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The Semantic Application Design Language (SADL) combines advances in standardized declarative modeling languages based on formal logic with advances in domain-specific language (DSL) development environments to create a controlled-English language that translates directly into the Web Ontology Language (OWL), the SPARQL graph query language, and a compatible if/then rule language. Models in the SADL language can be authored, tested, and maintained in an Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE). This environment offers semantic highlighting, statement completion, expression templates, hyperlinking of concepts to their definition, model validation, automatic error correction, and other advanced authoring features to enhance the ease and productivity of the modeling environment. In addition, the SADL language offers the ability to build in validation tests and test suites that can be used for regression testing. Through common Eclipse functionality, the models can be easily placed under source code control, versioned, and managed throughout the life of the model. Differences between versions can be compared side-by-side. Finally, the SADL-IDE offers an explanation capability that is useful in understanding what was inferred by the reasoner/rule engine and why those conclusions were reached. Perhaps more importantly, explanation is available of why an expected inference failed to occur. The objective of the language and the IDE is to enable domain experts to play a more active and productive role in capturing their knowledge and making it available as computable artifacts useful for automation where appropriate and for decision support systems in applications that benefit from a collaborative human-computer approach. SADL is built entirely on open source code and most of SADL is itself released to open source. This paper explores the concepts behind the language and provides details and examples of the authoring and model lifecycle support facilities.

As blockchain-based applications continue to evolve, there are at least two emerging trends. First, increasingly, there are multiple semantically different models proposed for similar tasks. As an example, researchers and companies have either proposed or developed different models for supply chain and other concerns. As a result, unfortunately, it is increasing likely that firms will need to choose between those systems and/or interface their internal systems, such as their enterprise resource planning systems, with multiple blockchain-like systems. Second, the importance of database models underlying blockchain transaction information is becoming increasingly apparent. The blockchain provides a source for immutable data, but participants are interested in gathering information from the data. Unfortunately, blockchain data is not in an easy to use format. As a result, the data is likely to be taken “off of the blockchain” in order to be queried, etc. This paper examines these emerging trends and this paper develops a “blockchain-like” application with blockchain and distributed database capabilities for the case of a virtual organization.

The use of linguistic information based on the fuzzy linguistic approach to deal with uncertain and vague information it has been successfully used in many problems. It implies processes of computing with words (CW). The use of fuzzy numbers to accomplish the processes of CW provides accuracy and flexibility in the operations, but the results are fuzzy numbers that usually cannot be expressed linguistically. Hence symbolic approaches have been proposed to accomplish the processes of CW and improve the understanding of the results, but this has implied a lack of precision and a limitation of the operations in those processes. In this contribution, we present a hybrid linguistic computational model that carries out the operations by using fuzzy numbers, but the results are expressed linguistically in order to overcome the operational limitations and the lack of precision of symbolic approaches.