Automatic Extraction of Semantically-Meaningful Information from the Web.

The semantic Web will bring meaning to the Internet,making it possible for web agents to understand the information it contains. However,curren t trends seem to suggest that the semantic web is not likely to be adopted in the forthcoming years. In this sense,meaningful information extraction from the web becomes a handicap for web agents. In this article,w e present a framework for automatic extraction of semantically-meaningful information from the current web. Separating the extraction process from the business logic of an agent enhances modularity,adaptabilit y,and maintainability. Our approach is novel in that it combines different technologies to extract information,surf the web and automatically adapt to web changes.Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología TIC2000-1106-C02-0

Semantic learning webs

By 2020, microprocessors will likely be as cheap and plentiful as scrap paper,scattered by the millions into the environment, allowing us to place intelligent systems everywhere. This will change everything around us, including the nature of commerce, the wealth of nations, and the way we communicate, work, play, and live. This will give us smart homes, cars, TVs , jewellery, and money. We will speak to our appliances, and they will speak back. Scientists also expect the Internet will wire up the entire planet and evolve into a membrane consisting of millions of computer networks, creating an “intelligent planet.” The Internet will eventually become a “Magic Mirror” that appears in fairy tales, able to speak with the wisdom of the human race. Michio Kaku, Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the Twenty - First Century, 1998 If the semantic web needed a symbol, a good one to use would be a Navaho dream-catcher: a small web, lovingly hand-crafted, [easy] to look at, and rumored to catch dreams; but really more of a symbol than a reality. Pat Hayes, Catching the Dreams, 2002 Though it is almost impossible to envisage what the Web will be like by the end of the next decade, we can say with some certainty that it will have continued its seemingly unstoppable growth. Given the investment of time and money in the Semantic Web (Berners-Lee et al., 2001), we can also be sure that some form of semanticization will have taken place. This might be superficial - accomplished simply through the addition of loose forms of meta-data mark-up, or more principled – grounded in ontologies and formalised by means of emerging semantic web standards, such as RDF (Lassila and Swick, 1999) or OWL (Mc Guinness and van Harmelen, 2003). Whatever the case, the addition of semantic mark-up will make at least part of the Web more readily accessible to humans and their software agents and will facilitate agent interoperability. If current research is successful there will also be a plethora of e-learning platforms making use of a varied menu of reusable educational material or learning objects. For the learner, the semanticized Web will, in addition, offer rich seams of diverse learning resources over and above the course materials (or learning objects) specified by course designers. For instance, the annotation registries, which provide access to marked up resources, will enable more focussed, ontologically-guided (or semantic) search. This much is already in development. But we can go much further. Semantic technologies make it possible not only to reason about the Web as if it is one extended knowledge base but also to provide a range of additional educational semantic web services such as summarization, interpretation or sense-making, structure-visualization, and support for argumentation

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N

Supporting decision making process with "Ideal" software agents: what do business executives want?

According to Simon’s (1977) decision making theory, intelligence is the first and most important phase in the decision making process. With the escalation of information resources available to business executives, it is becoming imperative to explore the potential and challenges of using agent-based systems to support the intelligence phase of decision-making. This research examines UK executives’ perceptions of using agent-based support systems and the criteria for design and development of their “ideal” intelligent software agents. The study adopted an inductive approach using focus groups to generate a preliminary set of design criteria of “ideal” agents. It then followed a deductive approach using semi-structured interviews to validate and enhance the criteria. This qualitative research has generated unique insights into executives’ perceptions of the design and use of agent-based support systems. The systematic content analysis of qualitative data led to the proposal and validation of design criteria at three levels. The findings revealed the most desirable criteria for agent based support systems from the end users’ point view. The design criteria can be used not only to guide intelligent agent system design but also system evaluation

Magpie: towards a semantic web browser

Web browsing involves two tasks: finding the right web page and then making sense of its content. So far, research has focused on supporting the task of finding web resources through ‘standard’ information retrieval mechanisms, or semantics-enhanced search. Much less attention has been paid to the second problem. In this paper we describe Magpie, a tool which supports the interpretation of web pages. Magpie offers complementary knowledge sources, which a reader can call upon to quickly gain access to any background knowledge relevant to a web resource. Magpie automatically associates an ontologybased semantic layer to web resources, allowing relevant services to be invoked within a standard web browser. Hence, Magpie may be seen as a step towards a semantic web browser. The functionality of Magpie is illustrated using examples of how it has been integrated with our lab’s web resources

Peer - Mediated Distributed Knowledge Management

Distributed Knowledge Management is an approach to knowledge management based on the principle that the multiplicity (and heterogeneity) of perspectives within complex organizations is not be viewed as an obstacle to knowledge exploitation, but rather as an opportunity that can foster innovation and creativity. Despite a wide agreement on this principle, most current KM systems are based on the idea that all perspectival aspects of knowledge should be eliminated in favor of an objective and general representation of knowledge. In this paper we propose a peer-to-peer architecture (called KEx), which embodies the principle above in a quite straightforward way: (i) each peer (called a K-peer) provides all the services needed to create and organize "local" knowledge from an individual's or a group's perspective, and (ii) social structures and protocols of meaning negotiation are introduced to achieve semantic coordination among autonomous peers (e.g., when searching documents from other K-peers). A first version of the system, called KEx, is imple-mented as a knowledge exchange level on top of JXTA

Collaboration in the Semantic Grid: a Basis for e-Learning

The CoAKTinG project aims to advance the state of the art in collaborative mediated spaces for the Semantic Grid. This paper presents an overview of the hypertext and knowledge based tools which have been deployed to augment existing collaborative environments, and the ontology which is used to exchange structure, promote enhanced process tracking, and aid navigation of resources before, after, and while a collaboration occurs. While the primary focus of the project has been supporting e-Science, this paper also explores the similarities and application of CoAKTinG technologies as part of a human-centred design approach to e-Learning

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