Search

An emerging hyper-world encompasses all human activities in a social-cyber-physical space. Its power derives from the Wisdom Web of Things (W2T) cycle, namely, “from things to data, information, knowledge, wisdom, services, humans, and then back to things.” The W2T cycle leads to a harmonious symbiosis among humans, computers and things, which can be constructed by large-scale converging of intelligent information technology applications with an open and interoperable architecture. The recent advances in cloud computing, the Internet/Web of Things, big data and other research fields have provided just such an open system architecture with resource sharing/services. The next step is therefore to develop an open and interoperable content architecture with intelligence sharing/services for the organization and transformation in the “data, information, knowledge and wisdom (DIKW)” hierarchy. This chapter introduces Wisdom as a Service (WaaS) as a content architecture based on the “paying only for what you use” IT business trend. The WaaS infrastructure, WaaS economics, and the main challenges in WaaS research and applications are discussed. A case study is described to demonstrate the usefulness and significance of WaaS. Relying on the clouds (cloud computing), things (Internet of Things) and big data, WaaS provides a practical approach to realize the W2T cycle in the hyper-world for the coming age of ubiquitous intelligent IT applications.

With the continued and relentless growth in dataset sizes in recent times, feature or attribute selection has become a necessary step in tackling the resultant intractability. Indeed, as the number of dimensions increases, the number of corresponding data instances required in order to generate accurate models increases exponentially. Fuzzy-rough set-based feature selection techniques offer great flexibility when dealing with real-valued and noisy data; however, most of the current approaches focus on the supervised domain where the data object labels are known. Very little work has been carried out using fuzzy-rough sets in the areas of unsupervised or semi-supervised learning. This paper proposes a novel approach for semi-supervised fuzzy-rough feature selection where the object labels in the data may only be partially present. The approach also has the appealing property that any generated subsets are also valid (super)reducts when the whole dataset is labelled. The experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed approach can generate stable and valid subsets even when up to 90 % of the data object labels are missing.

Ever since the first hybrid fuzzy rough set model was pro- posed in the early 1990¿s, many researchers have focused on the definition of the lower and upper approximation of a fuzzy set by means of a fuzzy relation. In this paper, we review those proposals which generalize the logical connectives and quantifiers present in the rough set approxima- tions by means of corresponding fuzzy logic operations. We introduce a general model which encapsulates all of these proposals, evaluate it w.r.t. a number of desirable properties, and refine the existing axiomatic approach to characterize lower and upper approximation operators. © 2013 Springer-Verlag., This work was partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology under Project TIN2011-28488. Lluis Godo has been partially supported by the MINECO Project TIN2012-39348-C02-01.