Mark Stephen Fox

• University of Toronto

The pursuit of quality improvements and accountability in the food supply chains, especially how they relate to food-related outcomes, such as hunger, has become increasingly vital, necessitating a comprehensive approach that encompasses product quality and its impact on various stakeholders and their communities. Such an approach offers numerous b...

The COVID-19 epidemic has demonstrated the important role that data plays in the response to and management of public health emergencies. It has also heightened awareness of the role that ontologies play in the design of semantically precise data models that improve data interoperability among stakeholders. This paper surveys vocabularies and ontol...

This paper develops a formal model of urban evolution in terms of (1) sources of variations; (2) principles of selection; and (3) mechanisms of retention. More specifically, regarding (1) it defines local and environmental sources of variation and identifies some of their generative processes, such as recom-bination, migration, mutation, extinction...

This paper seeks to develop the core concepts of a model of urban evolution. It proceeds in four major sections. First, we review prior adumbrations of an evolutionary model in urban theory, noting their potential and their limitations. Second, we turn to the general sociocultural evolution literature to draw inspiration for a fresh and more comple...

This paper is part II of “Towards A Model of Urban Evolution.” It defines a formal model of the Signature of an urban space, comprised of the information encoded in that space. This information consists of: an urban genome, which captures ideas regarding the groups (i.e., users) and activities (i.e., uses) to which a space’s physical forms are orie...

This paper is part IV of “towards a model of urban evolution”. It demonstrates how the Toronto Urban Evolution Model (TUEM) can be used to encode city data, illuminate key features, demonstrate how formetic distance can be used to discover how spatial areas change over time, and identify similar spatial areas within and between cities. The data use...

This paper introduces ontological concepts required to evaluate and manage the coverage of social services in a Smart City context. Here, we focus on the perspective of key stakeholders, namely social purpose organizations and the clients they serve. The Compass ontology presented here extends the Common Impact Data Standard by introducing new conc...

Named entity recognition (NER) is an important task in narration extraction. Narration, as a system of stories, provides insights into how events and characters in the stories develop over time. This paper proposes an architecture for NER on a corpus about social purpose organizations. This is the first NER task specifically targeted at social serv...

The Common Impact Data Standard (CIDS) is an ontology designed to represent a Social Purpose Organization's (SPO) impact model (i.e., definition) and the impact (i.e., effect) their implementation has on its stakeholders. It provides a common representation that allows each SPO to flexibly design an impact model that is most relevant to it, and rep...

This paper addresses the problem of how to represent education system measurement definitions and the data used to derive them. ISO 37120 is standard for measuring city performance. It defines 100 indicators of which seven focus on Education. As cities adopt the standard and begin publishing their indicator values, citizens, city bureaucrats and po...

As urbanization continues at a rapid pace, there is a corresponding need for tools that can aid urban planners and civil engineers in predicting impacts on municipal infrastructure. One of the most salient issues to accompany burgeoning urban populations is the strain that population growth places upon existing infrastructure systems. For instance,...

This paper develops a formal model of urban evolution in terms of 1) sources of variations; 2) principles of selection; and 3) mechanisms of retention. More specifically, regarding (1) it defines local and environmental sources of variation and identifies some of their generative processes, such as recombination, migration, mutation, extinction, an...

This paper is part II of “Towards a model of urban evolution.” This paper defines a formal model of the Signature of an urban space, comprised of: an urban genome which captures the expected groups (i.e., users) and activities (i.e., uses) of physical forms; a description of the actual activities and groups of the physical forms; and the signals th...

This paper seeks to develop the core concepts of a model of urban evolution. It proceeds in four major sections. First we review prior adumbrations of an evolutionary model in urban theory, noting their potential and their limitations. Second, we turn to the general sociocultural evolution literature to draw inspiration for a fresh and more complet...

This paper seeks to develop the core concepts of a model of urban evolution. It proceeds in four major sections. First we review prior adumbrations of an evolutionary model in urban theory, not-ing their potential and their limitations. Second, we turn to the general sociocultural evolution litera-ture to draw inspiration for a fresh and more compl...

As a partof the PolisGnosis project, this work aims to develop and ultimately implement an ontology to represent the definintions of indicators forthe ISO37120:2104, Section 16, Solid Wastetheme.This section contains 10 city indicators spanningwaste generationper capita, waste processing and disposal methods(ISO, 2014).

To create tomorrow's smarter cities, today's initiatives will need to create measurable improvements. However, a city is a complex system and measuring its performance generates a breadth of issues. Specifically, determining what criteria should be measured, how indications should be defined, and how should the identified indicators be derived. Thi...

Homelessness is a global issue that continues to affect the developed and developing world. The absence of comprehensive data collection and measurement of homelessness has led to a general lack of understanding of the global homeless. Improving our knowledge of homelessness requires information that reflects the reality of homelessness and housing...

In this paper, an indicator is defined as a metric for evaluating performance. Thus, a city indicator is a performance evaluating metric specific to a city. For example, an indicator for a city can be, "annual number of public transport trips per capita" which is one of the indicators specified in ISO 37120 [1]. These indicators are then used by ci...

This paper presents an ontology to describe the Healthcare indicators within the ISO 37120 standard. The objective of this representation is to automate the analysis of healthcare indicators and the performance on the indicators, in cities around the world. This representation gives us the ability to not only represent the ontology but more importa...

Transportation research relies heavily on a variety of data. From sensors to surveys, data supports day-to-day operations as well as long-term planning and decision-making. The challenges that arise due to the volume and variety of data that are found in transportation research can be effectively addressed by ontologies. This opportunity has alread...

This paper addresses the question of how to represent the semantics of populations. This question is unusual in the sense that statistics is directly concerned with the definition of populations but is essentially silent on the representation of population definitions from a data modeling perspective. The motivation for this work is the development...

In this article, we describe high-fidelity human behaviour emulation model capable of ranking and re-ranking goals during plan execution based on changing emotional modes of an agent. Our model assumes the agent is rational but its reasoning is bounded. The agent's reasoning process incorporates emotions and basic human needs to emulate changes in...

ISO 37120 defines 100 indicators for measuring city performance. Six of these indicators focus on Fire and Emergency services. In order to build automated tools to support the longitudinal and transversal analysis of cities, it is necessary to create a ontology for representing both the definitions of indicators, and the data used to derive them. I...

This paper examines standard definitions employed by our Recreation ontology and theme indicators and how they may be used to gauge a city’s performance in terms of the recreation structures available in a city. We start this by specifying a set of competency questions that our ontology must be able to answer based on the Recreation indicators defi...

A major challenge in making cities smarter is performing comparative analyses across two or more cities, or within a city across two or more departments. The problem is that data models and the underlying semantics of their content differ, making analysis difficult at best and erroneous at worst. This paper explores the hypothesis that a single, in...

A major challenge in making cities smarter is performing comparative analyses across two or more cities, or within a city across two or more departments. The problem is that data models and the underlying semantics of their content differ, making analysis difficult at best and erroneous at worst. This paper explores the hypothesis that a single, in...

Cities use a variety of metrics to evaluate and compare their performance with the goal being to improve city services. The ISO 37120 standard provides definitions for city indicators that measure a city’s quality of life and sustainability . A problem that arises in indicator-based comparisons, is whether the comparison is invalid due to inconsist...

In this paper we define aPublic Safety Ontology for Global City Indicatorsthat addresses the following issues: 1.How do we represent the (ISO 37120) definition of an indicator? In orderfor theanalysisof indicators to be automated, wemust be able to readand understand the definition of each indicator, which may change over time.2.How do we represent...

In the field of social services, practitioners work with homeless clients to help them exit homelessness. Due to the uniqueness of each client and the dynamic nature of their environment, practitioners must choose from a variety of theories and techniques to perform the required tasks. A major obstacle in automating these tasks is the lack of high-...

In order to compare and analyse open data across cities, standard representations or ontologies have to be created. This paper defines an innovation and telecommunications ontology that includes concepts of residency and services. The design of the ontology is based upon the data requirements of the ISO 37120:17 telecommunication and innovation ind...

The international standard ISO 37120, published in 2014, defines over 100 city indicators to be used globally by cities to measure and compare their performance. They cover 17 themes, including education, environment, health, safety, finance, and shelter. The goal of the PolisGnosis project is to automate the analysis of city performance as defin...

Current research indicates that the idea evaluation processes of many firms are ad hoc or intuitive, with very few firms having defined methods. We propose a new approach to select the best ideas to pursue amidst different probable versions of the future. In support of "front end of innovation" processes, the approach emphasizes the formation of re...

This paper defines the GCI Finance Ontology composed of classes covering: Debt, Asset and Liability, Revenue, Expenditure, Tax and Monetary measures. The design of the GCI Finance ontology is guided by the requirement to represent the definition of ISO 37120 Finance Theme indicators, and provide a standard ontology for cities that wish to openly pu...

In an era of urbanization there is an increasing need to benchmark the performance of cities and do this against a robust set of measures that can be repeated and replicated over time. Open city data initiatives are on the increase and with the release of IS037120 city indicators it is timely to critically appraise the synergies between open data a...

Singapore faces a major challenge in providing care and support for senior citizens due to its rapidly ageing population and declining old-age support ratio. The concept of Ageing-in-Place was introduced by the Singapore government [1] to allow older people to live independently in their own homes and communities so that the need for institutionali...

This paper defines an ontology for representing the definitions of the ISO 37120 Telecommunications and Innovation theme indicators. In order to represent these indicators, two ontologies had to be created: Residency and Service. Using these two ontologies along with the Global City Indicator Foundation Ontology we are able to represent on the Sema...

This paper defines a shelter ontology that includes concepts of shelters, slums, households and homelessness. ISO 37120 defines 100 indicators to be used by cities to measure and compare their performance. There are 3 shelter themed indicators defined, namely 15.1 Percentage of city population living in slums, 15.2 Number of homeless per 100 000 po...

The AAAI-14 Workshop program was held Sunday and Monday, July 27–28, 2012, at the Québec City Convention Centre in Québec, Canada. Canada. The AAAI-14 workshop program included fifteen workshops covering a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence. The titles of the workshops were AI and Robotics; Artificial Intelligence Applied to Assistive...

A major challenge in the analysis of city data is the integration of data from different sources. This paper defines an ontology, called Open 311 Ontology, that provides a unified terminology and a reference model for representing the 311 data. We illustrate how the ontology can be used to map and integrate data from multiple cities, and for answer...

City Indicators are metrics used to measure city per-formance. Global City Indicators, as developed by the Global Cities Institute at the University of Toronto, are metrics that have been agreed to by over 250 cities world wide and have been approved as ISO 37120. The definitions of the indicators exist only in written form. The purpose of this res...

In this paper, we describe our efforts in recogniz-ing knowledge requirements of city government. This model, which we denote as City Knowledge Patterns, is a set of standard Knowledge Patterns identifying the concepts required to represent municipal knowledge.

The Social Services Chain is the network of social services through which clients flow. At an abstract level, this is very much like a job shop in that each client moving through the chain requires a unique set and sequence of services, but that these services often have to be repeated as required by the individual needs of a client. When we consid...

Cities are moving towards policy-making based on data. They are publishing data using Open Data standards, linking data from disparate sources, allowing the crowd to update their data with Smart Phone Apps that use Open APIs, and applying "Big Data" analytics to discover relationships that lead to greater efficiencies. This paper provides an introd...

Organizations need to accurately understand the skills and competencies of their human resources in order to effectively respond to internal and external demands for expertise and make informed hiring decisions. In recent years, however, human resources have become highly mobile, making it more difficult for organizations to accurately learn their...

Organizations need to accurately understand the skills and competencies of their human resources to better utilize them and more effectively respond to internal and external demands for expertise. This paper focuses on the problem of inferring and validating skills and competencies over time. In particular, it explores how the quality of often inac...

Knowledge Management Systems that enhance and facilitate the process of finding the right expert in an organization have gained much attention in recent years. This chapter explores the potential benefits and challenges of using ontologies for improving existing systems. A modeling technique from requirements engineering is used to evaluate the pro...

High volume, B2C eCommerce web sites that often experience millions of visitors and 100,000s of orders a day in the lead up to major gift giving occasions, must meet customer demands of high availability, responsiveness, and functionality. These same web sites often integrate a large number of 3rd party web services that need to but often fail to m...

To stay competitive within the market, organizations need to understand the skills and competencies of their human resources in order to best utilize them. This paper focuses on the problem of modeling human resources in a dynamic environment, and presents a formal ontology for representing, inferring, and validating skills and competencies over ti...

xpert profiling and identification are important to both knowledge workers and organizations. To this end, skills management and expert recommender systems facilitate the management of skills and competencies and help find appropriate experts to meet a particular need. In this paper, we present a technique for generating evolving expert profiles of...

Human Resources Management (HRM) is the strategic management of the employees, who individually and collectively contribute to the achievement of the strategic goals of an organization. Most HRM tasks are based on acquiring the right information and reasoning about skills and competencies of individuals. In this paper we present a formal ontology f...

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how a radically different approach to the storage and retrieval of information can result in: (1) a reduction in the need for user sophistication in the use of information systems, and (2) the support of a browsing approach to information system searching. Our approach promotes the view that information s...

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has long been known for its ability to uniquely identify objects. Recent years have witnessed a significant increase in storage capacity on the tag, which is giving rise to a new set of application scenarios. As the tag itself can carry relevant context information, processes can be managed locally r...

Knowledge Provenance (KP) is proposed to address the problem about how to determine the validity and origin of information/knowledge on the web by means of modeling and maintaining information sources and dependencies as well as trust structures. Four levels of KP are introduced: Static, Dynamic, Uncertain, and Judgmental. In order to give a formal...

This paper explores the use of hyper-heuristics for variable and value ordering in binary Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSP). Specifically, we describe the use of a symbolic cognitive architecture, augmented with constraint based reasoning as the hyper-heuristic machine learning framework. The underlying design motivation of our approach is to...

Cognitive architectures aspire for generality both in terms of problem solving and learning across a range of problems, yet to date few examples of domain independent learning has been demonstrated. In contrast, constraint programming often utilizes the same domain independent heuristics to find efficient solutions across a broad range of problems...

Our aim in this work is to propose an ontology-based hybrid approach to effectively match job seekers and job advertisements. The approach uses a deductive model to determine the kind of match between a job seeker and an advertisement, and applies a similarity-based approach to rank applicants.

This article introduces a measurement ontology for applications to Semantic Web applications, specifically for emerging domains such as microarray analysis. The Semantic Web is thenext-generation Web of structured data that are automatically shared by software agents, which apply definitions and constraints organized in ontologies to correctly proc...

This paper introduces a measurement ontology for applications to semantic Web applications, specifically for emerging domains such as microarray analysis. The semantic Web is the next-generation Web of structured data that are automatically shared by software agents, which apply definitions and constraints organized in ontologies to correctly proce...

Sharing data between organizations is challenging because it is difficult to ensure that those consuming the data accurately interpret it. The promise of the next generation WWW, the semantic Web, is that semantics about shared data will be represented in ontologies and available for automatic and accurate machine processing of data. Thus, there is...

This paper introduces a measurement ontology for applications to semantic Web applications, specifically for emerging domains such as microarray analysis. The semantic Web is the next-generation Web of structured data that are automatically shared by software agents, which apply definitions and constraints organized in ontologies to correctly proce...

A number of pitfalls of empirical scheduling research are illustrated using real experimental data. These pitfalls, in general, serve to slow the progress of scheduling research by obsfucating results, blurring comparisons among scheduling algorithms and algorithm components, and complicating validation of work in the literature. In particular, we...

This paper formalizes the semantics of trust and studies the transitivity of trust. On the Web, people and software agents have to interact with "strangers". This makes trust a crucial factor on the Web. Basically trust is established in interaction between two entities and any one entity only has a finite number of direct trust relationships. Howe...

Knowledge Provenance (KP) addresses the problem of how to determine the validity and origin of web information by means of modelling and maintaining information sources, information dependencies, and trust structures. Four levels of KP have been identified: (1) static KP develops the fundamental concepts for KP, and focuses on provenance of static...

Knowledge provenance is an approach to determining the validity and origin of Web information by means of modeling and maintaining information sources, information dependencies, and trust structures. This paper explores trust structures in social networks and constructs a trust judgment model for knowledge provenance. Trust judgment includes: trust...

■ AI agents combining natural language interaction, task planning, and business ontologies can help companies provide better-quality and more cost- effective customer service. Our customer-service agents use natural language to interact with cus- tomers, enabling customers to state their inten- tions directly instead of searching for the places on...

Knowledge Provenance is proposed to address the problem about how to determine the validity and origin of information/knowledge on the web by means of modeling and maintaining information source and dependency, as well as trust structure. Four levels of Knowledge Provenance are introduced: Static, where the validity of knowledge does not change ove...

Knowledge Provenance is an approach to determining the origin and validity of knowledge/information on the web by means of modeling and maintaining information sources and dependencies, as well as trust structures. This paper constructs an uncertainty-oriented Knowledge Provenance model to address the provenance problem with uncertain truth values...

A company's profits may be defined as the positive difference between its income revenues and operational costs. Today, most companies use traditional costing methods and/or traditional Activity-Based Costing (ABC) to determine their operational costs with a view to direct operational and business process changes so that profits are realized. A tri...

M.S. Fox and J. Huang. Knowledge provenance – how to determine the truth and origin of web information. In Proc. of 2nd International Semantic Web Conference (posters), Florida, USA, Oct. 20-23, 2003, PP.47-48. paper: http://www.eil.utoronto.ca/km/papers/fox-kp1.pdf

This .paper describes the Intelligent Management System (IMS) project, which is part of the Factory of the Future project in the Robotics Institute of Carnegie-Mellon University.. IMS is a long term project concerned with applying artificial intelligence techniques in aiding professionals and managers in their day to day tasks. This report discusse...

The General Reasoning Engine and Selection Environment (GREASE) project is an investigation of the application of artificial intelligence to cutting fluid selection and blending for metal matching operations. The problem was to first diagnose the machining operations to determine which fluid characteristics are required, then to select a cutting fl...

milling-operation Schema milling-setup refines milling-operation Schema milling-run refines milling-operation Schema ope ration Schema time-line Schema time-interval schema Before Schema milling-ope ration Duration Specification milling-ope ration Precedence Specification milling-operation sub-operation time specification cause Schema milling-ope r...

This paper summarizes the past eight years of research in the application of Artificial Intelligence to Simulation. Our focus has been in two areas: the use of AI knowledge representation techniques for the modeling of complex systems, and the codification of simulation expertise so that it can be used to manage the simulation life cycle. The KB$ s...

This paper explores the requirements for database techniques in the construction of knowledge-based systems. Three knowledge-based systems are reviewed: XCN/R1, ISIS and Callisto in order to ascertain database requirements. These requirements result in the introduction of the Organization level, an extension to the symbol and knowledge levels intro...

Achieving manufacturing efficiency requires that many groups that comprise a manufacturing enterprise, such as design, planning, production, distribution, field service, accounting, sales and marketing, cooperate in order to achieve their common goal. In this paper we introduce the concept of Enterprise Management Network (EMN) as the element to fa...

This report defines a factory model and a set of experiments that can be used to compaxe alternative scheduling methods. The factory model defines parts, process plans, resources, and constraints. Multiple sets of test data are defined to test the scheduling algorithms under varying factory loadings. The model and test data are based on the ISIS/OP...

AI has the potential to play an important role in the customer service field. By leveraging the high bandwidth of natural language customers will be able to state their intentions directly instead of searching for the places on the Web site that may address their concern. By using a planning system to find the solution to the problem we increase th...

Knowledge Provenance (KP) is proposed to address the problem of how to determine the validity and origin of web information by introducing standards and methods for modeling and maintaining the evolution and validity of information/knowledge on the web. Four levels of KP including Static KP, Dynamic KP, Uncertain KP, and Judgmental KP are proposed....

Recent scheduling work has challenged the need for sophisticated heuristics such as those based on texture measurements.

In realistic scheduling problems, there may be choices among resources or among process plans. We formulate a constraint-based representation of alternative activities to model problems containing such choices. We extend existing constraint-directed scheduling heuristic commitment techniques and propagators to reason directly about the fact that an...

One source of complexity in tackling realistic scheduling problems comes from activities with resource alternatives.