Trust Strategies for the Semantic Web

Everyone agrees on the importance of enabling trust on the SemanticWebto ensure more efficient agent interaction. Current research on trust seems to focus on developing computational models, semantic representations, inference techniques, etc. However, little attention has been given to the plausible trust strategies or tactics that an agent can follow when interacting with other agents on the Semantic Web. In this paper we identify five most common strategies of trust and discuss their envisaged costs and benefits. The aim is to provide some guidelines to help system developers appreciate the risks and gains involved with each trust strategy

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

City Data Fusion: Sensor Data Fusion in the Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) has gained substantial attention recently and play a significant role in smart city application deployments. A number of such smart city applications depend on sensor fusion capabilities in the cloud from diverse data sources. We introduce the concept of IoT and present in detail ten different parameters that govern our sensor data fusion evaluation framework. We then evaluate the current state-of-the art in sensor data fusion against our sensor data fusion framework. Our main goal is to examine and survey different sensor data fusion research efforts based on our evaluation framework. The major open research issues related to sensor data fusion are also presented.Comment: Accepted to be published in International Journal of Distributed Systems and Technologies (IJDST), 201

Context-Aware Information Retrieval for Enhanced Situation Awareness

In the coalition forces, users are increasingly challenged with the issues of information overload and correlation of information from heterogeneous sources. Users might need different pieces of information, ranging from information about a single building, to the resolution strategy of a global conflict. Sometimes, the time, location and past history of information access can also shape the information needs of users. Information systems need to help users pull together data from disparate sources according to their expressed needs (as represented by system queries), as well as less specific criteria. Information consumers have varying roles, tasks/missions, goals and agendas, knowledge and background, and personal preferences. These factors can be used to shape both the execution of user queries and the form in which retrieved information is packaged. However, full automation of this daunting information aggregation and customization task is not possible with existing approaches. In this paper we present an infrastructure for context-aware information retrieval to enhance situation awareness. The infrastructure provides each user with a customized, mission-oriented system that gives access to the right information from heterogeneous sources in the context of a particular task, plan and/or mission. The approach lays on five intertwined fundamental concepts, namely Workflow, Context, Ontology, Profile and Information Aggregation. The exploitation of this knowledge, using appropriate domain ontologies, will make it feasible to provide contextual assistance in various ways to the work performed according to a user’s taskrelevant information requirements. This paper formalizes these concepts and their interrelationships

A Semantic Grid Oriented to E-Tourism

With increasing complexity of tourism business models and tasks, there is a clear need of the next generation e-Tourism infrastructure to support flexible automation, integration, computation, storage, and collaboration. Currently several enabling technologies such as semantic Web, Web service, agent and grid computing have been applied in the different e-Tourism applications, however there is no a unified framework to be able to integrate all of them. So this paper presents a promising e-Tourism framework based on emerging semantic grid, in which a number of key design issues are discussed including architecture, ontologies structure, semantic reconciliation, service and resource discovery, role based authorization and intelligent agent. The paper finally provides the implementation of the framework.Comment: 12 PAGES, 7 Figure

Digital Ecosystems: Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures

We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological ecosystems. Here, we are concerned with the creation of these Digital Ecosystems, exploiting the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems to evolve high-level software applications. Therefore, we created the Digital Ecosystem, a novel optimisation technique inspired by biological ecosystems, where the optimisation works at two levels: a first optimisation, migration of agents which are distributed in a decentralised peer-to-peer network, operating continuously in time; this process feeds a second optimisation based on evolutionary computing that operates locally on single peers and is aimed at finding solutions to satisfy locally relevant constraints. The Digital Ecosystem was then measured experimentally through simulations, with measures originating from theoretical ecology, evaluating its likeness to biological ecosystems. This included its responsiveness to requests for applications from the user base, as a measure of the ecological succession (ecosystem maturity). Overall, we have advanced the understanding of Digital Ecosystems, creating Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures where the word ecosystem is more than just a metaphor.Comment: 39 pages, 26 figures, journa