With the rise of the Semantic Web, several public semantic repositories like Knowledge Bases, Ontologies and Taxonomies have been developed in a variety of domains. For specific domains like the biomedical domain they have already formed a huge valuable infrastructure. On the other hand, the development of efficient algorithms for Natural Language Processing gave us access to the massive knowledge hidden in many unstructured resources. Combining and harvesting these two worlds would result into a very productive knowledge fusion applicable in several domains. In this paper, an extensible framework is presented that focuses on accessing and graphically presenting the knowledge coming from all available structured and unstructured resources. An abstraction formalism for representing any type of query based on graphs is the base of this approach. This formalism makes the framework accessible to non-expert users that have no knowledge of constructing queries in any querying language and barely understand what structured and unstructured resources are. The architecture that will allow for the framework to be adaptable to all available resources is described along with a proof of concept implementation in the biomedical domain.

Currently available tools for the development of the next generation distributed control and automation systems, adopt traditional architectural styles and do not cover the whole requirements of the development process. One of the major drawbacks of traditional engineering support systems (ESSs), which is extensibility, can be addressed by providing a public domain framework that can be easily extended. In this paper, a service-oriented architectural framework is adopted to provide the infrastructure for the exploitation of service-oriented computing in the development process of factory automation systems. Features required in the development process are implemented as Web-services and published in the public domain, so as to be used on demand by control engineers to construct their projects' specific ESSs. The infrastructure required to build a Web-service based ESS is presented. Specific Web-services are presented and the way that these services affect the development process is discussed. The need of a common field device model in the context of this approach is discussed and an ontology-based framework for such a device model is defined.

Methodologies, techniques and tools that currently support the embedded systems (ESs) development process prove inadequate for today's complex ESs. Adopted traditional architectural styles do not cover the whole requirements of the development process, with extensibility being the major drawback. Service-oriented computing is exploited in this paper, to define an architectural framework for a demand-led ESs development process. Features required in the development process are defined as Web-services, published in the public domain, and used on demand through semantic Web by developers to construct their projects' specific integrated development environment (IDE). The way that these services affect the development process is discussed with main focus on an ontology-based device modeling.

The IEC 61499 standard introduces the function block (FB) model to support the development of open, interoperable, distributed control applications (DCAs). Currently available engineering support systems (ESSs) as well as those under development adopt traditional architectural styles and do not cover the whole requirements of the development process of FB-based DCAs. However, the major drawback of traditional ESSs is that of extensibility. This problem can be addressed by providing a public domain framework that can be easily extended. In this paper an approach that promotes the idea of service-oriented computing in the control and automation domain, is described. A service-oriented architectural framework is proposed to provide the infrastructure for the exploitation of service-oriented computing in the development process of factory automation systems. Features required in the development process will be implemented as services and published in the public domain. These services can be used on demand by control engineers to construct their projects' specific engineering support environments.