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

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

The Web Science Observatory

To understand and enable the evolution of the Web and to help address grand societal challenges, the Web must be observable at scale across space and time. That requires a globally distributed and collaborative Web Observatory

Memories for Life: A Review of the Science and Technology

This paper discusses scientific, social and technological aspects of memory. Recent developments in our understanding of memory processes and mechanisms, and their digital implementation, have placed the encoding, storage, management and retrieval of information at the forefront of several fields of research. At the same time, the divisions between the biological, physical and the digital worlds seem to be dissolving. Hence opportunities for interdisciplinary research into memory are being created, between the life sciences, social sciences and physical sciences. Such research may benefit from immediate application into information management technology as a testbed. The paper describes one initiative, Memories for Life, as a potential common problem space for the various interested disciplines

Artequakt: Generating tailored biographies from automatically annotated fragments from the web

The Artequakt project seeks to automatically generate narrativebiographies of artists from knowledge that has been extracted from the Web and maintained in a knowledge base. An overview of the system architecture is presented here and the three key components of that architecture are explained in detail, namely knowledge extraction, information management and biography construction. Conclusions are drawn from the initial experiences of the project and future progress is detailed