A Lime-Flavored REST API for Alignment Services

A practical alignment service should be flexible enough to handle the varied alignment scenarios that arise in the real world, while minimizing the need for manual configuration. MAPLE, an orchestration framework for ontology alignment, supports this goal by coordinating a few loosely coupled actors, which communicate and cooperate to solve a matching task using explicit metadata about the input ontologies, other available resources and the task itself. The alignment task is thus summarized by a report listing its characteristics and suggesting alignment strategies. The schema of the report is based on several metadata vocabularies, among which the Lime module of the OntoLex-Lemon model is particularly important, summarizing the lexical content of the input ontologies and describing external language resources that may be exploited for performing the alignment. In this paper, we propose a REST API that enables the participation of downstream alignment services in the process orchestrated by MAPLE, helping them self-adapt in order to handle heterogeneous alignment tasks and scenarios. The realization of this alignment orchestration effort has been performed through two main phases: we first described its API as an OpenAPI specification (a la API-first), which we then exploited to generate server stubs and compliant client libraries. Finally, we switched our focus to the integration of existing alignment systems, with one fully integrated system and an additional one being worked on, in the effort to propose the API as a valuable addendum to any system being developed

Marvin: Semantic annotation using multiple knowledge sources

People are producing more written material then anytime in the history. The increase is so high that professionals from the various fields are no more able to cope with this amount of publications. Text mining tools can offer tools to help them and one of the tools that can aid information retrieval and information extraction is semantic text annotation. In this report we present Marvin, a text annotator written in Java, which can be used as a command line tool and as a Java library. Marvin is able to annotate text using multiple sources, including WordNet, MetaMap, DBPedia and thesauri represented as SKOS.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, keywords: Semantic annotation, text normalization, semantic web, linked data, information management, text mining, information extraction, data curatio

RNeXML: a package for reading and writing richly annotated phylogenetic, character, and trait data in R

NeXML is a powerful and extensible exchange standard recently proposed to better meet the expanding needs for phylogenetic data and metadata sharing. Here we present the RNeXML package, which provides users of the R programming language with easy-to-use tools for reading and writing NeXML documents, including rich metadata, in a way that interfaces seamlessly with the extensive library of phylogenetic tools already available in the R ecosystem

HILT : High-Level Thesaurus Project. Phase IV and Embedding Project Extension : Final Report

Ensuring that Higher Education (HE) and Further Education (FE) users of the JISC IE can find appropriate learning, research and information resources by subject search and browse in an environment where most national and institutional service providers - usually for very good local reasons - use different subject schemes to describe their resources is a major challenge facing the JISC domain (and, indeed, other domains beyond JISC). Encouraging the use of standard terminologies in some services (institutional repositories, for example) is a related challenge. Under the auspices of the HILT project, JISC has been investigating mechanisms to assist the community with this problem through a JISC Shared Infrastructure Service that would help optimise the value obtained from expenditure on content and services by facilitating subject-search-based resource sharing to benefit users in the learning and research communities. The project has been through a number of phases, with work from earlier phases reported, both in published work elsewhere, and in project reports (see the project website: http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/). HILT Phase IV had two elements - the core project, whose focus was 'to research, investigate and develop pilot solutions for problems pertaining to cross-searching multi-subject scheme information environments, as well as providing a variety of other terminological searching aids', and a short extension to encompass the pilot embedding of routines to interact with HILT M2M services in the user interfaces of various information services serving the JISC community. Both elements contributed to the developments summarised in this report

Outside The Box: Building a Digital Asset Management Ecosystem for Preservation and Access

The University of Houston (UH) Libraries made an institutional commitment in late 2015 to migrate the data for its digitized cultural heritage collections to open source systems for preservation and access: Hydra-in-a-Box, Archivematica, and ArchivesSpace. This article describes the work that the UH Libraries implementation team has completed to date, including open source tools for streamlining digital curation workflows, minting and resolving identifiers, and managing SKOS vocabularies. These systems, workflows, and tools, collectively known as the Bayou City Digital Asset Management System (BCDAMS), represent a novel effort to solve common issues in the digital curation lifecycle and may serve as a model for other institutions seeking to implement flexible and comprehensive systems for digital preservation and access.Librarie

Developing a RDF4J frontend

Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Engenharia InformáticaA few years ago, data was not shared and kept isolated, preventing communication between datasets. Currently, we have more significant data volumes, and in a world where everything is connected, our data is now also following this trend. Data model focus changed from a square structure like the relational model to a model centered on the relations. Knowledge graphs are the new paradigm to represent and manage this new kind of information structure. Along with the new paradigm, graph databases emerged to support the new requirements. Despite the increasing interest in the field, only a few native solutions are available. Most are under a commercial license, and the open-source options have very basic or outdated interfaces, and because of that, they are a little distant for most end-users. In this thesis, we introduce the Open Web Ontobud and discuss its design and develop ment. Ontobud is a Web Application aimed at improving the interface for one of the most fascinating and influential frameworks in this area: RDF4J. RDF4J is a Java framework to deal with RDF triple storage, management, and query. Open Web Ontobud is an open-source RDF4J web frontend created to reduce the gap between end-users and the RDF4J backend. We created a web interface that enables users with a basic knowledge of OWL and SPARQL to explore ontologies via resource tables or graphs and extract information from them with SPARQL queries. The interface aims to remain intuitive, providing tooltips and help when needed, as well as some statistical data in a readily available form. Despite the frontend being the main focus, a backend and two databases are also used for a total of four components in the framework. For the best deployment experience, Docker was used for its simplicity, allowing deployment in just a few commands. Each component has a dedicated image, following a modular design and allowing them to be executed on separate machines if desired.No passado, dados não era partilhada e permanecia isolada, impedindo comunicação entre datasets. Atualmente, temos maiores volumes de dados e num mundo onde tudo está interligado, os nossos dados também seguem essa tendência. O foco de modelo de dados alterou de uma estrutura quadrada, como o modelo relacional, para um modelo centrado em relações. Grafos de Conhecimento são o novo paradigma para a representação e manipulação desta nova estrutura de dados. Com o novo paradigma, bases de dados de grafos emergiram para suportar as novas necessidades. Apesar do aumento de interesse neste campo, apenas algumas soluções nativas estão disponíveis. A maioria requere uma licença comercial, e as opções open-source são interfaces básicas ou desatualizadas, e por consequência, distantes a muitos utilizadores. Nesta tese introduzimos o Open Web Ontobud e discutimos o seu design e desenvolvi mento. O Ontobud é uma aplicação Web direcionada ao melhoramento da interface de uma das mais fascinantes e influentes frameworks nesta área: o RDF4J. O RDF4J é uma framework em Java para guardar, manipular e inquirir grafos RDF. Open Web Ontobud é um open-source web frontend para o RDF4J criado para diminuir a separação entre os utilizadores e o RDF4J backend. Nós criamos uma interface web que permite utilizadores com conhecimento básico de OWL e SPARQL explorar ontologias através de tabelas de recursos ou grafos, e inquirir informação com queries SPARQL. O objetivo da interface é ser intuitiva, com tooltips e ajuda quando necessário, bem como alguma informação de estatísticas numa forma facilmente acessível. Apesar do frontend ser o foco principal, o backend e duas bases de dados também são utilizadas, para um total de quatro componentes nesta framework. Para a melhor experiência de inicialização utilizamos Docker pela sua simplicidade, permitindo inicialização em poucos comandos. Cada componente tem uma imagem dedicada, seguindo um design modular e permitindo cada componente ser executada em máquinas separadas se necessário

Adaptation of NLP Techniques to Cultural Heritage Research and Documentation

The WissKI system provides a framework for ontology based science communication and cultural heritage documentation. In many cases, the documentation consists of semi-structured data records with free text fields. Most references in the texts comprise of person and place names, as well as time specifications. We present the WissKI tools for semantic annotation using controlled vocabularies and formal ontologies derived from CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM). Current research deals with the annotations as building blocks for event recognition. Finally, we outline how the CRM helps to build bridges between documentation in different scientific disciplines

Spacialist – A Virtual Research Environment for the Spatial Humanities

Many archaeological research projects generate data and tools that are unusable or abandoned after the funding period ends. To counter this unsustainable practice, the Spacialist project was tasked to create a virtual research environment that offers an integrated, web-based user interface to record, browse, analyze, and visualize all spatial, graphical, textual and statistical data from archaeological or cultural heritage research projects. Spacialist is developed as an open-source software platform composed of modules providing the required functionality to end-users. It builds on controlled multi-language vocabularies and an abstract, extensible data model to facilitate data recording and analysis, as well as interoperability with other projects and infrastructures. Development of Spacialist is driven by an interdisciplinary team in collaboration with various pilot projects in different areas of archaeology. To support the complete research lifecycle, the platform is being integrated with the University’s research-data archive, guaranteeing long-term availability of project data

Connecting medical educational resources to the Linked Data cloud: the mEducator RDF Schema, store and API

The existence of non-interoperable metadata schemas and limited use of shared vocabularies means that retrieving and processing educational resources across the Web represents a challenge. The emerging Linked Data paradigm has provided the tools and methods to share and expose metadata in a more unified and well interlinked manner, permitting both humans and machines to process Web data. The availability of vast amounts of RDF-based Linked Data is offering a worthwhile alternative to the isolated and heterogeneous data silos which previously dominated the Web. In the ECfunded project mEducator a standardised approach is proposed to describing and exposing medical educational resources. In this paper are described firstly the design considerations, and conceptual model upon which mEducator’s metadata scheme approach was based. Afterwards, follows the description of the serialization of the scheme in RDF/XML, and in turn follows an example showing how medical educational resources are exposed on the Web using an RDF endpoint, and discuss the potential advantages of this approach