Music Rights Clearance Business Analysis and Delivery

Semantic Web Services can be seen as remote Problem Solving Methods offered via the Web through platform and language independent interfaces. They can be seamlessly integrated to achieve more complex functionality by composing pre-existing software components. Despite technical advantages surrounding Semantic Web Services technologies, their perspective overlooks the commercial aspects of services in the real – non-IT – world, and is therefore incomplete and limiting. Real-world services – business activities such as insurances, medical services, ADSL etc – have nowadays an increasing social and economic importance. Important trends are the bundling of services and a growing customer-need orientation. Thus, there is a need for a computational background for describing real-world services and applying knowledge-based technologies for reasoning about them: configuring composite services and analysing them from a business perspective. We have developed ontologies and software tools to fill this gap, and applied them to industrial case studies. We present here a case study from the music industry, going from the analysis of a new business scenario to the development of an application called Xena that coordinates IT infrastructures in order to provide a profitable service that reflects major business principles. As opposed to currently proposed solutions in the Semantic Web Services community, our system is an automated implementation of a real-world service where important business decisions can be traced back

A Metadata-Enabled Scientific Discourse Platform

Scientific papers and scientific conferences are still, despite the emergence of several new dissemination technologies, the de-facto standard in which scientific knowledge is consumed and discussed. While there is no shortage of services and platforms that aid this process (e.g. scholarly search engines, websites, blogs, conference management programs), a widely accepted platform used to capture and enrich the interactions of research community has yet to appear. As such, we aim to create new ways for the members and interested people working in research communities to interact; before, during and after their conferences. Furthermore, to serve as a base to these interactions, we want not only to obtain, format and manage a body of legacy and new papers related to this community but also to aggregate several useful information and services to the environment of a discourse platform

From Sensor to Observation Web with Environmental Enablers in the Future Internet

This paper outlines the grand challenges in global sustainability research and the objectives of the FP7 Future Internet PPP program within the Digital Agenda for Europe. Large user communities are generating significant amounts of valuable environmental observations at local and regional scales using the devices and services of the Future Internet. These communities’ environmental observations represent a wealth of information which is currently hardly used or used only in isolation and therefore in need of integration with other information sources. Indeed, this very integration will lead to a paradigm shift from a mere Sensor Web to an Observation Web with semantically enriched content emanating from sensors, environmental simulations and citizens. The paper also describes the research challenges to realize the Observation Web and the associated environmental enablers for the Future Internet. Such an environmental enabler could for instance be an electronic sensing device, a web-service application, or even a social networking group affording or facilitating the capability of the Future Internet applications to consume, produce, and use environmental observations in cross-domain applications. The term ?envirofied? Future Internet is coined to describe this overall target that forms a cornerstone of work in the Environmental Usage Area within the Future Internet PPP program. Relevant trends described in the paper are the usage of ubiquitous sensors (anywhere), the provision and generation of information by citizens, and the convergence of real and virtual realities to convey understanding of environmental observations. The paper addresses the technical challenges in the Environmental Usage Area and the need for designing multi-style service oriented architecture. Key topics are the mapping of requirements to capabilities, providing scalability and robustness with implementing context aware information retrieval. Another essential research topic is handling data fusion and model based computation, and the related propagation of information uncertainty. Approaches to security, standardization and harmonization, all essential for sustainable solutions, are summarized from the perspective of the Environmental Usage Area. The paper concludes with an overview of emerging, high impact applications in the environmental areas concerning land ecosystems (biodiversity), air quality (atmospheric conditions) and water ecosystems (marine asset management)