TY - JOUR
T1 - Software Agent-Centric Semantic Social Network for Cyber-Physical Interaction and Collaboration
AU - Hussain, Nazmul
AU - Wang, Hai H.
AU - Buckingham, Christopher D.
AU - Zhang, Xiaoyuan
PY - 2020/7/29
Y1 - 2020/7/29
N2 - Considerable research has recently focused on integrating cyber-physical systems in a social context. However, several challenges remain concerning appropriate methodologies, frameworks and techniques for supporting socio-cyber-physical collaboration. Existing systems do not recognize how cyber-physical resources can be socially connected so that they interact in collaborative decision-making like humans. Furthermore, the lack of semantic representations for heterogeneous cyber-social-collaborative networks limits integration, interoperability and knowledge discovery from their underlying data sources. Semantic Web ontology models can help to overcome this limitation by semantically describing and interconnecting cyber-physical objects and human participants in a social space. This research addresses the establishment of both cyber-physical and human relationships and their interactions within a social-collaborative network. We discuss how nonhuman resources can be represented as socially connected nodes and utilized by software agents. A software agent-centric Semantic Social-Collaborative Network (SSCN) is then presented that provides functionality to represent and manage cyber-physical resources in a social network. It is supported by an extended ontology model for semantically describing human and nonhuman resources and their social interactions. A software agent has been implemented to perform some actions on behalf of the nonhuman resources to achieve cyber-physical collaboration. It is demonstrated within a real-world decision support system, GRiST (www.egrist.org), used by mental-health services in the UK.
AB - Considerable research has recently focused on integrating cyber-physical systems in a social context. However, several challenges remain concerning appropriate methodologies, frameworks and techniques for supporting socio-cyber-physical collaboration. Existing systems do not recognize how cyber-physical resources can be socially connected so that they interact in collaborative decision-making like humans. Furthermore, the lack of semantic representations for heterogeneous cyber-social-collaborative networks limits integration, interoperability and knowledge discovery from their underlying data sources. Semantic Web ontology models can help to overcome this limitation by semantically describing and interconnecting cyber-physical objects and human participants in a social space. This research addresses the establishment of both cyber-physical and human relationships and their interactions within a social-collaborative network. We discuss how nonhuman resources can be represented as socially connected nodes and utilized by software agents. A software agent-centric Semantic Social-Collaborative Network (SSCN) is then presented that provides functionality to represent and manage cyber-physical resources in a social network. It is supported by an extended ontology model for semantically describing human and nonhuman resources and their social interactions. A software agent has been implemented to perform some actions on behalf of the nonhuman resources to achieve cyber-physical collaboration. It is demonstrated within a real-world decision support system, GRiST (www.egrist.org), used by mental-health services in the UK.
KW - Semantic Web
KW - Social computing
KW - Socio-Cyber-Physical system
KW - healthcare
KW - ontology
KW - social agent
KW - social network
UR - https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0218194020400100
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85089578276&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1142/s0218194020400100
DO - 10.1142/s0218194020400100
M3 - Article
SN - 0218-1940
VL - 30
SP - 859
EP - 893
JO - International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering
JF - International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering
IS - 6
ER -