Drawing OWL 2 ontologies with Eddy the editor

In this paper we introduce Eddy, a new open-source tool for the graphical editing of OWL~2 ontologies. Eddy is specifically designed for creating ontologies in Graphol, a completely visual ontology language that is equivalent to OWL~2. Thus, in Eddy ontologies are easily drawn as diagrams, rather than written as sets of formulas, as commonly happens in popular ontology design and engineering environments. This makes Eddy particularly suited for usage by people who are more familiar with diagramatic languages for conceptual modeling rather than with typical ontology formalisms, as is often required in non-academic and industrial contexts. Eddy provides intuitive functionalities for specifying Graphol diagrams, guarantees their syntactic correctness, and allows for exporting them in standard OWL 2 syntax. A user evaluation study we conducted shows that Eddy is perceived as an easy and intuitive tool for ontology specification

Explaining Trained Neural Networks with Semantic Web Technologies: First Steps

The ever increasing prevalence of publicly available structured data on the World Wide Web enables new applications in a variety of domains. In this paper, we provide a conceptual approach that leverages such data in order to explain the input-output behavior of trained artificial neural networks. We apply existing Semantic Web technologies in order to provide an experimental proof of concept

Extending the design process into the knowledge of the world

Research initiatives throughout history have shown how a designer typically makes associations and references to a vast amount of knowledge based on experiences to make decisions. With the increasing usage of information systems in our everyday lives, one might imagine an information system that provides designers access to the ‘architectural memories’ of other architectural designers during the design process, in addition to their own physical architectural memory. In this paper, we discuss how the increased adoption of semantic web technologies might advance this idea. We briefly discuss how such a semantic web of building information can be set up, and how this can be linked to a wealth of information freely available in the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud

Increasing information feed in the process of structural steel design

Research initiatives throughout history have shown how a designer typically makes associations and references to a vast amount of knowledge based on experiences to make decisions. With the increasing usage of information systems in our everyday lives, one might imagine an information system that provides designers access to the ‘architectural memories’ of other architectural designers during the design process, in addition to their own physical architectural memory. In this paper, we discuss how the increased adoption of semantic web technologies might advance this idea. We investigate to what extent information can be described with these technologies in the context of structural steel design. This investigation indicates significant possibilities regarding information reuse in the process of structural steel design and, by extent, in other design contexts as well. However, important obstacles and question remarks can still be outlined as well

Creating information delivery specifications using linked data

The use of Building Information Management (BIM) has become mainstream in many countries. Exchanging data in open standards like the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) is seen as the only workable solution for collaboration. To define information needs for collaboration, many organizations are now documenting what kind of data they need for their purposes. Currently practitioners define their requirements often a) in a format that cannot be read by a computer; b) by creating their own definitions that are not shared. This paper proposes a bottom up solution for the definition of new building concepts a property. The authors have created a prototype implementation and will elaborate on the capturing of information specifications in the future

Ontologies on the semantic web

As an informational technology, the World Wide Web has enjoyed spectacular success. In just ten years it has transformed the way information is produced, stored, and shared in arenas as diverse as shopping, family photo albums, and high-level academic research. The “Semantic Web” was touted by its developers as equally revolutionary but has not yet achieved anything like the Web’s exponential uptake. This 17 000 word survey article explores why this might be so, from a perspective that bridges both philosophy and IT

Semantic Technologies for Manuscript Descriptions — Concepts and Visions

The contribution at hand relates recent developments in the area of the World Wide Web to codicological research. In the last number of years, an informational extension of the internet has been discussed and extensively researched: the Semantic Web. It has already been applied in many areas, including digital information processing of cultural heritage data. The Semantic Web facilitates the organisation and linking of data across websites, according to a given semantic structure. Software can then process this structural and semantic information to extract further knowledge. In the area of codicological research, many institutions are making efforts to improve the online availability of handwritten codices. If these resources could also employ Semantic Web techniques, considerable research potential could be unleashed. However, data acquisition from less structured data sources will be problematic. In particular, data stemming from unstructured sources needs to be made accessible to SemanticWeb tools through information extraction techniques. In the area of museum research, the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) has been widely examined and is being adopted successfully. The CRM translates well to Semantic Web research, and its concentration on contextualization of objects could support approaches in codicological research. Further concepts for the creation and management of bibliographic coherences and structured vocabularies related to the CRM will be considered in this chapter. Finally, a user scenario showing all processing steps in their context will be elaborated on

Towards a semantic modeling of learners for social networks

The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) ontology is a vocabulary for mapping social networks. In this paper we propose an extension to FOAF in order to allow it to model learners and their social networks. We analyse FOAF alongside different learner modeling standards and specifications, and based on this analysis we introduce a taxonomy of the different features found in those models. We then compare the learner models and FOAF against the taxonomy to see how their characteristics have been shaped by their purpose. Based on this we propose extensions to FOAF in order to produce a learner model that is capable of forming the basis of a semantic social network.<br/