Knowledge-Based Techniques for Scholarly Data Access: Towards Automatic Curation

Accessing up-to-date and quality scientific literature is a critical preliminary step in any research activity. Identifying relevant scholarly literature for the extents of a given task or application is, however a complex and time consuming activity. Despite the large number of tools developed over the years to support scholars in their literature surveying activity, such as Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic search, and others, the best way to access quality papers remains asking a domain expert who is actively involved in the field and knows research trends and directions. State of the art systems, in fact, either do not allow exploratory search activity, such as identifying the active research directions within a given topic, or do not offer proactive features, such as content recommendation, which are both critical to researchers. To overcome these limitations, we strongly advocate a paradigm shift in the development of scholarly data access tools: moving from traditional information retrieval and filtering tools towards automated agents able to make sense of the textual content of published papers and therefore monitor the state of the art. Building such a system is however a complex task that implies tackling non trivial problems in the fields of Natural Language Processing, Big Data Analysis, User Modelling, and Information Filtering. In this work, we introduce the concept of Automatic Curator System and present its fundamental components.openDottorato di ricerca in InformaticaopenDe Nart, Dari

Understanding Web 3.0 - the Semantic Web : how the evolution to a third generation of the Web will impact upon the Internet and media environment within a global and South African context

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 158-174).This thesis examines the potential evolution of the current version of the Internet, popularly referred to as Web 2.0, to a third generation of the Web, referred to as the Semantic Web or Web 3.0. The paper provides an overview of the change in architecture and structure that the current version of the Web will need to undergo in the form of a standardised ontology development in order for the Web to evolve. The evolution to a third generation of the Web will ultimately improve the overall user experience both within a global and South African online context, through the innovation and development of Semantic Web technologies and capabilities. The thesis also discusses the role of the political economy of media and how this concept needs to be refreshed in terms of dealing with the advent of 'new' or digital media which are characterised by the Internet. The role of traditional media is also discussed and how, due to the advent of the Internet, there has been a movement away from a model of traditional centralised media to one of a more decentralised model. The challenges of intellectual property rights and copyright are analysed in terms of online users developing their own content online in the form of user generated content and how, through the evolution to a Web 3.0 version of the Internet, these challenges can be potentially solved through the use of Semantic Web innovation and technologies. One of the major challenges which Web 2.0 currently faces is that of privacy infringement, but through the adoption of Semantic Web technology these challenges which currently affect all users on the Web can potentially be solved. Finally, the paper looks at the way that South African online users interact with the Internet and how the potential evolution to a third generation of the Web could potentially impact their user behaviour online

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Cultural Heritage on line

The 2nd International Conference "Cultural Heritage online – Empowering users: an active role for user communities" was held in Florence on 15-16 December 2009. It was organised by the Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale, the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and the Library of Congress, through the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program - NDIIP partners. The conference topics were related to digital libraries, digital preservation and the changing paradigms, focussing on user needs and expectations, analysing how to involve users and the cultural heritage community in creating and sharing digital resources. The sessions investigated also new organisational issues and roles, and cultural and economic limits from an international perspective

A thin-server approach to ephemeral Web personalization exploiting RDF data embedded in Web pages

Over the last years adaptive Web personalization has become a widespread service and all the major players of the WWW are providing it in various forms. Ephemeral personalization, in particular, deals with short time interests which are often tacitly entailed from user browsing behaviour or contextual information. Such personalization can be found almost anywhere in the Web in several forms, ranging from targeting advertising to automatic language localisation of content. In order to present personalized content a user model is typically built and maintained at server-side by collecting, explicitly or implicitly, user data. In the case of ephemeral personalization this means storing at server-side a huge amount of user behaviour data, which raises severe privacy concerns. The evolution of the semantic Web and the growing availability of semantic metadata embedded in Web pages allow a role reversal in the traditional personalization scenario. In this paper we present a novel approach towards ephemeral Web personalization consisting in a client-side semantic user model built by aggregating RDF data encountered by the user in his/her browsing activity and enriching them with triples extracted from DBpedia. Such user model is then queried by a server application via SPARQL to identify a user stereotype and finally address personalized content

Building the Future Internet through FIRE

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate

Building the Future Internet through FIRE

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate