Back from SEKE 2008

I am finally back in Germany. SEKE 2008 went well and I received a lot of interesting feedback. So far, no critics have been uttered, but my presentation led to accreditation of my work.
Right now I am in the process of evaluating the feedback and setting down a plan how to proceed in the next couple of months. Question are:

• which results do I want to achieve next
• which conference do I want to submit articles
• how do I plan and engage my student helper's work
• which would be possible study thesis I could post
• who from the academic community should I try to cooperate with (see related work)
• when to start writing the proposal for my PhD thesis and try to get it acknowledged

As you can see - quite a few questions which might be solvable during the summer break which is just around the corner. Well, I'll have to stash my vacation-bag with a number of articles and mind-augmenting drugs. (latter of which was a joke in case you didn't get it)

Well, enough to do for tomorrow, I figure.

Preps for SEKE 2008 completed, next paper in line

The preparations for the SEKE 2008 conference are finally completed.
The camera ready file can be downloaded here.
Hotel and flights are booked and we are good to go. Just some minor adjustments on the slides I made.

We are already planning another paper (on which I am working at the moment) for the MODELS2008 conference. Actually, that educators symposium, that is. We'll be presenting our advancement in the area of creating checklists to correct UML exam or homework exercises.
More to come here soon.

SEKE 2008 Paper Accepted

Cheerio,

my paper "Improving Automatic Model Creation using Ontologies" has been accepted by the SEKE 2008 conference on April, 17th.
The ratings for the paper turned out to be 2 times .80 and one reviewer chose to give me only .20. He/she also doubted that my paper belonged to the conference and therefore weakly rejected it. I guess I'll have to make up for that in the camera ready version which is due May, 7th.

My paper is 7 pages long, including references and illustrations. I need to crop this down to 6 pages and make the article firmer and preciser. This is going to be my job for the next two days. I am planning on re-submitting the paper early next week.
I will post the camera-ready version here in this blog so you can take a look at it.

So far, I still have to book the flight and make hotel reservations.

I'll keep you updated.

Submitted article - waiting for reviewer's feedback

Again, it's been a while since my last post.
Matter of fact I submitted my first article concerning ontology usage to improve automatic model creation about 10 days ago. The choice was the SEKE conference, taking place in the bay area in July.
The submitted version of the paper can be downloaded here.
Information about acceptance or refusal should be available within the next 2 weeks.

On my next steps, I am working together with a student trying to build a completely covered process from textual specification to UML model directly.

Let's see what new discoveries lie on that path for us.

Orchestration of Concepts

The paper we need to get ready is finally out of its initial stages.
We addressed the related work and most importantly the reasoning part so far. Latter of which still has to be written down for the paper in TeX, but that should not take longer than a day.
I have focused on dealing with RCyc in the last 4 days and have to say that I personally think I am pretty savvy with the system(s) now.
The only thing I haven't gotten up and working so far is the newest Cyc-Version (KB 7130, that is) which still throws numerous exceptions when using it. I assume there's something wrong with the Cyc-World (Ontology).

Next steps are to list the results and progress in a table which should then be sufficiently described for the paper. At the moment we plan submitting the paper on march, 12th. That's still some time to go and I think we can make the deadline.

As of now, I just found out that the ICSC conference extended its submission deadline to march, 16th. So we might even want to chose which conference to deliver the paper to. We'll see.

Just to show you how the information gathering during the model creation process works, here two illustrations that should explain it.

The text (text.txt) is annotated manually. The annotated text (now text.sale) is then automatically transformed to a GrGen Graph-Rewriting Script (text.grs).
Having provided the Graph-Model for the specific domain - in our example UML - and using the GrShell to create the initial graph.
To give you a glimpse of what this looks like, check out the next picture which shows exemplary data in the various files.

And that's it for now. I'll come back to this later. I'll explain the whole orchestration in more detail once we have the paper for the conference.

Getting GrGen to dump data

Worked on the GrGen-Graph-Models today.
So far I've started to get familiar with the procedures necessary to work the tool. And yes, I have to admit, it is fast.
I already know which data to fish from the SALE-Models we already pushed into GrGen. The problem is, that GrGen is not behaving deterministically in any way. I guess I'll have to ring the maintainer of the project tomorrow to find how this could be resolved.
If I can answer all those questions by tomorrow evening, I see a very good chance that the paper for the ICSC could become a success. I am sure we have to start writing on it at the end of this week, otherwise, the night-shift might kill us (again).

So long, I am out of here for today, gotta be back early tomorrow morning.

Using reasoning to disambiguate natural language

Natural language always is ambiguous. There is no denying the fact.
Now when transforming specifications written in natural language into UML, one might want to make sure, that misinterpretations and misunderstandings are as seldom as possible.
But what if the words "user" and "client" are used to describe the same object? How might a electronic system grasp the similarity and understand? How am I telling the system to combine the actions (or methods if you want to call it so) and properties into one object (or class, if we stayed in OO-Code-speak).
Using an underlying ontology we will try to show that specifications can be made better, proper and severely more elaborated with the "insight" of common sense.
The first approach on this work has to be finished in the next 4 weeks since we do want to publish this on the ICSC conference 2008. Once again - no time to lean back. Full steam ahead!
For this week I will try to get the necessary information from the system.
Next weeks job will be to integrate the APIs so that the graph modeling framework GrGen we're using to transform annotated text into UML will be able to take advantage of the common sense we revived.
As always - it stays exciting!