Provenance-based validation of E-science experiments

E-Science experiments typically involve many distributed services maintained by different organisations. After an experiment has been executed, it is useful for a scientist to verify that the execution was performed correctly or is compatible with some existing experimental criteria or standards. Scientists may also want to review and verify experiments performed by their colleagues. There are no existing frameworks for validating such experiments in today's e-Science systems. Users therefore have to rely on error checking performed by the services, or adopt other ad hoc methods. This paper introduces a platform-independent framework for validating workflow executions. The validation relies on reasoning over the documented provenance of experiment results and semantic descriptions of services advertised in a registry. This validation process ensures experiments are performed correctly, and thus results generated are meaningful. The framework is tested in a bioinformatics application that performs protein compressibility analysis

Towards robust and reliable multimedia analysis through semantic integration of services

Thanks to ubiquitous Web connectivity and portable multimedia devices, it has never been so easy to produce and distribute new multimedia resources such as videos, photos, and audio. This ever-increasing production leads to an information overload for consumers, which calls for efficient multimedia retrieval techniques. Multimedia resources can be efficiently retrieved using their metadata, but the multimedia analysis methods that can automatically generate this metadata are currently not reliable enough for highly diverse multimedia content. A reliable and automatic method for analyzing general multimedia content is needed. We introduce a domain-agnostic framework that annotates multimedia resources using currently available multimedia analysis methods. By using a three-step reasoning cycle, this framework can assess and improve the quality of multimedia analysis results, by consecutively (1) combining analysis results effectively, (2) predicting which results might need improvement, and (3) invoking compatible analysis methods to retrieve new results. By using semantic descriptions for the Web services that wrap the multimedia analysis methods, compatible services can be automatically selected. By using additional semantic reasoning on these semantic descriptions, the different services can be repurposed across different use cases. We evaluated this problem-agnostic framework in the context of video face detection, and showed that it is capable of providing the best analysis results regardless of the input video. The proposed methodology can serve as a basis to build a generic multimedia annotation platform, which returns reliable results for diverse multimedia analysis problems. This allows for better metadata generation, and improves the efficient retrieval of multimedia resources

Semantic Description, Publication and Discovery of Workflows in myGrid

The bioinformatics scientific process relies on in silico experiments, which are experiments executed in full in a computational environment. Scientists wish to encode the designs of these experiments as workflows because they provide minimal, declarative descriptions of the designs, overcoming many barriers to the sharing and re-use of these designs between scientists and enable the use of the most appropriate services available at any one time. We anticipate that the number of workflows will increase quickly as more scientists begin to make use of existing workflow construction tools to express their experiment designs. Discovery then becomes an increasingly hard problem, as it becomes more difficult for a scientist to identify the workflows relevant to their particular research goals amongst all those on offer. While many approaches exist for the publishing and discovery of services, there have been few attempts to address where and how authors of experimental designs should advertise the availability of their work or how relevant workflows can be discovered with minimal effort from the user. As the users designing and adapting experiments will not necessarily have a computer science background, we also have to consider how publishing and discovery can be achieved in such a way that they are not required to have detailed technical knowledge of workflow scripting languages. Furthermore, we believe they should be able to make use of others' expert knowledge (the semantics) of the given scientific domain. In this paper, we define the issues related to the semantic description, publishing and discovery of workflows, and demonstrate how the architecture created by the myGrid project aids scientists in this process. We give a walk-through of how users can construct, publish, annotate, discover and enact workflows via the user interfaces of the myGrid architecture; we then describe novel middleware protocols, making use of the Semantic Web technologies RDF and OWL to support workflow publishing and discovery

Web Service Discovery in the FUSION Semantic Registry

The UDDI specification was developed as an attempt to address the key challenge of effective Web service discovery and has become a widely adopted standard. However, the text-based indexing and search mechanism that UDDI registries offer does not suffice for expressing unambiguous and semantically rich representations of service capabilities, and cannot support the logic-based inference capacity required for facilitating automated service matchmaking. This paper provides an overview of the approach put forward in the FUSION project for overcoming this important limitation. Our solution combines SAWSDL-based service descriptions with service capability profiling based on OWL-DL, and automated matchmaking through DL reasoning in a semantically extended UDDI registry

Combining SAWSDL, OWL-DL and UDDI for Semantically Enhanced Web Service Discovery

UDDI registries are included as a standard offering within the product suite of any major SOA vendor, serving as the foundation for establishing design-time and run-time SOA governance. Despite the success of the UDDI specification and its rapid uptake by the industry, the capabilities of its offered service discovery facilities are rather limited. The lack of machine-understandable semantics in the technical specifications and classification schemes used for retrieving services, prevent UDDI registries from supporting fully automated and thus truly effective service discovery. This paper presents the implementation of a semantically-enhanced registry that builds on the UDDI specification and augments its service publication and discovery facilities to overcome the aforementioned limitations. The proposed solution combines the use of SAWSDL for creating semantically annotated descriptions of service interfaces and the use of OWL-DL for modelling service capabilities and for performing matchmaking via DL reasoning

On the emergent Semantic Web and overlooked issues

The emergent Semantic Web, despite being in its infancy, has already received a lotof attention from academia and industry. This resulted in an abundance of prototype systems and discussion most of which are centred around the underlying infrastructure. However, when we critically review the work done to date we realise that there is little discussion with respect to the vision of the Semantic Web. In particular, there is an observed dearth of discussion on how to deliver knowledge sharing in an environment such as the Semantic Web in effective and efficient manners. There are a lot of overlooked issues, associated with agents and trust to hidden assumptions made with respect to knowledge representation and robust reasoning in a distributed environment. These issues could potentially hinder further development if not considered at the early stages of designing Semantic Web systems. In this perspectives paper, we aim to help engineers and practitioners of the Semantic Web by raising awareness of these issues

The Knowledge of the Grid: A Grid Ontology

This paper presents a knowledge architecture and set of ontologies that can be used as the foundation to facilitate the matching of abstract resource requests to services and resources, to determine the functional equivalence of Grid middle wares and deployments and to allow the description of ‘hybrid’ compound Grids composed of individual heterogeneous Grids. This is necessary as in all these cases what is required is mediation between different views or descriptions of Grids, which requires a formal reference vocabulary. We present a framework and ontologies for achieving this

Integrating Distributed Sources of Information for Construction Cost Estimating using Semantic Web and Semantic Web Service technologies

A construction project requires collaboration of several organizations such as owner, designer, contractor, and material supplier organizations. These organizations need to exchange information to enhance their teamwork. Understanding the information received from other organizations requires specialized human resources. Construction cost estimating is one of the processes that requires information from several sources including a building information model (BIM) created by designers, estimating assembly and work item information maintained by contractors, and construction material cost data provided by material suppliers. Currently, it is not easy to integrate the information necessary for cost estimating over the Internet. This paper discusses a new approach to construction cost estimating that uses Semantic Web technology. Semantic Web technology provides an infrastructure and a data modeling format that enables accessing, combining, and sharing information over the Internet in a machine processable format. The estimating approach presented in this paper relies on BIM, estimating knowledge, and construction material cost data expressed in a web ontology language. The approach presented in this paper makes the various sources of estimating data accessible as Simple Protocol and Resource Description Framework Query Language (SPARQL) endpoints or Semantic Web Services. We present an estimating application that integrates distributed information provided by project designers, contractors, and material suppliers for preparing cost estimates. The purpose of this paper is not to fully automate the estimating process but to streamline it by reducing human involvement in repetitive cost estimating activities

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

Identification of Design Principles

This report identifies those design principles for a (possibly new) query and transformation language for the Web supporting inference that are considered essential. Based upon these design principles an initial strawman is selected. Scenarios for querying the Semantic Web illustrate the design principles and their reflection in the initial strawman, i.e., a first draft of the query language to be designed and implemented by the REWERSE working group I4