Using semantic web technologies to access soft AEC data

Building related data tends to be generated, used and retained in a domain-specific manner. The lack of interoperability between data domains in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry inhibits the cross-domain use of data at an enterprise level. Semantic web technologies provide a possible solution to some of the noted interoperability issues. Traditional methods of information capture fail to take into account the wealth of soft information available throughout a building. Several sources of information are not included in performance assessment frameworks, including social media, occupant communication, mobile communication devices, occupancy patterns, human resource allocations and financial information.The paper suggests that improved data interoperability can aid the integration of untapped silos of information into existing structured performance measurement frameworks, leading to greater awareness of stakeholder concerns and building performance. An initial study of how building-related data can be published following semantic web principles and integrated with other ‘soft-data’ sources in a cross-domain manner is presented. The paper goes on to illustrate how data sources from outside the building operation domain can be used to supplement existing sources. Future work will include the creation of a semantic web based performance framework platform for building performance optimisation.     

WESONet: Applying semantic web technologies and collaborative tagging to multimedia web information systems

The publication of different media types, like images, audio and video in the World Wide Web is getting more importance each day. However, searching and locating content in multimedia sites is challenging. In this paper, we propose a platform for the development of multimedia web information systems. Our approach is based on the combination between semantic web technologies and collaborative tagging. Producers can add meta-data to multimedia content associating it with different domain-specific ontologies. At the same time, users can tag the content in a collaborative way. The proposed system uses a search engine that combines both kinds of meta-data to locate the desired content. It will also provide browsing capabilities through the ontology concepts and the developed tags.     

An assessment of open relation extraction systems for the semantic web

Open relation extraction has been a growing field of research in the last few years. This paper compares some of the most prominent open relation extractors and explores their strength and weaknesses on standard datasets. In particular, we highlight the lack of formal guidelines that define a valid relation and state that open relation extractors must be situated in particular tasks and contexts. In this respect, we briefly analyze the role of open relation extractors for the semantic Web and linked data context.     

Applying semantic web technologies to knowledge sharing in aerospace engineering

This paper details an integrated methodology to optimise knowledge reuse and sharing, illustrated with a use case in the aeronautics domain. It uses ontologies as a central modelling strategy for the capture of knowledge from legacy documents via automated means, or directly in systems interfacing with knowledge workers, via user-defined, web-based forms. The domain ontologies used for knowledge capture also guide the retrieval of the knowledge extracted from the data using a semantic search system that provides support for multiple modalities during search. This approach has been applied and evaluated successfully within the aerospace domain, and is currently being extended for use in other domains on an increasingly large scale.     

Measuring design complexity of semantic web ontologies

Ontology languages such as OWL are being widely used as the Semantic Web movement gains momentum. With the proliferation of the Semantic Web, more and more large-scale ontologies are being developed in real-world applications to represent and integrate knowledge and data. There is an increasing need for measuring the complexity of these ontologies in order for people to better understand, maintain, reuse and integrate them. In this paper, inspired by the concept of software metrics, we propose a suite of ontology metrics, at both the ontology-level and class-level, to measure the design complexity of ontologies. The proposed metrics are analytically evaluated against Weyuker’s criteria. We have also performed empirical analysis on public domain ontologies to show the characteristics and usefulness of the metrics. We point out possible applications of the proposed metrics to ontology quality control. We believe that the proposed metric suite is useful for managing ontology development projects.     

Using semantic techniques to access web data

Nowadays, people frequently use different keyword-based web search engines to find the information they need on the web. However, many words are polysemous and, when these words are used to query a search engine, its output usually includes links to web pages referring to their different meanings. Besides, results with different meanings are mixed up, which makes the task of finding the relevant information difficult for the users, especially if the user-intended meanings behind the input keywords are not among the most popular on the web.     

Format-independent and metadata-driven media resource adaptation using semantic web technologies

Adaptation of media resources is an emerging field due to the growing amount of multimedia content on the one hand and an increasing diversity in usage environments on the other hand. Furthermore, to deal with a plethora of coding and metadata formats, format-independent adaptation systems are important. In this paper, we present a new format-independent adaptation system. The proposed adaptation system relies on a model that takes into account the structural metadata, semantic metadata, and scalability information of media bitstreams. The model is implemented using the web ontology language. Existing coding formats are mapped to the structural part of the model, while existing metadata standards can be linked to the semantic part of the model. Our new adaptation technique, which is called RDF-driven content adaptation, is based on executing SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language queries over instances of the model for media bitstreams. Using different criteria, RDF-driven content adaptation is compared to other adaptation techniques. Next to real-time execution times, RDF-driven content adaptation provides a high abstraction level for the definition of adaptations and allows a seamless integration with existing semantic metadata standards.     

Visualization and comparison of architecture rationale with semantic web technologies

Deciding how to operationalize non-functional requirements (NFR) is a complex task, and several formalisms have been proposed to represent design decisions and their rationale. Unfortunately, these models can become complex (even unreadable) for designs with many alternatives and/or a well-documented rationale, which makes very hard to review and compare rationale. This paper introduces a Semantic Web-based technique to visualize and compare architecture rationale, combining Softgoal Interdependency Graphs (SIGs) with ontologies reified as named graphs. Reuse of rationale is thus facilitated by allowing architects to understand rationale of previous decisions and/or projects, though automated reuse remains unfeasible until extensive automated capture rationale happens. The approach is illustrated with a case study of Contexta, a museum integration project, using Toeska/Review, a Semantic Web-based tool.     

Dependency management for digital preservation using semantic web technologies

The preservation of digital objects is a topic of prominent importance for archives and digital libraries. In this article, we focus on the problem of preserving the intelligibility of digital objects. We formalize the problem in terms of dependencies and specify a number of basic intelligibility-related tasks. In parallel, we introduce a preservation scenario as a means for clarifying the pros and cons of various representation and modeling languages that are used for the problem at hand, which reveals the benefits of adopting Semantic Web (SW) languages as a representation framework. To this end, we propose a minimal core ontology for representing intelligibility-related dependencies along with methodological hints for extending it. Finally, we report empirical and experimental results from applying the proposed approach on real data sets. It is worth mentioning that this approach can be used not only on SW-based repositories or archives, but also on those that are based on conventional approaches and languages (like EAST, DEDSL, XFDU/SAFE).     

Dealing with software process requirements complexity: an information access proposal based on semantic technologies

Organizations developing software for critical sectors like aerospace, automotive, and medical systems need to apply process requirements coming from different sources: industrial standards, customer-provided requirements, and procedures from internal quality management systems. In these situations, software teams need to deal with complex sets of process requirements that govern different aspects of their work. This paper describes the development of a collaborative, web-based solution to improve access to process requirements. The solution makes use of semantic technologies to handle the context of process requirement. Requirements are contextualized by linking them to activities, tasks, and work products. With this tool, software engineers have a single point of access to all the applicable process requirements, avoiding the risk of missing relevant information.     

用语义网技术建模特征识别和攻击模型

安全特征识别和攻击的预测是网络安全领域内必不可少的功能部分,而攻击模型和其他安全特征的描述和定义需要专门的语言。然而,目前此类语言存在诸多问题,如语言功能单一,适用性差;缺乏开放性,语义不一致和缺乏可重用性等。为了改善这种情况,利用本体建模方法,通过一个典型攻击行为的建模,证明本体语言具有的特点支持其作为安全特征描述语言。     

Using semantic technologies and the OSU ontology for modelling context and activities in multi-sensory surveillance systems

Automatic systems that monitor human behaviour for detecting security problems are a challenge today. Previously, our group defined the Horus framework, which is a modular architecture for the integration of multi-sensor monitoring stages. In this work, structure and technologies required for high-level semantic stages of Horus are proposed, and the associated methodological principles established with the aim of recognising specific behaviours and situations.

Our methodology distinguishes three semantic levels of events: low level (compromised with sensors), medium level (compromised with context), and high level (target behaviours). The ontology for surveillance and ubiquitous computing has been used to integrate ontologies from specific domains and together with semantic technologies have facilitated the modelling and implementation of scenes and situations by reusing components.

A home context and a supermarket context were modelled following this approach, where three suspicious activities were monitored via different virtual sensors. The experiments demonstrate that our proposals facilitate the rapid prototyping of this kind of systems.     

基于本体的语义网检索模型及关键技术研究

为解决传统的基于题,构建了一个基于本体的语义网检索模型.提出了一种领域本体库和应用本体库的构建方法,给出了查询本体的生成以及相似本体匹配推理的方法,实现了以该模型为基础的试验性检索系统.实验结果表明,该模型能够进行本体的语义推理,在一定程度上增强信息检索系统的语义处理能力,检索效率得到了改善.     

基于推理的语义网检索模型及关键技术研究

为解决语义网检索过程中缺少推理导致语义检索性能不高的问题,提出一个基于推理的语义网检索模型,并介绍了该模型实现的关键技术.针对构建的领域本体,使用SWRL规则语言进行本体完善把本体中的隐性知识表示出来;在信息抽取过程中,对于识别出的实体,利用推理规则,获得更加丰富的实例知识库;对于用户输入的查询条件,利用完善的本体知识库及规则得到更多的相似概念实现查询扩展;进行语义匹配,获得更为精准的检索结果.实验结果表明,该模型能提高信息检索的语义性,得到较满意的信息检索结果.     

Process interoperability in healthcare systems with dynamic semantic web services

Healthcare systems are very complex due to extreme heterogeneity in their data and processes. Researchers and practitioner need to make systems interoperable and integrate for the benefit of all the stakeholders including hospitals, clinicians, medical support staff, and patients. The broader goal of interoperability can only be achieved when standards are practiced.Two different healthcare systems can earn HL7 conformance and compliance but at the same time can be incompatible for interoperability because of varying implementation of HL7 interaction model. This is mainly because workflows in healthcare systems are very complex. Interoperability on one hand requires flexible mechanism for the mapping of business processes to a standard, HL7 in our example. On the other hand it requires deeper understanding of the standard interaction model and gaps created by their incompatible implementations. In this paper we propose a novel technique of dynamically creating semantic web services as overlay on top of the existing services. We used Web Service Modeling Framework as an underlying architecture for HL7 process artifacts implementation as semantic web services. These semantic services are mapped to our proposed interaction ontology. Integrated reasoning mechanism provides necessary execution semantics for more effective and seamless end-to-end communication.The prototype we tested on different processes from the laboratory domain at a local diagnostic laboratory with uninterrupted process flow. The scenario of Result Query Placer interaction flow and its associated process artifacts are executed for the proof of concept.The proposed solution complements the existing data interoperability in HL7 and leads to semantic process interoperability. The achievement of semantic interoperability results in timely delivery of healthcare services to patients saving precious lives.     

利用Web Services技术构建开放式数据挖掘系统

提出了一种新颖的数据挖掘系统的体系结构,该结构把SOA与传统的挖掘系统结构相结合.在此体系结构的基础上,实现了一个开放式挖掘系统,能够动态集成挖掘算法.将该系统应用于福州地热资源的数据挖掘中,结果证明通过将WebServices技术引入数据挖掘系统的构建中,能大大增强挖掘系统的功能.     

Semantic technologies for open interaction systems

Open interaction systems play a crucial role in agreement technologies because they are software devised for enabling autonomous agents (software or human) to interact, negotiate, collaborate, and coordinate their activities in order to establish agreements and manage their execution. Following the approach proposed by the recent literature on agent environments those open distributed systems can be efficiently and effectively modeled as a set of correlated physical and institutional spaces of interaction where objects and agents are situated. In our view in distributed open systems, spaces are fundamental for modeling the fact that events, actions, and social concepts (like norms and institutional objects) should be perceivable only by the agents situated in the spaces where they happen or where they are situated. Institutional spaces are also crucial for their active functional role of keeping track of the state of the interaction, and for monitoring and enforcing norms. Given that in an open distributed and dynamic system it is fundamental to be able to create and destroy spaces of interaction at run-time, in this paper we propose to create them using Artificial Institutions (AIs) specified at design time. This dynamic creation is a complex task that deserves to be studied in all details. For doing that, in this paper, we will first define the various components of AIs and spaces using Semantic Web Technologies, then we will describe the mechanisms for using AIs specification for realizing spaces of interaction. We will exemplify this process by formalizing the components of the auction Artificial Institution and of the spaces created for running concrete auctions.     

Enterprise applications of semantic technologies for business process management

1 Introduction Today’s business process management (BPM)systems have evolved to provide rich and sophisticated tooling and runtime support for subject domainexperts     

Using a multimedia semantic graph for web document visualization and summarization

Multimedia Tools and Applications - The synthesis process of document content and its visualization play a basic role in the context of knowledge representation and retrieval. Existing methods for...