A Reference Architecture for Building Semantic-Web Mediators

The Semantic Web comprises a large amount of distributed and heterogeneous ontologies, which have been developed by different communities, and there exists a need to integrate them. Mediators are pieces of software that help to perform this integration, which have been widely studied in the context of nested relational models. Unfortunately, mediators for databases that are modelled using ontologies have not been so widely studied. In this paper, we present a reference architecture for building semantic-web mediators. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first reference architecture in the bibliography that solves the integration problem as a whole, contrarily to existing approaches that focus on specific problems. Furthermore, we describe a case study that is contextualised in the digital libraries domain in which we realise the benefits of our reference architecture. Finally, we identify a number of best practices to build semantic-web mediators.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TIN2007-64119Junta de Andalucía P07-TIC-2602,Junta de Andalucía P08-TIC-4100Ministerio de Industria, Turismo y Comercio TIN2008-04718-EMinisterio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2010-21744Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad TIN2010-09809-EMinisterio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2010-10811-EMinisterio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2010-09988-

A conceptual model for semantically-based e-government portals

Issues of semantic interoperability and service integration for e-government portals are the domain of interest of the present paper. We propose a Conceptual Model for One-Stop e-Government Portals based on the Semantic Web Service technology. We describe our research into building the three basic ontologies and their integration with standard ontologies. The result is a project-independent reusable model. At the same time, we outline a simple methodology for applying the proposed conceptual model into a specific scenario

IRS III: a platform and infrastructure for creating WSMO based semantic web services

The IRS project has the overall aim of supporting the automated or semi-automated construction of semantically enhanced systems over the inter-net. IRS-I supported the creation of knowledge intensive systems structured acording to the UPML framework and IRS-II integrated the UPML framework with web service technologies. In this paper we describe IRS-III. Within IRS-III we have now incorporated and extended the WSMO ontology. Our extensions to WSMO include the addition of input and output roles to goals and web services and a new type of mediator. As well as summarizing our additions to WSMO we outline the architecture of IRS-III and the associated interfaces

Components Interoperability through Mediating Connector Patterns

A key objective for ubiquitous environments is to enable system interoperability between system's components that are highly heterogeneous. In particular, the challenge is to embed in the system architecture the necessary support to cope with behavioral diversity in order to allow components to coordinate and communicate. The continuously evolving environment further asks for an automated and on-the-fly approach. In this paper we present the design building blocks for the dynamic and on-the-fly interoperability between heterogeneous components. Specifically, we describe an Architectural Pattern called Mediating Connector, that is the key enabler for communication. In addition, we present a set of Basic Mediator Patterns, that describe the basic mismatches which can occur when components try to interact, and their corresponding solutions.Comment: In Proceedings WCSI 2010, arXiv:1010.233

Knowledge modelling for integrating semantic web services in e-government applications

Service integration and domain interoperability are the basic requirements in the development of current service-oriented e-Government applications. Semantic Web and, in particular, Semantic Web Service (SWS) technology aim to address these issues. However, the integration between e-Government applications and SWS is not an easy task. We argue that a more complex semantic layer needs to be modeled. The aim of our work is to provide an ontological framework that maps such a semantic layer. In this paper, we describe our approach for creating a project-independent and reusable model, and provide a case study that demonstrates its applicability

Benefits and challenges of applying Semantic Web Services in the e-Government domain

Joining up services in e-Government usually implies governmental agencies acting in concert without a central control regime. This requires the sharing of scattered and heterogeneous data. Semantic Web Service (SWS) technology can help to integrate, mediate and reason between these datasets. However, since few real-world applications have been developed, it is still unclear which are the actual benefits and issues of adopting such a technology in the e-Government domain. In this paper, we contribute to raising awareness of the potential benefits in the e-Government community by analyzing motivations, requirements, and expected results, before proposing a reusable SWS-based framework. We demonstrate the application of this framework by a compelling use case: a GIS-based emergency planning system. We illustrate the obtained benefits and the key challenges which remain to be addressed

Towards intelligent web services: the web service modeling ontology (WSMO)

The Semantic Web and the Semantic Web Services build a natural application area for Intelligent Agents, namely querying and reasoning about structured knowledge and semantic descriptions of services and their interfaces on the Web. This paper provides an overview of the Web Service Modeling Ontology, a conceptual framework for the semantical description of Web services

An infrastructure for building semantic web portals

In this paper, we present our KMi semantic web portal infrastructure, which supports two important tasks of semantic web portals, namely metadata extraction and data querying. Central to our infrastructure are three components: i) an automated metadata extraction tool, ASDI, which supports the extraction of high quality metadata from heterogeneous sources, ii) an ontology-driven question answering tool, AquaLog, which makes use of the domain specific ontology and the semantic metadata extracted by ASDI to answers questions in natural language format, and iii) a semantic search engine, which enhances traditional text-based searching by making use of the underlying ontologies and the extracted metadata. A semantic web portal application has been built, which illustrates the usage of this infrastructure