Towards a search engine for functionally appropriate, Web-enabled models and simulations

New emerging modeling and simulation environments have the potential to provide easy access to design models and simulations on the Internet, much as the World Wide Web (WWW) has provided easy access to information. To support sharing, integration and reuse of web-enabled applications (design models and simulations), a search engine for functionally appropriate/similar models is needed. There are ongoing efforts to develop ontological descriptions for web content and simulation model functionality, where semantics of available services are explicitly represented using a shared knowledge representation of concepts and rules. Simulation publishers are responsible of semantically marking up the interfaces with such ontological annotations. In contrast to such an approach, this work proposes a flexible, implicit, pattern matching solution that does not require any extra annotations to accompany, the models, much as the way current web search engines operate. A learning-through-association, similarity-based approach was developed. It uses only pre-existing low-level information in web-enabled simulation interfaces-such as model and parameters names, parameter units, parameter scale, input/output structure, causality, and documentation - to synthesize templates that become archetypes for functional concepts.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Mechanical Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Cao, Qing, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• David R. Wallace.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/38261

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/38261