Report of the Stanford Linked Data Workshop

The Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SULAIR) with the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) conducted at week-long workshop on the prospects for a large scale, multi-national, multi-institutional prototype of a Linked Data environment for discovery of and navigation among the rapidly, chaotically expanding array of academic information resources. As preparation for the workshop, CLIR sponsored a survey by Jerry Persons, Chief Information Architect emeritus of SULAIR that was published originally for workshop participants as background to the workshop and is now publicly available. The original intention of the workshop was to devise a plan for such a prototype. However, such was the diversity of knowledge, experience, and views of the potential of Linked Data approaches that the workshop participants turned to two more fundamental goals: building common understanding and enthusiasm on the one hand and identifying opportunities and challenges to be confronted in the preparation of the intended prototype and its operation on the other. In pursuit of those objectives, the workshop participants produced:1. a value statement addressing the question of why a Linked Data approach is worth prototyping;2. a manifesto for Linked Libraries (and Museums and Archives and …);3. an outline of the phases in a life cycle of Linked Data approaches;4. a prioritized list of known issues in generating, harvesting & using Linked Data;5. a workflow with notes for converting library bibliographic records and other academic metadata to URIs;6. examples of potential “killer apps” using Linked Data: and7. a list of next steps and potential projects.This report includes a summary of the workshop agenda, a chart showing the use of Linked Data in cultural heritage venues, and short biographies and statements from each of the participants

Fostering e-participation sustainability through a BPM-driven semantic model

According to a recent Eurobarometer survey (2014), 68% of Europeans tend not to trust national governments. As the increasing alienation of citizens from politics endangers democracy and welfare, governments, practitioners and researchers look for innovative means to engage citizens in policy matters. One of the measures intended to overcome the so-called democratic deficit is the promotion of civic participation. Digital media proliferation offers a set of novel characteristics related to interactivity, ubiquitous connectivity, social networking and inclusiveness that enable new forms of societal-wide collaboration with a potential impact on leveraging participative democracy. Following this trend, e-Participation is an emerging research area that consists in the use of Information and Communication Technologies to mediate and transform the relations among citizens and governments towards increasing citizens’ participation in public decision-making. However, despite the widespread efforts to implement e-Participation through research programs, new technologies and projects, exhaustive studies on the achieved outcomes reveal that it has not yet been successfully incorporated in institutional politics. Given the problems underlying e-Participation implementation, the present research suggested that, rather than project-oriented efforts, the cornerstone for successfully implementing e-Participation in public institutions as a sustainable added-value activity is a systematic organisational planning, embodying the principles of open-governance and open-engagement. It further suggested that BPM, as a management discipline, can act as a catalyst to enable the desired transformations towards value creation throughout the policy-making cycle, including political, organisational and, ultimately, citizen value. Following these findings, the primary objective of this research was to provide an instrumental model to foster e-Participation sustainability across Government and Public Administration towards a participatory, inclusive, collaborative and deliberative democracy. The developed artefact, consisting in an e-Participation Organisational Semantic Model (ePOSM) underpinned by a BPM-steered approach, introduces this vision. This approach to e-Participation was modelled through a semi-formal lightweight ontology stack structured in four sub-ontologies, namely e-Participation Strategy, Organisational Units, Functions and Roles. The ePOSM facilitates e-Participation sustainability by: (1) Promoting a common and cross-functional understanding of the concepts underlying e-Participation implementation and of their articulation that bridges the gap between technical and non-technical users; (2) Providing an organisational model which allows a centralised and consistent roll-out of strategy-driven e-Participation initiatives, supported by operational units dedicated to the execution of transformation projects and participatory processes; (3) Providing a standardised organisational structure, goals, functions and roles related to e-Participation processes that enhances process-level interoperability among government agencies; (4) Providing a representation usable in software development for business processes’ automation, which allows advanced querying using a reasoner or inference engine to retrieve concrete and specific information about the e-Participation processes in place. An evaluation of the achieved outcomes, as well a comparative analysis with existent models, suggested that this innovative approach tackling the organisational planning dimension can constitute a stepping stone to harness e-Participation value

Helping scientists integrate and interact with biomedical data

Tese de mestrado, Bioinformática e Biologia Computacional , 2021, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de CiênciasFor the past decades, the amount and complexity of biomedical data available have increased and far exceeded the human capacity to process it. To support this, knowledge graphs and ontologies have been increasingly used, allowing semantic integration of heterogeneous data within and across domains. However, the independent development of biomedical ontologies has created heterogeneity problems, with the design of ontologies with overlapping domains or significant differences. Automated ontology alignment techniques have been developed to tackle the semantic heterogeneity problem, by establishing meaningful correspondences between entities of two ontologies. However, their performance is limited, and the alignments they produce can contain erroneous, incoherent, or missing mappings. Therefore, manual validation of automated ontology alignments remains essential to ensure their quality. Given the complexity of the ontology matching process, is important to provide visualization and a user interface with the necessary features to support the exploration, validation, and edition of alignments. However, these aspects are often overlooked, as few alignment systems feature user interfaces enabling alignment visualization, fewer allow editing alignments, and fewer provide the functionalities needed to make the task seamless for users. This dissertation developed VOWLMap — an extension for the standalone web application, WebVOWL — for visualizing, editing, and validating biomedical ontology alignments. This work extended the Visual Notation for OWL Ontologies (VOWL), which defines a visual representation for most language constructs of OWL, to support graphical representations of alignments and restructured WebVOWL to load and visualize alignments. VOWLMap employs modularization techniques to facilitate the visualization of large alignments, while maintaining the context of each mapping, and offers a dynamic visualization that supports interaction mechanisms, including direct interaction with and editing of graph representations. A user study was conducted to evaluate the usability and performance of VOWLMap, having obtained positive feedback with an excellent score in a standard usability questionnaire

Model-Driven Methodology for Rapid Deployment of Smart Spaces based on Resource-Oriented Architectures

Advances in electronics nowadays facilitate the design of smart spaces based on physical mash-ups of sensor and actuator devices. At the same time, software paradigms such as Internet of Things (IoT) and Web of Things (WoT) are motivating the creation of technology to support the development and deployment of web-enabled embedded sensor and actuator devices with two major objectives: (i) to integrate sensing and actuating functionalities into everyday objects, and (ii) to easily allow a diversity of devices to plug into the Internet. Currently, developers who are applying this Internet-oriented approach need to have solid understanding about specific platforms and web technologies. In order to alleviate this development process, this research proposes a Resource-Oriented and Ontology-Driven Development (ROOD) methodology based on the Model Driven Architecture (MDA). This methodology aims at enabling the development of smart spaces through a set of modeling tools and semantic technologies that support the definition of the smart space and the automatic generation of code at hardware level. ROOD feasibility is demonstrated by building an adaptive health monitoring service for a Smart Gym

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

Social informatics perspective as an integrative design method for information systems technology and business intelligence and analytics: a critical realist study

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, Wits Business School, 2016.This study contends that Information Systems and Technologies (ISTs) fail to adequately provide for effective delivery of Business Intelligence and Analytics (BIA), which limits the value that organisations can derive from their data assets. In spite of the influence that each has on the other and their widely acknowledged and undisputed relationship and interdependencies, design and development approaches still promote a silo approach to IST and BIA in theory and practice. The evolution of the role of data in the digital economy not only compels academics and practitioners to collaborate on how to enable creation of good quality data at source but intensifies the requirement for an integrated approach to IST and BIA design. The research problem that the study addresses is that design methods commonly employed in both Information Systems (IS) research studies and practice do not advocate for an integrated approach to design and development of IST and BIA. While IS research accounts for both IST and BIA, IST and BIA design and development studies are approached independently and/or in isolation, with limited integration. The effectiveness of Social informatics (SI) as an interdisciplinary study of design, uses and consequences of use, puts it above the rest of the commonly applied socio-technical design theories and approaches. SI’s strength is in studying designs, uses and consequences of IST use after implementation. However, the theory versus practice inconsistencies presented by the interpretivist paradigm, which is an underpinning philosophy for classical SI, limit its use as a design method. Critical Realism (CR) offers the research study a viable alternative and is crucial in addressing both contextual requirements, while embracing the positivist, deterministic aspects of the study. CR is a pluralist approach based on sound research method principles; hence the study adopted it as both the theoretical paradigm and research method. The research study objective is to reconceptualise the SI perspective as an integrative design method underpinned by CR. The study adopts CR as its research methodology. CR is a philosophy of science that allows for the pluralistic approach to operationalisation of the research strategy, a catalyst in addressing the paradigmatic challenges of the research study. The ability to address the qualitative realist requirements of the study while effectively dealing with the positivist characteristics of the research was crucial in ensuring comprehensive results. The insights which could only be effectively gained through a qualitative realist process of enquiry were invaluable in advancing the IST and BIA design knowledge and practice. CR’s strength in focusing the research practice on the complexities of the real world is a critical enabler for an open system discipline such as IS. It ensures that the research is placed within the realist context of time, space and culture. CR is effective in allowing the researcher to explain the mechanisms that influence the social actor action at different levels of social organisations. It allows for the identification of non-deterministic tendencies in a complex, multidisciplinary and open system such as IS. It not only accounts for the varying social actor requirements at empirical level but reveals possible underlying causes and relationships of the observable or non-observable events and/or activities at play. This approach to analysis of IST and BIA requirements offers a unique ability to frame problems in meaningful and social actor-centred ways, at all levels of social organisation, enabling design and development of IST that are BIA centric. The development of new knowledge advances the field of IS design, a crucial step towards offering practitioners with a practical, structured and integrative design method. The critical realist approach is the most appropriate theoretical paradigm to adopt to address the theory-practice inconsistency challenges at the heart of the IS field. Its strength as a research methodology offers the researcher a unique ability to interact with data at a level that other research methods do not: that is, to examine the impact of data at the three fundamental levels of research – empirical, actual and real – thereby enhancing the effectiveness of its application in practice. Therefore, reconceptualisation of the SI perspective theoretical paradigm from interpretivism to CR offers greater benefits not only to this research study but to the IS field. This is yet another development in the field which seeks to address the long-standing challenge of IS value contribution that is constantly diminished by ineffective design methods and poor integration of the IST and BIA disciplines, which by design should be leveraging on each other’s strengths in a quest to deliver superior results to businesses. Business requirements analysed as input into the design process using the integrative CR-based design method account for BIA requirements, thus enhancing value derived from both IST and BIA.MT 201