evaluation with other methodologies, as well as the results of its adoption in the context of the Athena Integrated Project, are also discussed.

A proposal for a unified process for ontology building : UPON

UPON Lite focuses on users, typically domain experts without ontology expertise, minimizing the role of ontology engineers.

A lightweight methodology for rapid ontology engineering

/pdf/a-proposal-for-a-unified-process-for-ontology-building-upon-3c6j7ap6b0.pdf

A proposal for a unified process for ontology building: UPON

Business people use informal methods to represent business processes (BP), having the main objective to support an enterprise organization. On the other hand, application software is increasingly based on Service Oriented Architectures, where the application logic is represented by executable BP (e.g., by using BPEL.) Despite both are aiming at BP modelling, the methods used by business people and IT specialists are quite different. The former use informal, descriptive methods, with an intuitive semantics difficult to be translated to the formal representation needed in the IT world. This paper presents the main lines of an ontological framework for the representation of BP semantics: BPAL (Business Process Abstract Language.) It is primarily conceived to provide a formal semantics to BPMN, an informal BP modelling method that is emerging in the business world. The modelling categories of BPAL are based on well accepted business notions, such as activity, decision, role. We believe that it may be useful beyond BPMN, in more general business contexts. BPAL is an abstract language (no drawing symbols are provided) having a procedural semantics (allowing a translation to an executable form, BPEL), and a declarative semantics, to be processed by an inference engine.

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00656686/document

Antonio De Nicola

Papers

A software engineering approach to ontology building

A proposal for a unified process for ontology building : UPON

A lightweight methodology for rapid ontology engineering

A proposal for a unified process for ontology building: UPON

An Ontological Approach to Business Process Modeling