Ontology engineering is known to be a complex, time-consuming, and costly process, in particular, if an ontology has to be developed from scratch, and respective domain knowledge has to be formally encoded. This paper presents the largest publicly available manufacturing ontology CDM-Core in the standard formal ontology language OWL2 (available at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cdm-core/). The CDM-Core ontology has been developed within the European research project CREMA in close collaboration with the user partners in order to sufficiently cover the CREMA use case domains of metal press maintenance and automative exhaust production. CDM-Core makes use of many relevant standard vocabularies and ontologies, with only about one fifth of its size being CREMA use case specific. The practical applicability of CDM-Core for semantic annotation of domain-related process models, sensor data and services has been approved by the user partners, and its quality according to selected common criteria of verification and validation was successfully evaluated. From the public release of the CDM-Core, we expect to cover the lack of a base common ontology for the manufacturing domain, thanks to feedbacks from industrial reuse and improvements from the community.

Summary: Background: Even though ePrescribing systems are now available in many healthcare systems and have been a crucial milestone of the roadmaps towards eHealth in the last years, there is still a large heterogeneity among functionalities and performances of different systems.Objective: In this paper, we propose an updated comprehensive model for the ePre-scribing process able to represent, analyze, and compare current systems and to support the design of new, more general, systems suitable also to sustain the ePrescription process in National Healthcare Systems.Methods: After a preliminary literature review, we identified six main phases of the ePrescribing process, namely Assign, Transmit, Dispense, Administer, Monitor, and Analysis & Decision. Each phase produces a digital object characterized by formal properties that ensure the collection of appropriate data and information and works as input for the next one. The impact, in terms of benefits, of ePrescribing on governance, drug sur -veillance, and quality of care at the individual, territorial, and governmental levels are related to the formal properties of the digital objects created at the end of each phase.Results and Conclusions: The model-based implementation of each phase has an impact on the quality of care, the access to care, and the effectiveness of care delivery. The model does not cover cost evaluation, but the benefits identified can be used as basis for cost-benefit or cost-effectiveness analysis of heterogeneous systems.

A new requirement for the manufacturing companies in Industry 4.0 is to be flexible with respect to changes in demands, requiring them to react rapidly and efficiently on the production capacities. Together with the trend to use Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), this requirement induces a need for agile collaboration among supply chain partners, but also between different divisions or branches of the same company. In order to address this collaboration challenge, we propose a novel pragmatic approach for the process analysis, implementation and execution. This is achieved through sets of semantic annotations of business process models encoded into BPMN 2.0 extensions. Building blocks for such manufacturing processes are the individual available services, which are also semantically annotated according to the Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) principles and stored into a common marketplace. The optimization of such manufacturing processes combines pattern-based semantic composition of services with their non-functional aspects. This is achieved by means of Quality-of-Service (QoS)-based Constraint Optimization Problem (COP) solving, resulting in an automatic implementation of service-based manufacturing processes. The produced solution is mapped back to the BPMN 2.0 standard formalism by means of the introduced extension elements, fully detailing the enactable optimal process service plan produced. This approach allows enacting a process instance, using just-in-time service leasing, allocation of resources and dynamic replanning in the case of failures. This proposition provides the best compromise between external visibility, control and flexibility. In this way, it provides an optimal approach for business process models’ implementation, with a full service-oriented taste, by implementing user-defined QoS metrics, just-in-time execution and basic dynamic repairing capabilities. This paper presents the described approach and the technical architecture and depicts one initial industrial application in the manufacturing domain of aluminum forging for bicycle hull body forming, where the advantages stemming from the main capabilities of this approach are sketched.

Over the last 10 years two major research directions explored the benefits of visualizing student learning progress. One stream of research on learning performance visualization attempts to build a visual presentation of students' learning progress, targeting the needs of instructors and academic advisors. The other stream of research on Open Student Modeling (OSM) attempts to visualize the state of individual student's knowledge and present the visualization directly to the student. The results of the studies in that area show that, presenting students with basic representation of their knowledge will result in facilitating their metacognitive activities and promoting self-reflection and awareness. This paper tries to study the impact of a more sophisticated form of performance visualization on students. We believe that our visualization tool can positively influence students by granting them the opportunity to get a view of their performance in the content of the class progress. Moreover, we tried to boost their motivation by building a positive sense of competition using a representation of average class performance. In this paper we present study comparing two groups of students, one using the visualization and another without visualization. The results of the study shows that: 1) the students are likely to use the social visualization tool during the whole semester to monitor their progress in comparison with their peers; 2) the visualization tool encourages students to use the learning materials in a more continuous manner during the whole semester and 3) students will achieve a higher success rate in answering self-assessment quizzes.