Applying intelligent agents and semantic web services in eGovernment environments

The increasing volume of eGovernment‐related services is demanding new approaches for service integration and interoperability in this domain. Semantic web (SW) technologies and applications can leverage the potential of eGovernment service integration and discovery, thus tackling the problems of semantic heterogeneity characterizing eGovernment information sources and the different levels of interoperability. eGovernment services will therefore be semantically described in the foreseeable future. In an environment with semantically annotated services, software agents are essential as the entities responsible for exploiting the semantic content in order to automate some tasks, and so enhance the user's experience. In this paper, we present a framework that provides a seamless integration of semantic web services and intelligent agents technologies by making use of ontologies to facilitate their interoperation. The proposed framework can assist in the development of powerful and flexible distributed systems in complex, dynamic, heterogeneous, unpredictable and open environments. Our approach is backed up by a proof‐of‐concept implementation, where the breakthrough of integrating disparate eGovernment services has been tested.     

Autonomous mapping of HL7 RIM and relational database schema

Healthcare systems need to share information within and across the boundaries in order to provide better care to the patients. For this purpose, they take advantage of the full potential of current state of the art in healthcare standards providing interoperable solutions. HL7 V3 specification is an international message exchange and interoperability standard. HL7 V3 messages exchanged between healthcare applications are ultimately recorded into local healthcare databases, mostly in relational databases. In order to bring these relational databases in compliance with HL7, mappings between HL7 RIM (Reference Information Model) and relational database schema are required. Currently, RIM and database mapping is largely performed manually, therefore it is tedious, time consuming, error prone and expensive process. It is a challenging task to determine all correspondences between RIM and schema automatically because of extreme heterogeneity issues in healthcare databases. To reduce the amount of manual efforts as much as possible, autonomous mapping approaches are required. This paper proposes a technique that addresses the aforementioned mapping issue and aligns healthcare databases to HL7 V3 RIM specifications. Furthermore, the proposed technique has been implemented as a working application and tested on real world healthcare systems. The application loads the target healthcare schema and then identifies the most appropriate match for tables and the associated fields in the schema by using domain knowledge and the matching rules defined in the Mapping Knowledge Repository. These rules are designed to handle the complexity of semantics found in healthcare databases. The GUI allows users to view and edit/re-map the correspondences. Once all the mappings are defined, the application generates Mapping Specification, which contains all the mapping information i.e. database tables and fields with associated RIM classes and attributes. In order to enable the transactions, the application is facilitated with the autonomous code generation from the Mapping Specification. The Code Generator component focuses primarily on generating custom classes and hibernate mapping files against the runtime system to retrieve and parse the data from the data source—thus allows bi-directional HL7 to database communication, with minimum programming required. Our experimental results show 35–65% accuracy on real laboratory systems, thus demonstrating the promise of the approach. The proposed scheme is an effective step in bringing the clinical databases in compliance with RIM, providing ease and flexibility.     

An experience report on developing an automated web services platform

Web services have attracted significant industry interest as a low-cost and flexible technology alternative to distributed object and proprietary message-oriented methods for delivery of on-demand business processes, enabling intra-organizational systems integration, and in the long term, development of dynamic inter-organizational process networks that may revolutionize B2C and B2B e-commerce. Exploiting this latent potential of web services technology requires the development of automated techniques for scalable and reliable service composition and execution in web service platforms. In this paper, we summarize our experience in developing an architectural framework for web services platforms, called Integrated Service Planning and Execution architecture (ISP & E). The use of recent advances in AI planning, learning and semantic web technologies for service composition, reliable service execution, transaction synthesis, and model-driven deployment of services is discussed. Furthermore, we discuss implications for and research issues in the development of web services based systems to aid e-business.     

Automatic derivation of BPEL4WS from IDEF0 process models

Integration definition for function modelling (IDEF0) is one of the most popular notations for modelling business processes. It employs a rather simple and intuitive modelling construct, consisting of boxes representing functions and arrows connecting them signifying flow of information and materials. Web services on the other hand are an emerging technology for implementing distributed systems. Web service orchestration languages, such as Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS), are the emerging approach for describing processes as networks of coordinated web services. Business processes as captured in IDEF0 models, however, may contain both web services as well as other types of activities which need to be coordinated. By automatically analysing the Extensible Markup Language (XML) definition of an IDEF0 model, we can identify how web services interact with other activities and at runtime generate code to support the orchestration of web services with the overall business process. The approach proposed is independent of the orchestration language and ensures an implementation independent model for specifying web service orchestrations. This approach also enables the top-down analysis of a business process to its constituent web services and avoids any misalignment problems during design time between the two.     

一种基于语义Web环境的电子商务模型

语义Web不仅能为人类用户而且能为软件Agent提供从语法层次到语义层次上的互操作性。语义Web与Web-Services有很强的互补性,现有的技术条件使二者的统一成为一种可能,这给电子商务的发展带来了一次历史性的革命机遇。给出了语义Web环境下结合Web Services关键技术和智能主体技术的一种极具潜能的电子商务实现模型。     

Standards for image annotation using Semantic Web

The impetus behind Semantic Web research remains the vision of supplementing availability with utility; that is, the World Wide Web provides availability of digital media, but the Semantic Web will allow presently available digital media to be used in unseen ways. An example of such an application is multimedia retrieval. At present, there are vast amounts of digital media available on the web. Once this media gets associated with machine-understandable metadata, the web can serve as a potentially unlimited supplier for multimedia web services, which could populate themselves by searching for keywords and subsequently retrieving images or articles, which is precisely the type of system that is proposed in this paper. Such a system requires solid interoperability, a central ontology, semantic agent search capabilities, and standards. Specifically, this paper explores this cross-section of image annotation and Semantic Web services, models the web service components that constitute such a system, discusses the sequential, cooperative execution of these Semantic Web services, and introduces intelligent storage of image semantics as part of a semantic link space.     

Semantic interoperability of controlled vocabularies in medicine: A case study of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases ‘Tuberculosis’ subset

Controlled vocabularies have been promoted for the achievement of semantic interoperability in e-health. However, the current implementations of healthcare information systems struggle with the remaining encoded semantics inside each particular data model. Multilevel modelling has been proposed for overcoming the challenges of semantic interoperability in healthcare, with different approaches for binding domain models to standard vocabularies; however, proofs of concept are still needed. This paper presents the fundamentals of knowledge modelling with standard vocabularies using the Multilevel Healthcare Information Modelling (MLHIM) specifications. The implementation of one term subset (‘Tuberculosis’) of the 10th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) in MLHIM domain models, the Concept Constraint Definitions (CCD), is described, using the Brazilian mortality and hospital information systems as use cases. Technical details of the semantic validation of data instances generated according to the XML instances that include this ICD-10 term set, as well as the correspondent migration of the original databases to MLHIM-compliant databases, are presented.     

基于Agent的语义web服务发现模型研究

Web服务发现是Web服务系统架构的重要部分,现有的主流Web服务发现方法采用基于UDDI框架的服务匹配。针对现有服务发现模型缺乏对语义信息的支持和发现精确程度不高的问题,本文在讨论Agent技术与语义Web服务技术的基础上,提出了一个基于Agent的语义Web服务发现模型,使服务发现的过程更加智能,也提高了服务发现的精确度,并设计了一个原型系统来验证所提出的服务发现方法的可行性。     

IT-Service-Management – Ein Modell zur Bestimmung der Folgen von Interoperabilitätsstandards auf die Einbindung externer IT-Dienstleister

This article examines the impact of interoperability standards such as Web Service standards or semantic annotation of services on the outsourcing of business processes or process activities. Especially the integration of external IT service providers is considered. Therefore a decision model is developed for optimizing service portfolios regarding risk-/cost-aspects. By using an extract of the application process for current accounts we exemplify the implementation and the results of the presented model.     

Web服务交互测试中SOAP消息的控制和分析

由于Web服务的平台异构性,Web服务的交互测试是一个重要的测试方面。阐述了一种通过截获和分析通讯消息进行Web服务交互测试的方法。在这种测试模型中,SOAP消息的控制和分析是关键。详细论述了SOAP消息的控制和分析在测试中的作用,并在结尾给出了系统的设计实现。     

基于Web服务技术实现异构环境下的互操作

分布式技术重点解决异构环境下的互操作性，传统的分布式异构环境操作不但烦琐，而且通用性很差。提出了基于Web服务技术进行异构环境下的互操作观点，介绍了Web服务的体系结构和相关主要技术，分析了当前流行的分布式组件技术及其互操作的缺陷后，给出了应用Web服务技术实现互操作的模型，并结合一个基于J2EE实例系统介绍了具体实现细节。Web服务将会成为下一代网络计算和企业应用的必然趋势。     

VN-KIM IE: Automatic Extraction of Vietnamese Named-Entities on the Web

The most fascinating advantage of the semantic web would be its capability of understanding and processing the contents of web pages automatically. Basically, the semantic web realization involves two main tasks: (1) Representation and management of a large amount of data and metadata for web contents; (2) Information extraction and annotation on web pages. On the one hand, recognition of named-entities is regarded as a basic and important problem to be solved, before deeper semantics of a web page could be extracted. On the other hand, semantic web information extraction is a language-dependent problem, which requires particular natural language processing techniques. This paper introduces VN-KIM IE, the information extraction module of the semantic web system VN-KIM that we have developed. The function of VN-KIM IE is to automatically recognize named-entities in Vietnamese web pages, by identifying their classes, and addresses if existing, in the knowledge base of discourse. That information is then annotated to those web pages, providing a basis for NE-based searching on them, as compared to the current keyword-based one. The design, implementation, and performance of VN-KIM IE are presented and discussed.     

基于Web Services XML-RPC的医院HIS/RIS集成研究与实现

医院不同信息系统的集成是医学信息学的一个难点,而Web Services被业界称为是计算机IT技术的第3次革命,它为异构系统的信息交互提供了一个参考模型.参照Web Services体系架构模型,对HIS/RIS集成的信息流程以及工作环境进行了分析研究,最终利用Web Services XML-RPC技术设计并实现了医院HIS/RIS的无缝连接与集成.     

SemantiClean

In our research on using information extraction to help populate semantic web resources, we have encountered significant obstacles to interoperability between the technologies. We believe these obstacles to be endemic to the basic paradigms and not quirks of the specific implementations we have worked with. In particular, we identify five dimensions of interoperability that must be addressed to successfully employ information extraction systems to populate semantic web resources that are suitable for reasoning. We call the task of transforming IE data into knowledge-based resources knowledge integration and we report results of experiments in which the knowledge integration process uses the deeper semantics of OWL ontologies to improve by between 8% and 13% the precision of relation extraction from text.     

支持跨区域协同的政务审批系统研究

当前电子政务审批系统的跨区域协同需求日益突出,从而迫切需要解决电子政务服务的效率、共享和互操作等问题.介绍了Web服务及工作流技术的特点,分析了基于面向服务架构的政务审批系统的协作关系,基于以服务执行引擎为核心的面向服务架构参考模型,提出了一种基于语义Web服务和工作流技术的政务审批系统框架,并给出了基于开源项目的系统实现.     

A semantic enriched data model for sensor network interoperability

One of the main open issues in the development of applications for sensor network management is the definition of interoperability mechanisms among the several monitoring systems and heterogeneous data. Interesting researches related to integration techniques have taken place, they are primary based on the adoption of sharing data mechanisms. In the last years, the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach has become predominant in many sensor network projects as it enables the cooperation and interoperability of different sensor platforms at an higher level of abstraction. In this paper we propose a novel architecture for the interoperability of sensor networks, which is based on web services technologies and on a common data model enriched with semantic concepts and annotations. The proposed architecture allows the development of complex decision support system applications by integration of heterogeneous data, accessible through services, according to standard data format and standard protocols.     

Support for seamless data exchanges between web services through information mapping analysis using kernel methods

A challenging issue to web services interoperability is seamless data exchanges between web services to be composed. A solution to this problem is to establish semantic mappings from an information item to another. To do that, we present an approximate information mapping analysis. We propose a kernel-based structural similarity measure for XML documents. Simulation results with industrial XML data show that the proposed kernel-based measure outperforms other existing methods.     

An ontology,intelligent agent-based framework for the provision of semantic web services

Intelligent agents and semantic web services are two technologies with great potential. Striking new applications can be developed by using the tools and techniques they provide. However, semantic web services need for an upper software entity able to deal with them and, on the other hand agent technology has historically suffered from a number of drawbacks that must be addressed. Integrating these two technologies in a joint environment can overcome their problems while strengthening their advantages. In this paper, the necessity for integrating these technologies and the potential benefits of their combination are analyzed. Based on this study, we present SEMMAS, an ontology-based framework for seamlessly integrating Intelligent Agents and Semantic Web Services. The basics of the framework are detailed and a proof-of-concept implementation described.