A Flexible Integration Framework for Semantic Web 2.0 Applications

The Semantic Web application framework extends Ruby on Rails to enable rapid development of integrated Semantic Web mash-ups. Web applications are mostly database driven. Developers design a database schema and then construct the application logic (which generates Web pages for user interaction) on top of the schema. These applications are centralized and rely on their own relational database, limiting the possibilities for data integration. Mash-ups (often called Web 2.0 applications) are an emerging Web development paradigm that combines functionality from different Web applications.     

一种基于本体的分布式面向服务的体系结构风格

语义Web服务,作为本体技术与面向服务的体系架构的完美结合,已经成为语义Web和面向服务的软件工程的一个重要研究方向。OWL-S和WSMF等语义Web服务方法,为Web服务描述标准（WSDL）,提供了基于本体的框架,从而实现服务的自动化发现、调用和组合。但基于原有语义Web服务方法,处理组合服务时,对子服务构件之间通信的建模缺乏实际意义上的语义。基于本体和P2P技术,建立一套通用的分布式的面向服务的体系结构——DisOntoSOA。DisOntoSOA不局限于任何一种编程语言和任何一种特定的Web服务技术。因此,只要是结合本体与SOA的方法,都适用于该体系。     

Magpie: Experiences in supporting Semantic Web browsing

Magpie has been one of the first truly effective approaches to bringing semantics into the web browsing experience. The key innovation brought by Magpie was the replacement of a manual annotation process by an automatically associated ontology-based semantic layer over web resources, which ensured added value at no cost for the user. Magpie also differs from older open hypermedia systems: its associations between entities in a web page and semantic concepts from an ontology enable link typing and subsequent interpretation of the resource. The semantic layer in Magpie also facilitates locating semantic services and making them available to the user, so that they can be manually activated by a user or opportunistically triggered when appropriate patterns are encountered during browsing. In this paper we track the evolution of Magpie as a technology for developing open and flexible Semantic Web applications. Magpie emerged from our research into user-accessible Semantic Web, and we use this viewpoint to assess the role of tools like Magpie in making semantic content useful for ordinary users. We see such tools as crucial in bootstrapping the Semantic Web through the automation of the knowledge generation process.     

Using the Semantic Web technologies in virtual engineering tools to create extensible interfaces

Ideas and tools developed for the Semantic Web can also be applied to and integrated with engineering tools and software. The ideas upon which the Semantic Web are founded, along with the technologies that are used to implement it, provide a platform on which virtual engineering tools and interfaces can be extended to create a web in which contextual information is readily accessible to engineers. When the Semantic Web and virtual engineering methods are fully realized, computer hardware and networking capabilities will work to provide information and tools to access information meaningfully. The question that must be answered today is: how will information be integrated in a manner that will allow commercial and proprietary software tools to remain separate while also being integrated so that the end user can control and query these tools with little to no knowledge of the tools’ implementation or inner-working details? The answer to this question will depend largely on the ability to implement open interfaces and schemas that can evolve over time as well as open source toolkits that enable development teams to collaborate at a high level. This paper discusses potential applications of the Semantic Web to explore these questions. In addition, specific capabilities being developed in VE-Suite are discussed.     

基于语义距离度量模型的语义Web服务匹配排序机制

随着语义Web服务技术研究工作的不断深入,因特网上语义Web服务数量急剧增加。如何快速便捷地定位可用语义Web服务已经成为一个迫切且关键的问题。在语义Web服务匹配技术研究中,其中一个重要的研究主题就是语义Web服务匹配结果的排序机制。本文在综合概括和分析各种关于语义Web服务匹配结果排序机制的基础上,提出了一种基于语义距离度量模型的语义Web服务匹配结果排序机制,利用该排序机制,计算待匹配语义Web服务的语义相似度量,并依据此度量对语义Web服务匹配结果进行排序。该度量模型将语义Web服务引用概念间的语义关系转换成可精确比较的量化度量值,对属于相同语义匹配类型的匹配候选服务也能够分别计算语义距离,区分出相同匹配类型的候选服务与服务请求的匹配程度,从而达到改善用户对语义Web服务的搜索体验的目的。     

SemWebDL: A privacy-preserving Semantic Web infrastructure for digital libraries

Recent advances in digital libraries have been closely intertwined with advances in Internet technologies. With the advent of the Web, digital libraries have been able to reach constituencies previously unanticipated. Because of the wide deployability of Web-accessible digital libraries, the potential for privacy violations has also grown tremendously. The much touted Semantic Web, with its agent, service, and ontology technologies, is slated to take the Web to another qualitative level in advances. Unfortunately, these advances may also open doors for privacy violations in ways never seen before. We propose a Semantic Web infrastructure, called SemWebDL, that enables the dynamic composition of disparate and autonomous digital libraries while preserving user privacy. In the proposed infrastructure, users will be able to pose more qualitative queries that may require the ad hoc collaboration of multiple digital libraries. In addition to the Semantic Web-based infrastructure, the quality of the response would rest on extraneous information in the form of a profile. We introduce the concept of communities to enable subject-based cooperation and search speedup. Further, digital libraries heterogeneity and autonomy are transcended by a layered Web-service-based infrastructure. Semantic Web-based digital library providers would advertise to Web services, which in turn are organized in communities accessed by users. For the purpose of privacy preservation, we devise a three-tier privacy model consisting of user privacy, Web service privacy, and digital library privacy that offers autonomy of perspectives for privacy definition and violation. We propose an approach that seamlessly interoperates with potentially conflicting privacy definitions and policies at the different levels of the Semantic Web-based infrastructure. A key aspect in the approach is the use of reputations for outsourcing Web services. A Web service reputation is associated with its behavior with regard to privacy preservation. We developed a technique that uses attribute ontologies and information flow difference to collect, evaluate, and disseminate the reputation of Web services.     

Using the Semantic Web for linking and reusing data across Web 2.0 communities

Large volumes of content (bookmarks, reviews, videos, etc.) are currently being created on the “Social Web”, i.e. on Web 2.0 community sites, and this content is being annotated and commented upon. The ability to view an individual's entire contribution to the Social Web would be an interesting and valuable service, particularly important as social networks are often being formed through created content and things that people have in common (“object-centred sociality”). SIOC is a Semantic Web research project that aims to describe online communities on the Social Web. This paper describes how SIOC and the Semantic Web can enable linking and reuse scenarios of data from Web 2.0 community sites, and introduces a SIOC Types module to further specify the type of content items and act as a “glue” between user posts and the content items created and annotated by users.     

Semantic Web computing in industry

The Semantic Web has attracted significant attention during the last decade. On the one hand, many research groups have changed their focus towards Semantic Web research and research funding agencies particularly in Europe have explicitly mentioned Semantic Web in their calls for proposals. On the other hand, industry has also begun to watch developments with interest and a number of large companies have started to experiment with Semantic Web technologies to ascertain if these new technologies can be leveraged to add more value for their customers or internally within the company, while there are already several offers of vendors of Semantic Web solutions on the market. The essence of the Semantic Web is to structure Web-based information to make it more interoperable, machine-readable and thereafter to provide a means to relate various information concepts more easily and in a reusable way. The Semantic Web acts as an additional layer on the top of the Web, and is built around explicit representations of information concepts and their relationships such as ontologies and taxonomies. Furthermore, Semantic Web technologies are not only valuable on an open environment like the Web, but also in closed systems such as in industrial settings. Hence, these technologies can be efficiently deployed for domains including Web Services, Enterprise Application Integration, Knowledge Management and E-Commerce, fulfilling existing gaps in current applications. This paper focuses on this synthesis between Semantic Web technologies and systems problems within industrial applications. There will be a short review of Semantic Web standards, languages and technologies followed by a more detailed review of applications of Semantic Web computing in industry. The paper covers theoretical considerations as well as use cases and experience reports on the topic, and we also present some current challenges and opportunities in the domain.     

Steps, techniques, and technologies for the development of intelligent applications based on Semantic Web Services: A case study in e-learning systems

Semantic Web Services domain has gained special attention in academia and industry. It has been adopted as a promise to enable automation of all aspects of Web Services provision and uses, such as service creation, selection, discovery, composition, and invocation. However, the development of intelligent systems based on Semantic Web Services (SWS) is still a complex and time-consuming task, mainly with respect to the choice and integration of technologies. In this paper, we discuss some empirical issues associated with the development process for such systems and propose a systematic way for building intelligent applications based on SWS by providing the development process with steps, techniques and technologies. In addition, one experiment concerning the implementation of a real e-learning system using the proposed approach is described. The evaluation results from this experiment showed that our approach has been effective and relevant in terms of improvements in the development process of intelligent applications based on SWS.     

Encoding Semantic Awareness in Resource-Constrained Devices

With the semantic Web relying on ontologies to establish online machine- interpretable information, the Internet is growing into a semantically aware computing paradigm that facilitates Web entities' discovery of the knowledge and resources they need. Ambient intelligence aims to enable smart interaction beyond the Internet by embedding intelligence into our environment to unobtrusively support users' daily activities. To accomplish these goals, ontologies and semantic awareness are crucial for better understanding a user's context. While interest in the Semantic Web has spurred the development of large-scale semantic grid architectures, expanding the Semantic Web to the other side of the computing spectrum is a complex undertaking. The techniques and tools that support the semantic Web aren't designed to deal with the resource-constrained devices with which people frequently interact in an ambient-intelligence environment. To counter this disadvantage, we developed a coding scheme for ontologies that embeds semantic awareness in devices with limited memory and processing capabilities, such as sensory nodes and smart phones. This scheme provides a compact representation of an ontology and is enhanced with an efficient and effective semantic-matching algorithm.     

Bayesian intelligent semantic mashup for tourism

A common perception is that there are two competing visions for the future evolution of the Web: the Semantic Web and Web 2.0. In fact, Semantic Web technologies must integrate with Web 2.0 services for both to leverage each other's strengths. This paper illustrates how Semantic Web technologies can support information integration and make it easy to create semantic mashups. An intelligent recommendation system for tourism is presented to show the efficiency of our method. Through the ontology of tourism, the system allows the integration of heterogeneous online travel information. An integrated knowledge process is developed to guarantee the whole engineering procedure. Based on the Bayesian network technique, the system recommends tourist attractions to a user by taking into account the travel behavior both of the user and of other users. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Integrating web service and semantic dialogue model for user models interoperability on the web

Nowadays there is a great number of Web information systems that build a model of the user and adapt their services according to the needs and preferences maintained by the user model (UM). One of the most challenging issues of this scenario is the possibility to enable different systems to cooperate in order to exchange the available information about a user. Our aim is to create rich (and scalable) communication protocols and infrastructures to enable consumers and providers of UM data to interact. Our solution for dealing with such an issue is to exploit Web standards for interoperability (i.e. Semantic Web and Web Services) for implementing simple atomic communication, and a dialogue model for implementing enhanced communication capabilities. In particular, two systems can start a semantics-enhanced Dialogue Game as a form of negotiation to clarify the meaning of the requested concepts when a shared knowledge model does not exist, and to approximate the response when the exact one is not available. We propose a distributed semantic conversation framework based on the Sesame semantic environment for the exchange of user model knowledge on the Web. Systems have to expose their user model data as a Web Service, and to exploit a public dialogue knowledge base to start the dialogue. The main advantage of the approach is to allow systems to deal with difficult situations by starting an appropriate dialogue game instead of stopping the communication as in the traditional “all-or-nothing” Web Service approach. On the basis of a preliminary evaluation, the approach has shown an improvement of the adaptation results provided by the systems we tested.     

本体存储技术研究

Ontobgy是对一个特定领域中重要概念的共享的形式化的描述,由于具有明确性和共享性,它可以作为领域内不同主体之同进行交流的语义基础;更进一步的,Ontology可以帮助机器理解文档表达的语义信息。语义网络是Ontology的一个重要应用场景,Ontolcgy用来描述网络资源的语义,从而使机器具有自动管理网络信息的能力。那么巨大的数据规模是语义网络环境下Ontology数据存储管理面临的一个突出问题,所以介绍了本体存储的方法、存储模式及几种典型的本体存储管理系统。讨论了当前本体存储模式的问题并展望了未来的发展方向。     

本体存储技术研究

Ontology是对一个特定领域中重要概念的共享的形式化的描述,由于具有明确性和共享性,它可以作为领域内不同主体之间进行交流的语义基础;更进一步的,Ontology可以帮助机器理解文档表达的语义信息.语义网络是Ontology的一个重要应用场景,Ontology用来描述网络资源的语义,从而使机器具有自动管理网络信息的能力.那么巨大的数据规模是语义网络环境下Ontology数据存储管理面临的一个突出问题,所以介绍了本体存储的方法、存储模式及几种典型的本体存储管理系统.讨论了当前本体存储模式的问题并展望了未来的发展方向.     

An overview of semantic search evaluation initiatives

Recent work on searching the Semantic Web has yielded a wide range of approaches with respect to the underlying search mechanisms, results management and presentation, and style of input. Each approach impacts upon the quality of the information retrieved and the user’s experience of the search process. However, despite the wealth of experience accumulated from evaluating Information Retrieval (IR) systems, the evaluation of Semantic Web search systems has largely been developed in isolation from mainstream IR evaluation with a far less unified approach to the design of evaluation activities. This has led to slow progress and low interest when compared to other established evaluation series, such as TREC for IR or OAEI for Ontology Matching. In this paper, we review existing approaches to IR evaluation and analyse evaluation activities for Semantic Web search systems. Through a discussion of these, we identify their weaknesses and highlight the future need for a more comprehensive evaluation framework that addresses current limitations.     

Currents: Trends, People, Projects

Along with the more public debate about the benefits the Semantic Web is - or isn't - delivering to the Internet, a related undercurrent of discussion is growing about software engineering's future. In the vanguard of this discussion, some researchers and software engineers are advocating that Semantic Web technologies should be key components of the next paradigm of software development. These advocates, however, are discovering that the ongoing debate about the Semantic Web's ultimate usefulness is being fought over the user experience - whether or not the principles behind the Semantic Web are just too complex to be truly useful to the bulk of Internet users.     

Semantic Web Mining: State of the art and future directions

Semantic Web Mining aims at combining the two fast-developing research areas Semantic Web and Web Mining. This survey analyzes the convergence of trends from both areas: More and more researchers are working on improving the results of Web Mining by exploiting semantic structures in the Web, and they make use of Web Mining techniques for building the Semantic Web. Last but not least, these techniques can be used for mining the Semantic Web itself.The Semantic Web is the second-generation WWW, enriched by machine-processable information which supports the user in his tasks. Given the enormous size even of today’s Web, it is impossible to manually enrich all of these resources. Therefore, automated schemes for learning the relevant information are increasingly being used. Web Mining aims at discovering insights about the meaning of Web resources and their usage. Given the primarily syntactical nature of the data being mined, the discovery of meaning is impossible based on these data only. Therefore, formalizations of the semantics of Web sites and navigation behavior are becoming more and more common. Furthermore, mining the Semantic Web itself is another upcoming application. We argue that the two areas Web Mining and Semantic Web need each other to fulfill their goals, but that the full potential of this convergence is not yet realized. This paper gives an overview of where the two areas meet today, and sketches ways of how a closer integration could be profitable.