Intelligent Semantic Oriented Agent based Search (I-SOAS) Zeeshan Ahmed Vienna University of Technology Austria and University of Wuerzburg Germany
[email protected]
ABSTRACT This research paper is the brief presentation of a PhD research and development conducted in the fields of Product Data Management (PDM). This research paper briefly presents targeted problems i.e. unfriendly graphical user interfaces and unintelligent search in PDM Systems, state of the art, proposed approach i.e., Intelligent Semantic Oriented Agent based Search, comparison of implemented prototype with existing systems and some future recommendation.
General Terms Product Data Management, Human Machine Interface, Natural Language Processing
Keywords PDM, Graphical User Interface, Language Technology, Semantic Web
1. INTRODUCTION In early 1970s there was no such system to automate the process of data management, then in 1980s Computer Integrated Manufacturing was introduced but seemed not to be successful in product data management [9]. With emergence of CAD technologies PDM Systems are introduced and used to manage engineering data, activities and processes through better control of engineering data, activities, changes and product configurations. PDM products mainly manage information about design and manufacturing of products including technical operations and running projects. PDM is also renowned as Engineering Data Management and Engineering Document Management Systems because it provides better management and control over engineering data, activities, and changes related to design and manufacture of product. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is another acronym for PDM to manage the entire development life cycle of the product by integrating people, data, processes and business systems [10].
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. FIT’09, December 16–18, 2009, CIIT, Abbottabad, Pakistan. Copyright 2009 ACM 978-1-60558-642-7/09/12....$10.
PDM provides a backbone for the controlled flow of engineering information throughout the product life cycle by using engineering data, such as CAD, ERP and field service. Moreover PDM also supports product teams and techniques by providing Concurrent Engineering in improving engineering workflow. PDM systems address issues such as control, quality, reuse, security and availability of engineering data. PDM performs five main functions to integrate and manage all applications, information, and processes during the associated product life cycle i.e., Data vault and document management, Workflow and process management, Product structure management, Parts management and Program management [6]. The major objectives of PDMs of companies now a days are to reduce the cost of engineering, reduce effort in product development life cycle, reduce time in change handling and new product development, improve the quality and services of the product, deliver and support products at the given time, improve team coordination, increase customization of products, maintain product configuration based information, manage large volumes of data generated by computer based systems, reduce engineering environment based problems, provide better access to information, provide better reuse of design information, provide common data ware housing, secure engineering data’s originality, prevent error creation and propagation and make a strong effect on market shares [12]. Moreover PDM is also supposed to handle business process work flows, change management, revision control, product configurations, product structure management, project tracking and resource planning [11].
2. PROBLEM DEFINITIONS Product Data Management (PDM) desktop and web based systems maintain the organizational technical and managerial data to increase the quality of products by improving the processes of development, business process flows, change management, product structure management, project tracking and resource planning. Though PDM is heavily benefiting industry but PDM community is facing some serious unresolved issues in PDM System development .i.e., unfriendly graphical user interfaces and unintelligent search. PDM Systems offer different many services and functionalities at a time but the graphical user interfaces of most of the PDM Systems are not designed in a way that a user (especially a new user) can easily learn and use them. Moreover, PDM Systems contain and manage heavy amount of data but the search mechanism of most of the PDM System is not intelligent which can process user’s structured or unstructured natural language based queries to extract desired information. In the
domain of PDM many products are available and several approaches have been introduced by many researchers which are providing lots of values in the implementation of PDM applications i.e., K2 Mobility SVT: VIF [1], VIVACE: EU [2], Promise PLM: EU [3] etc. but in this research only some of the most relevant PDM System architectures related to this research work are considered i.e., Windchill [6], CIM [7], Componentbased Product Data Management system [4], Web-based product data management (WPDM) [5].
3. METHODOLOGY The planned and decided structure of research as shown in Figure 1 starts with the introduction to the field of Product Data Management (PDM). Going in to the details of the field some existing challenges are identified i.e., unfriendly web based graphical user interface and unintelligent search. Meeting the motivation of this research, the goals and the scope is set.
structuring of data over the web to take advantage in extracting semantic based information. The field of Language Technology is researched to take help in implementing a natural language based search for PDM applications. Based on the knowledge resulted from above discussed research, a comprehensive approach i.e., Intelligent Semantic Oriented Agent Search (I-SOAS) is proposed to implement a flexible web based graphical user interface and natural language based search for PDM Systems. Going into the details of proposition and to get it into a realistic shape, implementation architecture is designed and implemented. A prototype solutions with limited scope and capable of providing a flexible graphical user interface and natural language based search is developed and compared with some existing PDM Systems. Then resultant information is discussed and concluded with some advantages to the current system. As this PhD research is about the initialization of the proposition of a solution for the PDM community, some future recommendations are also discussed.
4. PROPOSITION The accomplished goal of this PhD research was to support the field of PDM with a proposition of a conceptual model for the implementation of natural language based search and flexible web based graphical user interface including the capabilities for knowledge management. The proposed conceptual model shown in figure 2 i.e., Intelligent Semantic oriented Agent Based Search (I-SOAS) is successfully designed into implementation model and a resultant prototype putting values to the field is now available as shown in figure 3. The implemented version of I-SOAS is compared with respective functions of existing PDM systems .i.e., Windchill and CIM to evaluate its effectiveness against targeted challenges.
Figure.1. Research Methodology Targeting the challenge of designing a flexible web based graphical user interface development; at first the research is conducted in exploring some existing product data management based systems and analyzing their implemented architectures to take values in designing own solution. Then the field of Human Machine Interface is selected and investigated to have complete understanding of graphical user interface design, going into the details some latest web development technologies are also tested and compared to conclude with one final technology for own use. Targeting the challenge of implementing a natural language based search to extract knowledge based information from database research is carried into the fields of Semantic Web and Language Technology. The reason of selecting the field of Semantic Web for desired solution is that this field promotes the implementation of semantic based web applications by providing the concept of
Figure.2. I-SOAS Conceptual Model I-SOAS consists of four main sequential iterative components i.e., Intelligent User Interface, Information Processing, Data Management and Data Representation. Every product whether it is software or hardware has a user interface for user system communication. In this architecture the first component is also the User Interface i.e., Intelligent User Interface. Considering the concepts of natural language processing, compiler construction of any software programming language and semantic modeling a
new concept of Information Processing and Semantic Modeling is introduced. This follows existing database concepts to design third component Data Management to store and manage data. Then to reconstruct the final output of the system in user’s understandable format designed the last component of I-SOAS i.e., Data Presentation.
Providing flexible graphical user interface with several different options
Providing standard graphical interface, designed by system
Providing flexible graphical user interface, so the user can redesign and reconfigure the interface itself to accommodate specific needs by Mouse Click and Drag Drop options
Providing several different options to the user for GUI designing like user can change the look and feel by
5. I-SOAS CAPABILITIES At the moment I-SOAS Prototype Application as shown in Figure 3 (a) and (b) is capable of running as a prototype application, providing flexible and standard graphical user interface with several different options for PDM Systems data manipulation and user interface manipulation and enabling user to make natural language based search to extract desired results from repository. Moreover the implemented version of I-SOAS is compared with respective functions of existing PDM systems .i.e., Windchill and CIM to evaluate its effectiveness against targeted challenges which resulted with several advantages over existing systems.
Figure.3. (a) I-SOAS Prototype – Web Interface
o
changing background,
o
changing mixing background colors,
o
changing font colors,
o
changing background text colors,
o
adding some image at the background,
o
adding components from main component bar,
o
deleting added components to the interface
o
altering the placement positions
Providing option to every user to save his own deigned GUI, so then next time if user comes online then he will be provided his own designed GUI, not the default one, but he will still have the option to redesign or alter or restore the default GUI.
Providing option to user to enter the instruction in Natural Language as well as SQL Query Format
Providing Natural Language Mode of search, to enter natural language based query like “I am looking for PDM” etc and search
Providing SQL Query Mode of search, to enter SQL Query like “Select * from Document” etc and search
Providing option to make search after entering the instruction
Providing results back to the user
Providing option to log of from the system
6. RESULTS The currently available prototype version of I-SOAS SOAS is compared with respective functions of existing PDM systems .i.e., Windchill and CIM to evaluate its effectiveness against targeted challenges. Figure.3. (b) I-SOAS Prototype – Desktop Interface I-SOAS Web Application’s currently available version is capable of
Running as a stable application
Providing information about research project
Providing security system for user authentication and verification
The resultant information shows that I-SOAS has several many advantages over Windchill and CIM Database with respect to the graphical user interface. The three products hold a competitive match against each other when it comes to web based platform independent structured graphical user interface. However I-SOAS takes an edge while considering efficiently intelligent and flexible graphical user interface. The difference is there as the next generation PDM Products become more humanly friendly rather than robustly automated. Moreover the currently available prototype version of I-SOAS has several many advantages over Windchill and CIM Database with
respect to the Search Module as well. The three compared products have limited fixed options based static search. While ISOAS compensates for this feature by providing an intelligent search based on defined natural language processing.
7. CONCLUSIONS At the moment, developed prototype version of I-SOAS is available, which is capable of running standalone and providing intelligent search and flexible graphical user interface. In future I am hoping for the full version of I-SOAS web application consisting of complete proposed graphical interface options and the development of knowledge base system.
[5] M.Y. Huang, Y.J. Lin, Hu Xu, "A framework for web-based product data management using J2EE", In The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology,Volume 24, Numbers 11-12 / Dezember 2004, pp 847-852, 0268-3768 (Print) 1433-3015 (Online), Published online: 27 October 2004 [6] Michael Finocchiar, Donald Mize abd Stephen Fleischman, “Architecture and Sizing Guide for HP Enterprise Servers”, PTC Windchill, PDMLink Version R8.0, Hewlett-Packet Company, 26 July 2006 [7] CIM Products, last reviewed, 01 October 2009,
9. REFERENCES
[8] A. Zeeshan, D. Gerhard: "Semantic Oriented Agent based Approach towards Engineering Data Management, Web Information Retrieval and User System Communication Problems", In the proceedings of 3rd International Conference for Internet Technology and Secured, June 23– 28, Dublin Ireland 2008
[1] K2 Mobility Sustainable Vehicle Technologies (K2 Mobility SVT), Last Reviewed 08 September 2008,
[9] Nihit Aurora, "Careers in Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM)", Reviewed 12 January 2009,
[2] VIVACE, Last Reviewed 05 September 2008
[10] Product lifecycle management, Reviewed at 12 January 2009,
8. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thanks to the research supervisors for their time, guidance and support throughout the research work.
[3] Mr. Bjørn Moseng, “Promise- Product Lifecycle Management and Information Tracking using Smart Embedded Systems”, Last Reviewed 04 September 2008, [4] C.S Sung and Sam Joon Park, "A component-based product data management system", In The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, Volume 33, Numbers 5-6 / Juni 2007, PP 614-626, 0268-3768 (Print) 1433-3015 (Online), Published online: 30 March 2006
[11] Product Data Management, Reviewed April 2007, [12] Product Data Management (PDM), reviewed May 2007, < http://www.johnstark.com >
