Abdelghani Karkar
email: a.karkar@qu.edu.qa

Jihad Mohamad Al Ja'am

Sebti Foufou
email: sfoufou@qu.edu.qa

A Survey on Educational Ontologies and their Development Cycle

Keywords: Semantic Web, Ontology, Methodology, Development life cycle, Engineering Education

Nowadays, the grid of Internet has demonstrated to be plentiful and tremendous data source of information, where diverse domains can be reached and mined. Semantic web is part of the Internet grid where knowledge is provided and has a predefined sense. People can use the big quantity of accessible information for entertainment, exploring knowledge, and learning. In this paper, we provide a survey of educational ontologies, their development life cycle, and the tools used for their implementation. The classification outcomes are beneficial not only for practicality purposes but also for building educational ontologies and their reusability, since it provides a framework for selecting the suitable methodology to be used in specific context, depending also on the requirements of the application itself.

Introduction

Ontology has gained the attention of people in both industrial and academic fields. The term ontology has been defined in various ways [START_REF] Sowa | Ontology, metadata, and semiotics[END_REF]. Initially, it originates from philosophy, where it refers to the basic characteristics of semantic existence in the word. Different domain ontologies are applied to provide a formal concept for knowledge structure, such as, management, nutriments, animals and medicines. Domain knowledge can provide meaning based and requirement statements in a particular domain [START_REF] Kaiya | Using domain ontology as domain knowledge for requirements elicitation[END_REF]. Domain concepts in a domain and their semantic relations can lead to discover new facts.

Educational content is created by an instructor in order to provide his students with useful learning materials. It is usually divided into different complementary sections where each section covers a particular area that can be related to the previous one. Any educational content can have general information like domain, title, description, chapter, etc. Educational ontologies are developed to improve the learning concepts in a particular area. They can be used in different domains to facilitate the access to information and generate new knowledge through reasoning. Different educational ontologies for different domains have been created and published [START_REF] Chung | Semantic Model of Syllabus and Learning Ontology for Intelligent Learning System[END_REF][START_REF] Rachuri | A model for capturing product assembly information[END_REF][START_REF] Sawsaa | Building an Advance Domain Ontology Model of Information Science[END_REF]. However, the reusability aspect of these ontologies in a complete educational system is still missing. This study is a survey of the existing educational ontologies. It provides an initial step to reuse and maintain different domain models for learning and training purposes. This paper is organized as follows: section 2 presents the literature background of educational and learning ontologies. Section 3, surveys the methodologies used to construct ontologies. Section 4 reviews the used tools for developing the ontologies and some technical details of about them. Section 5 elucidates the significance of reusing and maintaining educational ontologies for educational and training purposes. Finally, section 6 concludes the paper.

Background

An ontology can be constructed to define specific type of information that will be used by communities. Researchers have been constructing conceptual ground for developing efficient solutions to daily problems based on shared and reusable knowledge components. The construction of ontology denotes clear concepts, relations and instances which define the characteristics of conceptualization. In another words, an ontology is the backbone to define concepts specifications [START_REF] Sawsaa | Building an Advance Domain Ontology Model of Information Science[END_REF].

Sawsaa and Lu [START_REF] Sawsaa | Building an Advance Domain Ontology Model of Information Science[END_REF] have developed an ontology of information science (OIS) that can be used for information science education. The formulation of concepts depends on recognizing the information science (IS) concepts and coinciding them into a hierarchical structure based on their classifications. The study presents formal semantic elucidation for IS meta-data. The formal semantic elucidation involves the strength of reading information and processing them by Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems [START_REF] Marquardt | OntoCAPE: A re-usable ontology for chemical process engineering[END_REF]. Wang et al. [START_REF] Wang | Using Semantic Techology for Consistency Checking of Road Signs[END_REF] proposed an image processing system to verify automatically road signs depending on pre-defined road sign regulations (RSRs) and simulate the generation of new road signs process when new roads are constructed. The system is based on semantic-enabled road sign management (SeRSM), where information are integrated semantically using the Large Knowledge Collider (LarKC) platform [START_REF] Fensel | Towards LarKC: a platform for web-scale reasoning[END_REF]. LarKC is a huge distributed data used for enormous knowledge classification, reasoning, representation querying, and it has been excessively applied in the fields of urban computing, biomedical, and sciences. The main goal of LarKC projects is to develop a reasoning platform using huge amounts of diverse information. The platform contains a pluggable interface to achieve heuristics and techniques from different areas such as machine learning, databases and semantic web.

Challco et al. [START_REF] Challco | Towards an Ontology for Gamifying Collaborative Learning Scenarios[END_REF] have developed an ontology for gamifying collaborative learning (CL) scenarios (OntoGaCLeS). The term gamification exceeds the meaning of playing games only; it conducts the design of game elements to motivate individual requirement depending on personality characteristics. "Human desires" is take into consideration the needs of individual's motivation through the integration of diverse game techniques to provide sufficient environment [START_REF] Domínguez | Gamifying learning experiences: Practical implications and outcomes[END_REF]. Rezgui et al. [START_REF] Rezgui | An Ontology-Based Approach to Competency Modeling and Management in Learning Networks[END_REF] have analyzed various competency modeling approaches and proposed an ontology to formally define the characteristics of competency-related and learning resources. The ontology intends to provide visual presentation for competency information management aspects. Thus, it serves lifelong competency development within learning networks. Chung and Kim [START_REF] Chung | Semantic Model of Syllabus and Learning Ontology for Intelligent Learning System[END_REF] have defined an ontological structure for syllabus with their semantic relationships. They have integrated the classification based on ACM/IEEE computing curriculum, learning activity, formalization of learning goals, and they performed learning evaluation using Bloom's taxonomy to ameliorate syllabus usability [START_REF] Forehand | Bloom's taxonomy[END_REF]. They have proposed an efficient method for improving students' learning effect using the constructed subject ontology, knowledge sharing, and visual presentation.

Quinn et al. [START_REF] Quinn | An Ontology Based Approach to the Provision of Personalized Patient Education[END_REF] have proposed a personalized approach to improve patient education. They presented three models, health conditions, user characteristics, and educational content. The three models can be used to create educational content that supports patient understanding and concentrates on specific patient's health concerns. The educational content is presented in a web-based application that provides the patients with details about their diagnosis and how they can improve their health. Yoon et al. [START_REF] Yoon | MCSOSA: multimedia content share using ontology and secure access agent in mobile cloud[END_REF] suggested a model to provide protective technique to access multimedia content in the mobile cloud. The model manages different content forms, and builds the multimedia ontology to improve reliability during the retrieval process. The ontology can solve conflict problems caused by mobile device meta-information and it manages the content in different forms. Meta information includes name, store location, production day, etc. Conflict problems, such as meta-information collision and semantic collision, can be resolved through mapping between content of instances. Kim et al. [START_REF] Kim | Development of Ontology for the Diseases of Spine[END_REF] constructed a spine ontology that represents disease information and spine anatomical structure that is compatible with KISTI Simulation model. The ontology concentrates on the persistent diseases that concern Koreans. It contains methods of treatment, classification, and cause related with spine. The spinal ontology can be used for education purpose by medical students, biomedical engineers, and physicians.

Review of Used Methodologies

Sawsaa and Lu [START_REF] Sawsaa | Building an Advance Domain Ontology Model of Information Science[END_REF] developed an ontology of information science (OIS) according to the IEEE principle for the process of software development life cycle. The formulation of concepts depends on recognizing the Information Science (IS) notions, and coinciding them into a hierarchical structure view based on their classifications. Wang et al. [START_REF] Wang | Using Semantic Techology for Consistency Checking of Road Signs[END_REF] investigated a data integration solution to provide a ground for intelligence road sign management system instituted over LarKC platform. The solution carries the processing of huge amount of lined geo-data, data modeling, road sign data, reasoning and scalable querying. The data is associated using mediation ontology. SeRSM Geographic data is declared originally by three elements (i.e., node, way and relation). Way elements are accentuated as a range of nodes, and a road on the map is formed from ways. The node is modeled in three types: 1) generic nodes that can distinguish either a point on way or a junction between multiple roads. 2) Road sign (RS) nodes which identify the location of a road sign. And 3) Zhenjiang POIs (ZJPOI) that identify Point of Interests (POI) from (Open Street Map1 ) Open Street Map (OSM) and Baidu map. SeRSM system exploits large scale of semantic data. Semantic data was transformed to a uniform representation using XSLT and other technologies to facilitate the handling process and reasoning between them.

Challco et al. [START_REF] Challco | Towards an Ontology for Gamifying Collaborative Learning Scenarios[END_REF] examined gamifying CL scenarios to make the learning experience more meaningful and enjoyable. Learners will be highly motivated while performing their proposed tasks. They will enjoy using different game techniques like point system, social connection, leaderboards, etc. Challco et al. introduced different terms to support the games mechanics' personalization in CL scenarios: 1) I-mot goal is the increase of individual motivation to achieve the goal at specific stage. 2) Y <= I-mot goal is the increase of motivational strategy to attain the goal. 3) You-player role and I-player role are the active player role. 4) Igameplay is the behavior of strategy employed at runtime of the person in focus (I). The ontology contains the player's roles concepts, where two prerequisites are denoted as desired and necessary conditions. The desired conditions define learner satisfaction to attain full interest of a player that are defined in the playing style, while the necessary conditions are important for a learner to play the game which also refer to psychological needs and motivational stages. They have defined in their ontology only one restriction for socializer which can work only with other socializer. Rezgui et al. [START_REF] Rezgui | An Ontology-Based Approach to Competency Modeling and Management in Learning Networks[END_REF] defined several concepts in their competency ontology to formalize the terms competency profile and competency. Competency profiles in real applications illuminate most evident aspects of competency modeling. They provide support to various tasks, like creating job/project competency profile for hiring candidates, creating personal competency profiles to set the highlight on certain capabilities, creating perquisite competency profiles to show basic requirements for specific programs, and so. They defined their competency model according to the definition of Paquette [START_REF] Paquette | An ontology and a software framework for competency modeling and management[END_REF]. Paquette [START_REF] Paquette | An ontology and a software framework for competency modeling and management[END_REF] defined the competency as a statement having different relationships to all achieved skills and knowledge at specific performance level. For instance, "apply all processes to construct a use case diagram" is a competency statement in which the term apply indicates the usage of previous knowledge for construction.

Chung and Kim [START_REF] Chung | Semantic Model of Syllabus and Learning Ontology for Intelligent Learning System[END_REF] developed their syllabus ontology to show learning concepts and relations between them. The syllabus is written by the instructor for his/her students to present how learning materials will be provided. The syllabus does not provide semantic concepts and essential relations among different information (e.g., title, summary, grading criteria, etc.). It can be used only to organize information in particular order. Syllabus ontology demonstrates an efficient method to improve students' learning effect where it conceptualizes teaching contents. It is designed to cover many sorts of e-learning environment knowledge from curriculum. The curriculum can be structured as a set of courses' description and syllabus. The curriculum ontology defines the concepts of curriculum-related knowledge (e.g., Course, Program, Level, etc.) with their semantic relation between each course and its syllabus ontology. The syllabus ontology defines the structure of syllabuses where it defines the core concept, called Syllabus. The Syllabus has different properties (e.g., titleOfCourse, gradingPolicy, description, etc.), which describe the characteristics of the course. The subject ontology is composed from learner-based ontologies and teacher-based ontologies. Learner-based ontologies provide knowledge of learning materials created by students. Teacher-based ontology provides knowledge of learning materials that will be studied in class. When a teacher displays learning subjects, students conduct displayed subjects to extract required concepts and knowledge.

During the ontology design phase proposed by Quinn et al. [START_REF] Quinn | An Ontology Based Approach to the Provision of Personalized Patient Education[END_REF], different sources were surveyed to identify which characteristics should be checked for the person and health conditions items. These sources comprised Diabetes UK, the UK National Health Service, The American Diabetes Association, and academic publications. The proposed personalized framework is composed of two layers; 1) Modelling & Management ontology layer: it has three main entities; the patient, medical conditions, and education content. Information is modeled in an ontology to share understanding of domain interest. Ontology data ensures that semantic information is not ambiguous and it is appropriate for performing reasoning technologies. Information in this layer includes patients' characteristics collected from their medical records and activity specifications inspected by a physician; and 2) Personalization & Contextualization layer: it includes rules and reasoning engine for personalization. The reasoning component can use the ontology and rules to generate inferences and their semantic relations. For instance, a rule can be defined to identify the relation between a set of symptoms denoted by a patient including specific health involvement. Kim et al. [START_REF] Kim | Development of Ontology for the Diseases of Spine[END_REF] are professional researchers from different domains, which include computer professional, medical informatics, and clinical experts. They collaborated together to design and construct the spinal ontology. They passed through five phases: 1) review existing ontologies in the domain where required information are gathered after the classifying of diseases and analyzing the ontology of Rat anatomy; 2) selection of the diverse spine diseases including the research subject, where the selection is done according to three criteria: (a) most spinal diseases occurring among Koreans, (b) the disease must happen in particular area rather than the whole spine, and (c) the disease should have a computerized representation; 3) development and review of ontology information, 4) construction of the ontology relying on the feedback of clinical experts, and 5) review the ontology by specialists. The represented results allow users to access 3D images where they can rotate, move, and change the zoom level of the image.

Review the Used Tools and Technical Details

The OIS ontology proposed by Sawsaa and Lu [START_REF] Sawsaa | Building an Advance Domain Ontology Model of Information Science[END_REF] has been developed using Protégé where fourteen facets have been defined (e.g., Actors, Methods, Practice, etc.). The evaluation of the ontology showed adequate results where it has been assessed by domain's experts to inspect different criterions, which include avoiding concepts duplication, inconsistent relationships, clarity and excessiveness. The dataset proposed by Wang et al. [START_REF] Wang | Using Semantic Techology for Consistency Checking of Road Signs[END_REF] contains 3 million triples representing streets of Zhenjiang which are collected by OSM, 0.8 million triples represent road signs which a collected from Baidu map, and 0.1 million triples represent road signs which are collected by the team members. 32 Chinese road sign regulations related to naming and positioning are converted to SPARQL queries. The presentation of data is a web based interface that displays extracted information directly on the map. If the settled threshold has too much information in one road sign, the system will show warning information for the users.

Challco et al. [START_REF] Challco | Towards an Ontology for Gamifying Collaborative Learning Scenarios[END_REF] have developed a semantic web utility that serves in the design of Collaborative Learning (CL) based on game design, instructional design, and learning theories principles. They have developed their ontology using Hozo Ontology editor. They have defined eight gamified CL scenarios using their developed ontology. Each scenario is associated with one player's role to satisfy the psychological needs, motivation stages and playing style. The competency ontology proposed by Rezgui et al. [START_REF] Rezgui | An Ontology-Based Approach to Competency Modeling and Management in Learning Networks[END_REF] is constructed using Protégé. OntoViz plugin has been used to visualize the ontology as a graph. It reuses some concepts defined semantic web vocabularies for taxonomy representation (e.g., SKOS Core ontology [START_REF] Bechhofer | SKOS simple knowledge organization system reference[END_REF] and annotation of content (e.g., Dublin Core) [START_REF] Dc | Dublin Core Metadata Element Set[END_REF]. The concept competency has different properties (e.g., isComposedOf, requires, hasProficiencyLevel, etc.) and it is related with different concepts: 1) Skill denotes the selected skill from skills of learning-domain taxonomy; 2) Knowledge specifies the correspondent view of a subject matter; 3) the context which is basically identified from the domain ontology; and 4) ProficiencyLevel which identifies individual proficiency record.

The syllabus ontology proposed by Chung and Kim [START_REF] Chung | Semantic Model of Syllabus and Learning Ontology for Intelligent Learning System[END_REF] provides diverse semantic relationships through its main class named Syllabus. Learning elements will be displayed as sequentially connected nodes for students inside a learning graph. Each node contains the lectures, learning activities, goals and assessments. The Syllabus also can be presented in the learning graph to provide more information about the course (e.g., description, lectures, learning materials, etc.) and to show the order between multiple syllabuses. The teacher can define 1) a learning goal in the format of <goalp, Ci, Aj, Sk>, like <"Understanding functions in JAVA", C3, A2, S3>, where p-th denotes the learning goal, i th for understanding complexity level, j th for the attitude level, and k th for the skills level respectively; 2) a learning activity in the format of <LAp, Ci, Aj, Sk>, where LAp denotes the learning activity (e.g., (R)eading, (P)resentation, pr(A)ctice, etc.); and 3) a learning assessment in the format of <QEp, sentenceg> where QEp is the learning activities (e.g., quiz, assignment, exam, etc.), and sentenceg denotes the description for the learning assessment.

The design of the ontology proposed by Quinn et al. [START_REF] Quinn | An Ontology Based Approach to the Provision of Personalized Patient Education[END_REF] is developed with Protégé. Domain concepts are defined, declared and arranged in a hierarchical structure of superclass-subclass relationships. The data in the user model are separated into three classes, HealthProfile, PersonalProfile, and EducationProfile. HeathProfile contains all aspects of activity objectives and patient's health. PersonalProfile contains personal information of the patient, such as, gender, age, language, and ethnicity. EducationProfile stores information used to identify the readability level of the patient. The educational content includes graphical and text components, such as, diagrams and illustrations. The educational content consists of three classes, Educational-Content, Text, and Image. Class Text shows textual information that is related to the obesity and diabetes. Its properties include hasSubject, hasLanguage, and hasReadabilityLevel. These properties can be associated with the PersonalProfile and EducationProfile to guarantee the language preferences and readability needs of the patient. Class Image properties include hasGender, hasEthnicity, and hasAge. They provide relations to infer associations with comparable characteristics recorded about the patient.

The multimedia content ontology proposed by Yoon et al. [START_REF] Yoon | MCSOSA: multimedia content share using ontology and secure access agent in mobile cloud[END_REF] is developed with Protégé. It is based on the OWL language. Extracted information can be classified by instance, category, position, and value partition sectors. The instance stores the semantic relation between contents. The category applies Multimedia Description Schema (MDS) of MPEG-7. The position access instance information and stores its location. It facilitates the access to particular content by a user. Eventually, value partition stores the assortment of the values obtained by instance. Collisions might occur between the content stored on mobile devices and meta-information. They can be resolved by the mapping of instances between meta-information. For instance, meta-information for an audio file on device A cloud includes artist, name, media, size, long date; whilst meta-information of the same audio file on device B cloud includes author, title, media size, short date; both meta-information refer to the same information where synonym, format convert, and mapping can be used to solve this collision.

The spinal ontology proposed by Kim et al. [START_REF] Kim | Development of Ontology for the Diseases of Spine[END_REF] was developed using Protégé and Altova SemanticWorks. The ontology includes the connections to sample disease images and images from KISTI. It contains detailed information about a disease that can occur in particular region. Anatomical information were classified into two categories, anatomical location (e.g., spine:isPartOf) and anatomic properties (e.g., spine:isPartOf, rdfs:label, rdfs:subClassOf, etc.). Disease related information were classified into five categories: anatomical location (e.g., spine:hasSite, etc.), property of the disease (e.g., rdfs:description, spine:diagnosis, spine:hasCause, etc.), method of treatment (e.g., spine:hasNonSurgicalTreatment, spine:hasSurgicalTreatment, etc.), symptom/sign (e.g., spine:hasSymptom, spine:hasSign, etc.), and image (e.g., spine:hasImageBeforeTx, spine:hasImageAfterTx).

Ontology Usage in Education and Professional Training

Large composite applications can be costly, difficult and controversial especially when diverse forms describe the same concept. However, extracting information from previous existing ontologies remains viable since they have common high-level structure. One of the intelligent tasks that can be performed with ontologies is the semantic relation extraction (SRE), which includes finding new semantic relations (Inference 2 ) to optimize the taxonomic of reasoning. These tasks cannot be done in database models since they rely on static predefined structure. SER can identify entity acquaintance, relationship with other entities, and its types. It can be used also for knowledge extraction (i.e., extracting entity names from text content, etc.) that is required during the phase of text processing. Educational ontologies can be used for: 1) education to teach students (e.g., processing a child story to show a lion is carnivorous and eats rabbit; if we know that a tiger is carnivorous, we can infer that the tiger can also eat rabbit), and 2) professional trainings to provide profound information in particular area, for instance, to provide a representation about electro-mechanical assemblies require the extraction of required information from an ontology that illuminates the usage of each part and the relation between each other (e.g., a Ring Gear can hold a Sun Gear, an Output Shaft requires both Planet Gears and Planet Gear Pins to be connected [START_REF] Rachuri | A model for capturing product assembly information[END_REF], etc.).

Conclusion

Based on our survey, it can be seen that there is a growing interest in the field of educational ontologies. Our paper provided a survey of some available educational ontologies from different domains of application 2 Inference: http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/inference and discussed their development methodologies as well as used tools. This work can be considered as a tentative effort to manage and use them in a unified aspect in order to provide a complete semantic knowledge representation for the diverse domains. Therefore, it is recommended to design a system that can manage the reusability of existing ontologies to extract relevant information and provide learners with suitable knowledge.

Open Street Map: http://www.openstreetmap.org/

APPENDIX


T R G Green

Noora Fetais

How Notations are Developed: a Proposed Notational Lifecycle

Keywords: Notations, Usability, Cognitive Dimensions Framework, Development of Notational Systems, Diagrams. 1

Notations develop over time. We propose that they characteristically pass through a series of development stages, starting very simple and becoming more complex, reaching a stage of complexity that hinders their usability: then, often, a new higher-level notation is developed that is once again simple, and will perhaps pass through the same development. Notations develop in this way because the way they are used develops. We propose 5 stages; Iconic, Flowering, Formalising, Support Patchwork, and Rebirth. Examples can be found in the development of various software systems, such as programming languages, CSS, and content-management systems; also in other domains, such as circuit diagrams and music notation.

Introduction

This paper describes the life cycle of notations and how they evolve. Notations that are used to represent data and code evolve, just as do natural languages that are used for human-human communication [START_REF] Crystal | The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language[END_REF], but natural languages are unplanned, whereas each successive version of a notation is deliberately intended to be an improvement over the previous version -yet by solving some problems, these improvements create new problems; solutions to those problems raise further problems, and so on. That is the notational life cycle.

We start with some short examples of notational development, drawn from accounts of the history of dance notation, the history of algebraic notation, and the history of musical notation, and enquire what is known about the motivations that forced the changes over time. We claim that these descriptions of notational development, which we believe to be typical, give little understanding of the reasons for notational development, beyond saying that the notation 'needed to develop': and most importantly, these descriptions show no awareness that other notations, in other fields, follow parallel courses.

What might be meant by saying that a notation 'needs to develop'? Presumably, that it is not doing its job well enough any longer. All the accounts cited present insightful comments about what jobs their notation needs to do, but none of them gives any more generalised account; so we next consider two attempts to describe the features required of notations at a generalised level, focusing on usability in the sense of human-computer interaction. But both these accounts are purely synchronic, describing what is required of a notation at a particular time, but giving no account of the lifecycles of notations, and so these descriptions are of little help to us.

Is it possible, then, to describe the typical lifecycle of a notation? We claim that it is, and we draw on the examples mentioned to postulate five stages of notational development. From here we continue with a case study of a particular notation. exists in the designer's mind and the public notational system used to express designs." To illustrate their approach, they consider the field of dance and the historical development of dance notation. Like any other notation, dance notation must meet the needs of the various interested parties (dancers, stage designers, lighting crew, director, etc). Early dance notations included the well-known woodcuts of Arbeau's treatise of 1588 on social dancing, Orchésographie (Figure 1). These early forms were purely pictorial notations. Fig. [START_REF] Moody | The Physics" of Notations: Toward a Scientific Basis for Constructing Visual Notations in Software Engineering[END_REF] An Example of Sutton Movement Writing [START_REF] Sutton | [END_REF] Dance notation rapidly became more elaborate, more detailed, and more formal, leading to highly detailed notations that needed lengthy training to read and write fluently, such as 'labanotation' [START_REF] Laban | Laban's Principles of Dance and Movement Notation[END_REF] (Figure 2).

In the late twentieth century, however, we see a return to a form of pictorial notation for dance and other forms of movement, the Sutton Method [START_REF] Sutton | Dance Writing Shorthand for Classical Ballet. Center for Sutton Movement Writing[END_REF]. Waters and Gibbons assert that the Sutton method conveys as much information as the Laban notation, but that dancers find it much easier. What have they to say about this progression? They have an interesting and insightful section on the interaction between 'design language' and 'notation system', and they correctly observe that a good notation leads to fruitful innovation, but they have nothing to say about the progress and lifecycle except that as the design language becomes refined and extended, it leads to developments in the notation, which lead to further developments in the design language, and so on.

Algebraic Notation. Stallings [START_REF]A Brief History of Algebraic Notation[END_REF] describes three major stages in the development of our schoolroom algebra, starting with 'rhetorical algebra' in which operations were described in words:

If the instance be, "ten and thing to be multiplied by thing less ten," then this is the same as if it were said thing and ten by thing less ten. You say, therefore, thing multiplied by thing is a square positive; and ten by thing is ten things positive; and minus ten by thing is ten things negative. You now remove the positive by the negative, then there only remains a square. Minus ten multiplied by ten is a hundred, to be subtracted from the square. This, therefore, altogether, is a square less a hundred. . . [Nelson, 1993, p 33] Or, in modern terms, (x + 10)(x -10) = x2 -100. The steps to our modern 'symbolic' algerba were gradual. The equality sign was developed by Robert Recorde in 1557, who chose two parallel lines of the same length because "no 2 things can be more equal" -a picture of equality. Much earlier, Stallings writes, the Rhind papyrus of c. 1650 BC contains "one of the earliest known symbols for addition and subtraction; a pair of legs walking forward, which denoted addition and a pair of legs walking away for subtraction (Eves, 1983)." Once again, we note that these early symbols are pictures.

Staff Notation of Music. [START_REF] Rastall | The Notation of Western Music: an introduction[END_REF] presents an excellent overview of the development of Western musical notation. The common notation for Western music has undergone a very long course of development and the notations of its earliest stages are not well understood; but in the 9th and 10th centuries, we find the earliest instances of the use of 'neumes' as musical signs, in the manuscripts of the Swiss monastery of St Gall. "The earliest neumes were inflective marks which indicated the general shape but not necessarily the exact notes or rhythms to be sung" (wikipaedia, under neume). Their function was to remind their reader of the essential features of a melody that has already been learnt, rather than to specify the performance exactly. Although neumes were already highly developed by the time of the St Gall manuscripts, their appearance is at least partly a picture of the trajectory of pitches: the neume called 'climacus', for instance, stands for three notes descending, and looks exactly like that: Fig. 44 The climacus neume -three notes descending

The development of neumes is one of increasing sophistication, from simple lines and dots to fairly elaborate flourishes. By a very complex series of developments, notation eventually arrived at our familiar staff notation, far more precise and detailed than the neume -though even here, we can distinguish different levels of detail, depending on the genre. Today, three notes descending might be written like this: Unlike neumes, present-day notation offers many possible elaborations, which can give much more precision about how the notes are to be played: Rastall distinguishes eight kinds of notation in music, from a pure aide-mémoire, through skeleton notations to more and more closely detailed notations and then to 'inspirational' notations where "visual symbols or ideas expressed graphically and/or in words inspire the performer to certain actions". He no doubt had in mind such notations as the quasi-pictorial symbols bused by Christian Wolff [START_REF] Wolff | For 1, 2 or 3 people[END_REF] (Figure 7).

Wolff's symbols mean things like 'make a sound in a middle place, in some respect, of the sounds around it,' make a sound involving stretched material', or 'play after a previous sound has begun, hold till it stops'. We see here a move away from the high level of formality and precision that had been accumulating in music notation and a return to the under-specified world of the neume.

What have we learnt? Three very different fields of notation have been presented, and in each case we have seen that the earliest forms were pictorial or picture-like; that the notations developed in degree of formality and in degree of expressiveness and sophistication; and eventually, in at least the dance and music fields, a new notation was presented, in which the level of formality was abruptly reduced.

We have also seen that in all three fields there is no proper account of the development. Nothing is said about the fact that the earliest stage was usually pictorial, and nothing is said about the development except that it needed to become more expressive.

Above all, there is no awareness that the course of development in each field is profoundly similar. The evidence is that notations start and develop in similar ways, whatever field they may be designed for. The purpose of this paper is to make a start at describing the common features of notational development.

What is a 'good' notation?

Although the field of human-computer interaction offers many examples of detailed analysis, there are very few attempts to provide evaluation techniques suitable for notations as a class. One such is the 'cognitive dimensions' framework; another is the so-called 'physics of notations' [START_REF] Moody | The Physics" of Notations: Toward a Scientific Basis for Constructing Visual Notations in Software Engineering[END_REF].

Cognitive Dimensions of Notations. The cognitive dimensions framework [START_REF] Green | Cognitive dimensions of notations[END_REF] sets out to provide a useful vocabulary with which to describe important aspects of notational systems at the structural level -that is, it explicitly does not deal with details of rendering and presentation. It is important to note that because this framework is much concerned with creating or making changes to documents, what is considered is the notation in the environment of its editing system, which might be an IDE or might be pen and paper or might even be marble and chisel. Examples of dimensions are viscosity, meaning that local changes need many actions to accomplish: changing all the first-level headings of a document to use larger font, for instance, can be a tedious job unless a style-sheet system is available. A style-sheet, however, introduces the dimension of abstraction level: some users find abstractions to be a serious barrier. A third dimension is hidden dependencies, where it is difficult to know what will happen if one object is changed because it is not manifest whether other objects will be affected; changing one cell in a spreadsheet, for example, may have big knock-on effects. About 16 dimensions are included in the framework.

Within the framework, no dimension is considered to be evaluative on its own, but only in the context of one of the half-dozen archetypal 'activities': incrementation (adding more objects to a structure, eg defining a new class), modification (changing the structure, eg rebuilding the class hierarchy), transcription (e.g. turning arithmetic procedures into program code), search, exploratory design (working out how to write a program, composing a piece of music, etc), and exploratory understanding (discovering the internal structure and workings, e.g. of a piece of software). If we know the typical activity that a notation will be used for, we can then make some evaluations: a notational system with high viscosity is more suitable for transcription activities than for exploratory design, for instance.

The framework does not claim to offer precise or even vague quantitative predictions, but instead to offer 'tools for discussion' which can lead to improvements in existing notational systems. It has been applied with success in many fields, but unfortunately it offers no clue as to the lifecycles of notations. It is a purely synchronic evaluation. [START_REF] Moody | The Physics" of Notations: Toward a Scientific Basis for Constructing Visual Notations in Software Engineering[END_REF] claims to have developed 'principles for designing cognitively effective visual notations', optimised for human communication and problem-solving. These principles are such as semiotic clarity, meaning that there should be a 1:1 correspondence between semantic constructs and graphical symbols. While it is unclear to us that the principles proposed by Moody merit a comparison to physics, what is clear is that this is another purely synchronic form of evaluation, with nothing to say about how notations might develop.

Physics of Notations. Moody

The Notational Life Cycle

We propose that notations generally proceed along a spiral path in five stages, as in Fig. 8: 88 The notational lifecycle Each notational stage will have different characteristic problems. (These 'stages' are a convenient idealisation, of course, just as the usual colour names -red, orange, yellow ... -are a convenient idealisation of continuously changing wavelengths and mixtures of wavelengths.) Every time we see a new cycle start, by creating a new notation to replace an older one, we see the stage 5 problems exchanged for the stage 1 problems. Stage 5 problems include an over-stretched vocabulary with many special cases; on restarting at stage 1 the vocabulary will be 'higher-level' [START_REF] Green | Cognitive dimensions of notations[END_REF] with new rules for combining components more productively, but the environment will be worse and little attention will be paid to issues of any type of activity except 'incrementation' [START_REF] Green | Cognitive dimensions of notations[END_REF], i.e. adding material. The notational stages are: Iconic. When a new notation is created by an unsophisticated person, it will be pictorial or iconic, like early circuit diagrams (Figure 9).

Fig.
The creator imagines how to add items (more wires or resistors) but does not imagine how to make large changes; likewise personal use is imagined, but not collaborative use. In terms of the 'cognitive dimensions' framework [START_REF] Green | Cognitive dimensions of notations[END_REF], [START_REF] Green | Usability analysis of visual programming environments: a cognitive dimensions framework[END_REF], high viscosity and frequent hidden dependencies are acceptable for personal use. Outside that framework, there are other types of consequence: the notation will probably be very incomplete, because the notation is more of an aide-mémoire than a complete description. Flowering. The notation becomes popular. It is used by other people for slightly different tasks. The vocabulary has to be increased, and consistency falls. As time passes, the early instances of its use need to be updated, and maintenance is slowed by the hidden dependencies and viscosity. Collaborative use increases and forces users to devise techniques for secondary notation to improve the role-expressiveness; these techniques may arise differently and incompatibly among different user groups. The notation is a victim of its success, and is stressed by unforeseen problems.

Formalising. To improve consistency, rules are made explicit. The vocabulary is defined, the syntax is defined, and the possible relationships between entities are defined. The notation gets harder to use, although it's more likely that a syntactically correct document means what its creator intended. Labanotation is at this formalised stage, for example.

Support Patchwork.

A patchwork of tools appears to support users. For example, because the notation has become more formal, it has become harder to sketch casually, so another notation is introduced as a sketching tool, before transcribing the sketch into the target notation, which we call 'decoupling'. A typical example is the development of graphical notations for sketching designs for software before starting implementationsuch as UML, or at a simpler level the humble flowchart. These are what Waters and Gibbons (see above) called 'design languages', in that they free the user from some of the constraints and details. Typically they also free the user from order constraints, because ideas come to the mind in an order dictated by their internal logic rather than by the demands of a formal notation. That is to say, if a diagram is in use as a sketching tool, new logic can be added to it at any point, arbitrarily, whereas if a class hierarchy is being created in an IDE it is usually impossible to create subclasses until their superordinate class has been created: thus, the diagram allows free working, whereas the IDE forces the expression of the program to take place in top-down order.

Rebirth. The vocabulary gets too large and is obviously too low-level. The uses it is put to become more complex, and the structures built in it grow so fat that viscosity, hidden dependencies, and poor visibility are a serious impediment. The crisis is resolved by creating a new, higher-level notation. This will have its own problems, so we are back at stage 1 but at a higher level. The Sutton method, a replacement for labanotation, is an example of rebirth. Similar examples can be found in the development of various software systems, such as programming languages, CSS, and content-management systems; also in other domains, such as circuit diagrams and music notation.

The proposed stages represent the straight track. However, there are lots of factors that might affect the straight track. We proposed 5 factors that may affect the straight track:

Repurposing. Notations are augmented for a specific purpose. For example, CSS originally described the spatial characteristics of typeface, which might include some positional aspects; it is now the primary tool for laying out the spatial structure of a webpage.

Change in Demand.

Due to cultural or environmental influences, users may be more sophisticated; new groups of users may appear. What they want may change, forcing adaptations.

Changes in World.

Inventions could change the role of the usage of some notations. Thus, the notation has had to change dramatically, and many different notations have been created by notational novices, frequently starting at stage 1. For example, after introducing the predicate logic, many notational systems were developed.

Mature Disfluency. Certain notations are so designed that their users' environments slowly become damaged, and the more the notation is used, the worse the damage. An example is the accumulated silt in everyone's computer: dot-files, preference-files and user-manuals for applications long since discarded continue to consume space and efficiency. Market Forces. Notations do not exist in isolation, and sometimes two notations have the same domain. One possible outcome is simple rivalry, as with Leibniz's and Newton's notations for calculus. Another possible outcome is fusion, as in the Unified Modelling Language. The third possible outcome is sophisticated, forward-looking rivalry, in which the creators of one notation attempt to pre-empt rivals by capturing as much notational space as possible.

A Pedagogical Example: Constraint Diagrams and their Life Cycle

To understand our proposed notation lifecycle, we provide a detailed example of the development of an existing notation. The Constraint Diagram notation was chosen because many developments happened in a short time.

At stage 1, the notation was designed for one person doing one small job and thus the anticipated activities on constraint diagrams were limited to 'incrementation' -adding more of the same objects. The notator did not look forward to anticipate modifications or other activities, and worked at an individual level, rather than collective. This stage produced Fig. 11. The notation became popular and was used by other people for slightly different tasks such as behavioural specification [START_REF] Gil | Three dimensional software modelling[END_REF], [START_REF] Gil | Constraint Diagrams: a step beyond UML[END_REF]. Thus, the vocabulary increased, leading to stage 2 of constraint diagrams as shown in Fig. 12. Here we see the notation flowering. In Stage 3 as shown in Fig. 13, an attempt was made to improve consistency by making rules explicit [START_REF] Burton | Transforming constraint diagrams[END_REF]. The vocabulary and the syntax were defined [START_REF] Gil | Towards a Formalization of Constraint Diagrams[END_REF]. The notation started to get harder to use and users would be categorised as experts or novices; a classic example of the formalised stage of a notation cycle. At stage 4 as in Fig. 14, the constraint diagram notation was rigid and thus the constraint tree notation [START_REF] Kent | Constraint Trees[END_REF] was introduced as a complementary notation. Here we see the 'support systems' stage of the lifecycle.

This attempt was improved by introducing reading trees; both explicitly [START_REF] Fish | Computing Reading Trees for Constraint Diagrams[END_REF], [START_REF] Fish | A reading algorithm for Constraint Diagrams[END_REF], [START_REF] Fish | Do monkeys like elephants or do elephants watch monkeys? An empirical study into the default reading of constraint diagrams[END_REF], [START_REF] Fish | A Reading Algorithm for Constraint Diagrams[END_REF], [START_REF] Fish | Computing Reading Trees for Constraint Diagrams[END_REF] and implicitly [START_REF] Fish | Towards a default reading for Constraint Diagrams[END_REF]. There was another attempt [START_REF] Howse | Precise visual modelling[END_REF] of improving this notation using the implicit reading tree with the influence of Z notation [START_REF] Woodcock | Using Z: Specification, Refinement[END_REF]. At this stage, the vocabulary got too large and was obviously too low-level. Thus, new notations needed be devised at a higher level of idealization such as Concept Diagrams [START_REF] Chapman | Deriving sound inference rules for concept diagrams[END_REF], [START_REF] Stapleton | What Can Concept Diagrams Say?. The 7th International Conference of Diagrammatic Representation and Inference[END_REF], [START_REF] Howse | Visualizing Ontologies: A Case Study[END_REF] as in Fig. 15. This is a start of a second life cycle, the 'rebirth', in which we return to stage 1 at a higher level.

Conclusion

In this paper we have argued that notations in very disparate fields develop in very similar ways, and that their paths can be characterised by our five-stage model. To our knowledge, this is an entirely novel observation. The stages have been closely illustrated in the account of the development of constraint diagrams.

Does this lead to useful advice for the designer of a notation? Both the cognitive dimensions framework and the 'physics of notations' approach (see above) can offer some useful advice: for instance, the former can advise a notation designer to think in terms of activities beyond incrementation, and to beware of, say, hidden dependencies in some activities (modification, exploratory understanding) though not all activities (transcription), while the 'physics' approach can remind the designer that symbols should not be overloaded. Yet such advice is purely synchronic.

It is too early know what benefits, if any, may come from viewing notational design diachronically rather than synchronically. However, in this paper, we have focused on their evolution, trying to postulate the factors that cause a notation to develop through different stages. This leads to some principles for notational design that we believe are novel, in that they are based on the likely evolutionary path of a notation:

1. Don't try to create the perfect notation for all time. However perfect the notation might be for the present moment, things will change. 2. Therefore, do try to design a notation that can easily be extended to new activities when they become necessary. 3. Prepare for the patchwork of support that will become necessary, by providing whatever hooks may be useful -but in the early stages it may be difficult to foresee the need. 4. Try to short-circuit the evolution by starting at level 2, the flowering stage, rather than level 1, the iconic stage. It will be obvious that these recommendations are at present quite untested, and we hope that future research on the histories of notations will create a more detailed picture and will correct our thinking where necessary.

FigFig. 22

 22 Fig. 11 a dance movement a Orchésographie

Fig. 55

 55 Fig. 55 Three different realisations of "three notes descending"

Fig. 66

 66 Fig. 66 Three descending notes with more precise information about technique

Fig. 99

 99 Fig. 99 Early circuit diagrams [34] Fig. 1010 [Private communication to first author.]Figure10shows a notation devised by a novice to show how to ring a tune on handbells. The bells are

Fig. 1111 .

 1111 Fig. 1111. Stage 1 of Constraint Diagram[START_REF] Kent | Constraint Diagrams: Visualizing Assertions in Object-Oriented Models[END_REF]

Fig. 1212 .

 1212 Fig. 1212. Stage 2 of Constraint Diagram [5]

Fig. 1313 .

 1313 Fig. 1313. Stage 3 of Constraint Diagram [7]

Fig. 1414 .

 1414 Fig. 1414. Stage 4 of Constraint Diagram [11]

Fig. 1515 .

 1515 Fig. 1515. Stage 5 of Constraint Diagram[START_REF] Howse | Visualizing Ontologies: A Case Study[END_REF]


Ahmed Hefnawy
email: ahmed.hefnawy@univ-lyon2.fr

Abdelaziz Bouras
email: abdelaziz.bouras@qu.edu.qa

Chantal Cherifi
email: chantal.bonnercherifi@univ-lyon2.fr

Integration of Smart City and Lifecycle Concepts for Enhanced Large-Scale Event Management

ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.


Ahm Shamsuzzoha

Petri Helo
email: phelo@uva.fi

Business collaboration -an approach towards end-toend ICT solutions for virtual factory

Keywords: Virtual factory, end-to-end ICT solutions, business collaboration, process monitoring, SMEs

Business collaboration attracts substantial attention within manufacturing communities globally. Companies are collaborating with each other in order to achieve open innovation and for gaining business benefits. This specific research proposes a new business environment known as virtual factory, where similar type of companies form and execute business ecosystem. Such changed business environment demands for an end-to-end communication framework in order to obtaining status update between each other business processes. This research initiates an approach to the formation and execution of a virtual factory business environment that offers one of the important concepts and foundations central to the realization of future manufacturing environment. The virtual factory that is supported by the end-to-end integration of ICT technologies ensures a plug-and-play business process management functionality. In addition to, this research carried out an effort to look into the current researches on virtual collaborations, their inherent requirements and presented a communication framework between collaborative partners through ICT-enabled infrastructure. A case example is highlighted within the scope of this research with the objective to demonstrate and validate the presented communication framework that is to be implemented to monitor and manage virtual factory business processes successfully.

Introduction

Reduced investment capability of companies due to economic crisis, highly dynamic markets, intense competition and other external factors influences manufacturing companies to react quickly and the adoption of changes faster than before. Today's customers expect personalized products or services, which often make difficult for individual company to satisfy. To react such challenge, companies find other companies and integrate with them to work in collaborative enterprise networks [START_REF] Sitek | Towards an inter-organisational perspective for managing quality in virtual organisations[END_REF]. In order to create such networks, companies not only the capability to identify, model and expose their core competences, but the capability to execute their business processes in an agile, short-time and often non-hierarchical business environments [START_REF] Karlsson | The development of industrial networks: challenges to operations management in an extraprise[END_REF].

Due to global economic crisis, the manufacturing domain looks forward to achieve business benefits mostly by exploiting the latest advancements in ICT that supports a more productive, cost efficient and sustainable future. There exists distributed and flexible manufacturing domain in recent days, however there are lacking more responsive and agile manufacturing configurations to achieve added business potential [START_REF] Markaki | Towards Adopting Dynamic Manufacturing Networks for Future Manufacturing: Benefits and Risks of the IMAGINE DMN End-to-End Management Methodology[END_REF]. In such business environment, dynamic manufacturing networks in the form of virtual factory stands out as a cutting-edge solution that enables manufacturing companies to drive into the new global economy. This concept is expedited through the ADVENTURE plug-and-play virtual factory business environment [START_REF]Adaptive Virtual Enterprise Manufacturing Environment, European RTD project[END_REF].

The concept of virtual factory emerge from the idea of formation and execution of business collaboration with the help of end-to-end ICT solutions. This business environment effectively support to highly customized and service-enhanced products along its life cycle. It promotes co-creation and co-innovation, involving the manufacturers, customers and local suppliers. To develop supporting tools and governance models for virtual business environment, it is necessary to first identify representative business scenarios that enable individual requirements to the collaboration. In this context, a set of relevant business scenarios for virtual business environment are derived from the requirements of the manufacturing domain are identified and discussed.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 represents the theoretical framework that outlines relevant information associated with virtual collaboration, while Section 3 defines virtual factory design requirements. Section 4 highlights the business framework for virtual factory in the form of brief explanation of its life cycle and associated sub-processes. An application of ADVENTURE virtual factory: endto-end integration of ICT solutions is presented in Section 5, whereas, the paper is concluded with discussions and future works in Section 6.

Theoretical framework

The formation of business collaboration is the natural evolution of typical supply chains that aim to respond to global business challenges [START_REF] Camarinha-Matos | ECOLEAD and CNO base concepts[END_REF]. Business collaboration in the form of virtual factory coined to express the establishment of dynamic alliances among manufacturing companies in order to gaining mutual benefits. The virtual factory constitute a demand-driven formation of enterprises for a certain purpose [START_REF] Shamsuzzoha | Virtual Business Process Management Within Collaborative Manufacturing Network: An Implementation Case[END_REF]. To be successful in such business environment, the interconnection and effective communication among the various systems of every participating enterprise is considered a precondition. This communication extends to shop floor of partner companies and is not limited to only systems level (e.g. ERP systems). The general objective behind forming such networks is to reduce both costs and time to market, while increasing flexibility, gaining access to new markets and resources, and utilizing collective intelligence on methodologies and procedures [START_REF] Kokkinakos | Dynamic Manufacturing Networks Monitoring and Governance[END_REF].

The implementation of ICT and particularly Internet technologies developments led to higher focus on virtual knowledge management and high value added activities when they comes to design collaborative business. These changes in the organizational structures and business models need collaboration among multiple stakeholders, where an organization shift from product-oriented enterprise to customer-oriented enterprise, a shift centralized system to a 'community or ecosystem oriented' system [START_REF] Camarinha-Matos | Collaborative Business Scenarios in a Service-Enhanced Products Ecosystem[END_REF]. The developments in ICT sector and the emerging globalization of the economy, business collaboration or networking is becoming increasingly important for innovation and growth. In reality, easy interconnectivity between partner organizations is nowadays a pre-requisite in achieving competitive advantage.

Most of the global companies need to take initiatives to recover from lost opportunities during the last years. The manufacturing sector still plays a major role in the global economy and is seen as a vital sector for the successful future. To claim regular success in both private and public sectors, ICT has been identified as a key driver with a high potential to enhance manufacturing industry in a sustainable way [START_REF] Taisch | ICT in Manufacturing: Trends and Challenges for 2020 -An European View[END_REF]. The developments of ICT framework tend to consider business services as some form of 'black boxes' that enables companies to perform some actions, being more focused on data, control flow, and interoperability of collaborative processes. From a business aspect, such services offers benefit to the product that is delivered to a customer with higher satisfaction. Successful partners work together with other partners through ICT enablers who offer complimentary expertise such as assets, processes capabilities and capacities [START_REF] Walters | Competition, Collaboration, and Creating Value in the Value Chain[END_REF].

From the literature review, it is revealed that there are several dimensions within business collaboration as defined by many researchers [START_REF] Dekkers | Appraising Interdisciplinary Contributions to Theory for Collaborative (Manufacturing) Networks: Still a Long Way to Go?[END_REF][START_REF] Agranoff | Inside Collaborative Networks: Ten Lessons for Public Managers[END_REF][START_REF] Eschenbächer | Managing Distributed Innovation Processes in Virtual Organizations by Applying the Collaborative Network Relationship Analysis[END_REF]. Some of the major dimensions with their associated elements and benefits are illustrated in Table 1.

From Table 1, it is noticed that major dimensions in business collaboration are information exchange, process coordination and monitoring, workflow management, governance model and production planning and scheduling.

Virtual factory design requirements: business, strategic and functional

The requirements within virtual collaboration whether it is business, strategic or functional collaborative needs to assess them critically before moving forward to establish such network. It is therefore highly recommended to ensure state-of-the-art requirements collection and analyze them to get the optimum ones. Initially, in case of virtual factory environment, Broker Company needs to collect the requirements and shares with the potential partners in the proposed collaborative network. Such requirements are collected following three steps as highlighted in Figure 1.

From Figure 1, it is seen that there are three steps in the requirements collection process within virtual factory. Step 1 is designated as business requirements, while step 2 and 3 are strategic and functional requirements respectively.

There are several requirements within business requirements as presented in step 1 in Figure 1, however, major requirements are highlighted within this research scope. Market research and analysis is one of the important business requirements, which starts before initiating any forms of collaboration. During market research, possible business opportunities are identified based on customers' preferences and target market segment.is calculated eventually.

. After finalizing the target market segment by the broker company of the defined collaborative business network, the next available business requirement is to look for potential partners and select them based on the their expertise, knowledge, experiences and product portfolios. The collaboration is formed after making an agreement between collaborative partners.

Fig. 1. Synoptic view of the virtual factory designed requirements

The second step of virtual factory designed requirements are strategic requirements, which are highly dependent on the previous business requirements. At this step, customers' responses as received from step 1 are analyzed and target product specifications are finalized. Based on the product specifications, essential product design and analysis are done. In order to develop the target product, required collaborative process planning and scheduling are performed. In addition to collaborative process planning, process forecasting is also considered as strategic requirement in order to design the business processes efficiently

The final step of virtual factory requirements are functional requirements, which are initiated based on strategic requirements. Within such requirements, business processes monitoring and ,management is considered an important requirement. In functional requirements, partners also need to optimize their collaborative business processes. In order to execute a successful business collaboration in the form of virtual factory, partners need to design and develop a communication framework or channel with the objective to exchange information between partners that consequently support to track the process status. The final requirement is to design a database management system in order to store the process related data or information of the virtual factory.

Business framework for virtual factory environment

The business framework for virtual factory environment contains four levels namely, initiate, plug, play and dissolve as displayed in Figure 2. From Figure 1, it is seen that each of the step is consists of several sub-processes as needed to formation and execution of virtual factory successfully.

In the first step 'Initiate', Broker Company that initiates virtual collaboration in the form of virtual factory identifies new business opportunity after rigorous market survey. From this market survey major customers preferences are screened out before proceed towards collaborative network. The formation of collaboration initiates after defining partners selection criterions based upon potential partners are looked for. At this step, necessary governance model is initiated in addition to develop network's methodology. In order to measure the overall performance of the virtual collaboration several key performance indicators are also finalized at this phase.

In the plug phase of the virtual factory environment, partner's selection process is finalized and collaboration is started in order to achieve the identified business opportunity. All partners signed an agreement to share each other resources and expertise and maintain confidential information within the forum. The partners share design information of the proposed product after signing the agreement. At this step, production plan and operational routing and scheduling are initiated after finalized the product specifications. In this plug phase, a communication channel is established between the partners to exchange valuable information and to update collaborative processes statuses. The network governance model as initiated previous step also finalized at this phase.

Fig. 2. Synoptic view of business framework for virtual factory environment

After selecting the potential partners, virtual factory's broker company allocate and share costly resources among partner companies, which are also managed efficiently among them. The required production plan and operational routing and scheduling are finalized at this phase. In the plug phase of the virtual factory environment, different collaborative processes are managed and to measure the processes performances for evaluation purpose. All the partners' processes are made interoperable in order to processes updates and establish smooth message transfer between each other.

Final step of the virtual factory environment concerns with dissolution of the entire business collaboration, which was formed temporarily based on the identified business opportunity. At this step, profits and liabilities of the virtual factory are shared among partners and disseminate the network's outcomes. New knowledge and data as achieved from this collaborative environment are stored in database system for future use. Overall performance of the individual partners are published within the network for further improvements. In case of better performance, partners are awarded as a recognition. Critical after sales service of the sold products is also ascertained at this phase, which is a part of customer service and satisfaction.

ADVENTURE virtual factory: an example of end-to-end integration of ICT solutions

This section highlights an end-to-end integration of ICT solutions for virtual factory designed and developed under ADVENTURE project environment. The ADVENTURE is a project funded by European Union (EU), where the aims were to ensure virtual business collaborations among companies, mainly among small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) in EU [START_REF]Adaptive Virtual Enterprise Manufacturing Environment, European RTD project[END_REF]. The virtual factory needs several systems to manage effectively such as workflow management systems, project management systems, document management systems and collaboration management systems. In order to achieve such needs, virtual factory broker makes use virtual factory platform. Figure 3 displays an example of a process model within a virtual factory platform, where different sub-processes of a product design and delivery phases are illustrated.

From the process model as displayed in Figure 3, it is noticed that when a partner within virtual factory receives an order for very new equipment to be designed from scratch from a client, the ADVENTURE Process designer is used to model the entire manufacturing process.

Fig. 3. Virtual factory process model designed in ADVENTURE platform

Implementing the Process Designer component and the integration with the Partner management system, the partner company is able to search and select for suitable partners, filtering them through non-functional requirements (e.g., CO2 emissions, lead-time, cost, location, etc…) and assign them to each external order. When the essential processes are defined, the partner company can use the Simulation and Optimization components, as part of the ADVENTURE platform to achieve the best result for this concrete process. After optimizing the process, it is necessary to execute it, which is done by the ADVENTURE Smart Process Engine component that controls the workflow and invokes services on the partner company's internal legacy systems (Figure 4) as well as on active virtual factory members' legacy systems. For those partners who are not technically integrated in the portal, web user interfaces will be available or its interaction with the system.

Fig. 4. Placing an order in virtual factory partner's ERP system

In order to place an order in virtual factory partner's legacy system, the Smart Process Engine imports the model from Process Designer and invokes the respective gateway service assigned to the internal task (see Figure 4). The procedure to place an order to a supplier's legacy system is similar to Figure 4. From Figure 4, it is noticed that ADVENTURE platform make the interfacing between partner's legacy systems and supplier's legacy system in placing an order.

In case of placing an order in partner's ERP system, it is noticed from Figure 4 that partner's ERP system received an order through ADVENTURE platform, where the order is processed through smart process engine, transform services and gateway services. This order process is also monitored through real-time monitoring module before saved in the ADVENTURE Cloud data storage. Eventually, the user can visualize the order status through dashboard module as depicted in Figure 4.

Discussions and conclusion

Comparatively easy access to global resources and capabilities enables manufacturing companies to select most suitable partner to form a temporary business network with the objective to meet complex customer demand. Such interorganizational relations among business partners offer increased competitive power, which is often not possible for an individual company to achieve. Such legally bonded collaborative forum is often named as virtual organization [START_REF] Sydow | Strategische Netzwerke: Evolution und Organisation[END_REF], virtual factory [START_REF] Shamsuzzoha | Virtual Business Process Management Within Collaborative Manufacturing Network: An Implementation Case[END_REF], business community [START_REF] Shamsuzzoha | Dynamic and Collaborative Business Networks in the Fashion Industry[END_REF], etc. In such business network, each of the partner's core competencies and resources are used to produce complex, capital-intensive products that is carried out along process chains, composed of the contributions of different partner companies [START_REF] Sitek | Towards an inter-organisational perspective for managing quality in virtual organisations[END_REF].

The effort of business collaboration becomes known after identifying a business opportunity, where the broker company invites and selected partner companies. Such collaboration implements collaborative processes where all partners have to create a common result. These processes can effectively be managed through end-to-end integration with ICT solutions. The impact of such ICT solutions enable virtual collaborations to react dynamically with partner companies through providing realtime communication framework. The real-time communication framework provides necessary support to monitor and manage the collaboration.

This research work highlights elaborately to an end-to-end ICT framework that is to be applicable for virtual factory environment. This framework provides the detailed phases of the VF life cycle along with associated sub-processes. These sub-processes and their individual functionalities are explained for further use. The presented ICT framework is implemented in a case business network, where the broker company uses the framework to manage both of its own legacy systems as well as suppliers' one to place an order. With the scope of this framework, a complete order placement process from partner's ERP system to supplier's ERP system is explained. This complete order placement process can also be monitored and managed through such framework.

Future research can be investigated to extensively study the potential limitations and risks of the business collaboration. In addition to, advanced ICT framework can also be designed and developed to support agile and resilient virtual collaborations.

Table 1 .

 1 Various dimensions of virtual collaborations and their associated benefits.

	Dimensions	Elements	Advantages
	Real-time	• Ensure on time information	• Reduce information gap
	information	• Information visibility	between partners
	exchange among	• Access right for information	• Faster problem detection
	partners	• Transparency of information	• Improve trust between
			partners
			• Quick response rate
	Business process	• Collaborative process design and	• Optimize process
	coordination and	development	performance
	monitoring	• Infrastructure for process	• Minimize process uncertainty
		coordination	• Improve collaborative service
		• Process monitoring framework	level
		• Storage of monitored data	• Reduce process related cost
	Workflow	• Business workflow design and	• Enhance workflow efficiency
	coordination and	management	and accuracy
	management	• Integrate planning and	• Faster time-to-market
		coordination system	• Improve workflow

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the co-funding of the European Commission in NMP priority of the Seventh RTD Framework Programme (2007-13) for the ADVENTURE project (ADaptive Virtual ENterprise ManufacTURing Environment), Ref. 285220. The authors also acknowledge the valuable collaboration provided by the project team during the research work.