Book Reviews

Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

The Semantic Web Revisited

The original Scientific American article on the Semantic Web appeared in 2001. It described the evolution of a Web that consisted largely of documents for humans to read to one that included data and information for computers to manipulate. The Semantic Web is a Web of actionable information--information derived from data through a semantic theory for interpreting the symbols.This simple idea, however, remains largely unrealized. Shopbots and auction bots abound on the Web, but these are essentially handcrafted for particular tasks; they have little ability to interact with heterogeneous data and information types. Because we haven't yet delivered large-scale, agent-based mediation, some commentators argue that the Semantic Web has failed to deliver. We argue that agents can only flourish when standards are well established and that the Web standards for expressing shared meaning have progressed steadily over the past five years. Furthermore, we see the use of ontologies in the e-science community presaging ultimate success for the Semantic Web--just as the use of HTTP within the CERN particle physics community led to the revolutionary success of the original Web. This article is part of a special issue on the Future of AI

A study of fieldwork practice in the United Kingdom and Sri Lanka, with implications for social work training in Zimbabwe

An occasional paper on social work practice in the UK and Sri lanka and their implication on social work training in Zimbabwe.Firstly social work is an international profession, with an international literature. Initiatives in one part of the world need to be considered by social workers in other parts, particularly where there are similarities in the socioeconomic situations of respective countries (eg poverty, communal values, etc). Secondly the problems faced by social work educators are analogous and useful comparisons can be made between them. Exchange of information and dialogue with regard to achievements and failures in the field of training can be mutually beneficial. Thirdly, a similar philosophy of adult education binds schools and faculties of social work in different continents together. This became obvious to me in researching the background approaches of various training institutions and bodies, where similar references and statements of intent were made in discussion of the mission and programmes of these organisations. This Occasional Paper examines the use of practical fieldwork as a means of training student social workers to engage in professional practice. Aspects of the practice curriculum are discussed as well as the structure and general orientation of this method of training students. There are four main sections. Section One outlines fieldwork issues in the United Kingdom, particularly with regard to the accreditation of practice teachers and concerns over the quality and methodology of fieldwork training. Section Two examines the use of fieldwork in one Third World country (Sri Lanka) and its orientation towards social development. Section Three offers some comments and observations on theories of adult learning and their relevance to fieldwork training, while Section Four draws together some practice lessons which Schools of Social Work may wish to consider with regard to developing their fieldwork programmes.Financial support from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAF.

Reading About \u27Reading\u27

The centrality of an abundance of books to the task of learning to read is undisputed. No-one writes a book about reading without stressing the importance of experiences with books

Implementing structural adjustment programmes in Africa: some implications for social work practice and training

A conference paper on the implications for social work practice in Africa due to the IMF/World Bank sponsored economic structural adjustment programmes.The main elements involved in the African economic crisis include deteriorating levels of public and private investment, mounting foreign debt:, inflationary budget deficits, incapability of maintaining public expenditure on social services (in particular health and education) and the maintenance of infrastructure generally. This is made worse by drastic declines in production in key sectors and increasing rates of unemployment and overall poverty. Structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) are only the most recent in a long series of similar attempts at resolving this economic crisis in Africa during the course of the last three decades of post-independence. Structural adjustment programmes (and previous policies, eg those termed "stabilisation programmes" and "economic reform programmes") have had immense impact on the countries undertaking the reforms, and in many cases have created further hardships for vulnerable groups within these countries, however these groups are defined. This paper considers the issue of the implementation of structural adjustment programmes in African countries. The aftermath of these programmes is so profound that almost every aspect of life is affected. As such it is important that social workers become aware of the resulting consequences and consider the implications for their own practice. It is also necessary to consider ways in which knowledge about structural adjustment and its social effects can be incorporated in the curriculum of schools of social work in Africa

Connecting the dots: a multi-pivot approach to data exploration

The purpose of data browsers is to help users identify and query data effectively without being overwhelmed by large complex graphs of data. A proposed solution to identify and query data in graph-based datasets is Pivoting (or set-oriented browsing), a many-to-many graph browsing technique that allows users to navigate the graph by starting from a set of instances followed by navigation through common links. Relying solely on navigation, however, makes it difficult for users to find paths or even see if the element of interest is in the graph when the points of interest may be many vertices apart. Further challenges include finding paths which require combinations of forward and backward links in order to make the necessary connections which further adds to the complexity of pivoting. In order to mitigate the effects of these problems and enhance the strengths of pivoting we present a multi-pivot approach which we embodied in tool called Visor. Visor allows users to explore from multiple points in the graph, helping users connect key points of interest in the graph on the conceptual level, visually occluding the remainder parts of the graph, thus helping create a road-map for navigation. We carried out an user study to demonstrate the viability of our approach

mashpoint: browsing the web along structured lines

Large numbers of Web sites support rich data-centric features to explore and interact with data. In this paper we present mashpoint, a framework that allows distributed data-powered Web applications to linked based on similarities of the entities in their data. By linking applications in this way we allow browsing with selections of data from one application to another application. This sort of browsing allows complex queries and exploration of data to be done by average Web users using multiple applications. We additionally use this concept to surface structured information to users in Web pages. In this paper we present this concept and our initial prototyp

A Linked Data representation of the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics

The recent publication of public sector information (PSI) data sets has brought to the attention of the scientific community the redundant presence of location based context. At the same time it stresses the inadequacy of current Linked Data services for exploiting the semantics of such contextual dimensions for easing entity retrieval and browsing. In this paper describes our approach for supporting the publication of geographical subdivisions in Linked Data format for supporting the e-government and public sector in publishing their data sets. The topological knowledge published can be reused in order to enrich the geographical context of other data sets, in particular we propose an exploitation scenario using statistical data sets described with the SCOVO ontology. The topological knowledge is then exploited within a service that supports the navigation and retrieval of statistical geographical entities for the EU territory. Geographical entities, in the extent of this paper, are linked data resources that describe objects that have a geographical extension. The data and services presented in this paper allows the discovery of resources that contain or are contained by a given entity URI and their representation within map widgets. We present an approach for a geography based service that helps in querying qualitative spatial relations for the EU statistical geography (proper containment so far). We also provide a rationale for publishing geographical information in Linked Data format based on our experience, within the EnAKTing project, in publishing UK PSI data

Advanced knowledge system for coatings and the gas turbine MRO industry

The growth of data generated within thermal spraying is, for many, a daunting business. Yet, this growing resource represents a largely untapped and potentially valuable asset capable of providing 'knowledge' rather than just 'information'. Many companies already use a range of Web based tools. However, the Web itself is changing and the vision for the future, the 'Semantic Web', is set to revolutionise how business will be done. One important aspect of this Web 'future' is that web pages will be greatly enriched and data will have additional information (tags) which help to describe it and more significantly, put the data into a context. This will enable machine readability and the use of query languages to ask direct questions. Following on from ideas introduced at ITSC 2007, a proof of concept demonstrator has been built for thermal spray coatings used in the Maintenance Repair and Overhaul (MRO) of gas turbines. A system has been built which stores and manipulates a range of data including; aircraft deliveries, RSS feeds of aircraft sales, engine types, MRO business details, thermal spray coasystem and discusses its future potential

Here comes Everything: Preparing for the Linked Web of Data

This talk reviews the history and development of the Web as a global information fabric. It describes some of the key developments and goes on to consider current excitement around the emergence of a Web of Linked Data. Much of this is arising in the area of Public Sector Informatin. Governments around the world collect information. This information is often non-personal public sector information. It relates to transport and education, health and the environment, business and leisure. Publishing and releasing this information in a machine readable way could lead to huge economic and social improvements. We describe developments in the UK and US which are showing the potential of building a Web of Open Linked Data using Semantic Web Standards. It will discuss the technical as well as social and cultural challenges. It will show examples of the applications that can result. It will consider the economic and social impact this could have