Semantic annotation of Web APIs with SWEET

Recently technology developments in the area of services on the Web are marked by the proliferation of Web applications and APIs. The development and evolution of applications based on Web APIs is, however, hampered by the lack of automation that can be achieved with current technologies. In this paper we present SWEET - Semantic Web sErvices Editing Tool - a lightweight Web application for creating semantic descriptions of Web APIs. SWEET directly supports the creation of mashups by enabling the semantic annotation of Web APIs, thus contributing to the automation of the discovery, composition and invocation service tasks. Furthermore, it enables the development of composite SWS based applications on top of Linked Data

Hydrological modelling in a "big data" era: a proof of concept of hydrological models as web services

Dealing with the massive increase in global data availability of all sorts is increasingly being known as big data science. Indeed, largely leveraged by the internet, a new resource of data sets emerges that are so large and heterogeneous that they become awkward to work with. New algorithms, methods and models are needed to filter such data to find trends, test hypotheses, make predictions and quantify uncertainties. As a considerable share of the data relate to environmental processes (e.g., satellite images, distributed sensor networks), this evolution provides exciting challenges for environmental sciences, and hydrology in particular. Web-enabled models are a promising approach to process large and distributed data sets, and to provide tailored products for a variety of end-users. It will also allow hydrological models to be used as building blocks in larger earth system simulation systems. However, in order to do so we need to reconsider the ways that hydrological models are built, results are made available, and uncertainties are quantified. We present the results of an experimental proof of concept of a hydrological modelling web-service to process heterogeneous hydrological data sets. The hydrological model itself consists of a set of conceptual model routines implemented with on a common platform. This framework is linked to global and local data sets through web standards provided by the Open Geospatial Consortium, as well as to a web interface that enables an end-user to request stream flow simulations from a self-defined location. In essence, the proof-of-concept can be seen as an implementation of the Models of Everywhere concept introduced by Beven in 2007. Although the setup is operational and effectively simulates stream flow, we identify several bottlenecks for optimal hydrological simulation in a web-context. The major challenges we identify are related to (1) model selection; (2) uncertainty quantification, and (3) user interaction and scenario analysis. Model selection is inherent to hydrological modelling, because of the large spatial and temporal variability of processes, which inhibits the use of one optimal model structure. However, in a web context it becomes paramount that such selection is automatic, yet objective and transparent. Similarly, uncertainty quantification is a mainstream practice in hydrological modelling, but in a web-context uncertainty analysis face unprecedented challenges in terms of tracking uncertainties throughout a possibly geographically distributed workflow, as well as dealing with an extreme heterogeneity of data availability. Lastly, the ability of end-users to interact directly with hydrological models poses specific challenges in terms of mapping user scenarios (e.g., a scenario of land-use change) into the model parameter space for prediction and uncertainty quantification. The setup has been used in several scientific experiments, including the large-scale UK consortium project on an Environmental Virtual Observatory pilot

A Query Integrator and Manager for the Query Web

We introduce two concepts: the Query Web as a layer of interconnected queries over the document web and the semantic web, and a Query Web Integrator and Manager (QI) that enables the Query Web to evolve. QI permits users to write, save and reuse queries over any web accessible source, including other queries saved in other installations of QI. The saved queries may be in any language (e.g. SPARQL, XQuery); the only condition for interconnection is that the queries return their results in some form of XML. This condition allows queries to chain off each other, and to be written in whatever language is appropriate for the task. We illustrate the potential use of QI for several biomedical use cases, including ontology view generation using a combination of graph-based and logical approaches, value set generation for clinical data management, image annotation using terminology obtained from an ontology web service, ontology-driven brain imaging data integration, small-scale clinical data integration, and wider-scale clinical data integration. Such use cases illustrate the current range of applications of QI and lead us to speculate about the potential evolution from smaller groups of interconnected queries into a larger query network that layers over the document and semantic web. The resulting Query Web could greatly aid researchers and others who now have to manually navigate through multiple information sources in order to answer specific questions

Ontology-based domain modelling for consistent content change management

Ontology-based modelling of multi-formatted software application content is a challenging area in content management. When the number of software content unit is huge and in continuous process of change, content change management is important. The management of content in this context requires targeted access and manipulation methods. We present a novel approach to deal with model-driven content-centric information systems and access to their content. At the core of our approach is an ontology-based semantic annotation technique for diversely formatted content that can improve the accuracy of access and systems evolution. Domain ontologies represent domain-specific concepts and conform to metamodels. Different ontologies - from application domain ontologies to software ontologies - capture and model the different properties and perspectives on a software content unit. Interdependencies between domain ontologies, the artifacts and the content are captured through a trace model. The annotation traces are formalised and a graph-based system is selected for the representation of the annotation traces

Challenges in Bridging Social Semantics and Formal Semantics on the Web

This paper describes several results of Wimmics, a research lab which names stands for: web-instrumented man-machine interactions, communities, and semantics. The approaches introduced here rely on graph-oriented knowledge representation, reasoning and operationalization to model and support actors, actions and interactions in web-based epistemic communities. The re-search results are applied to support and foster interactions in online communities and manage their resources