Restaurant Multi-Context-Based Information Retrieval System Ontological Model

This paper aims to improve information retrieval results by considering multi-context-based information that can be associated with retrieval. Traditional Information Retrieval has been termed inefficient because of its lack of consideration for individual user preference and contexts. An example domain where user preference and context consideration are expedient is the restaurant and food information retrieval domain. Current food-based ontologies do not provide sufficient information to tackle this challenge. We analysed existing food-based ontologies, developed and evaluated a restaurant-food-based ontology that provides application developers with a formalised restaurant-food ontology that will foster interoperability and information sharing within the domain. The ontology was developed using the methontology methodology for ontology development. Our restaurant-food ontology is based on ontology web language (OWL) and implemented in Protégé ontology editor. Using standard ontology evaluation measures of competency (in terms of precision and recall) and consistency, our results show that our ontology is 100% competent and can be used to build a range of applications that require answering a wide range of queries correctly that are general, detailed, context-based (location and environmental) and preference-based. This is currently, beyond what traditional Information retrieval and location-based systems can answer with accurac

Improving Ontology Recommendation and Reuse in WebCORE by Collaborative Assessments

In this work, we present an extension of CORE [8], a tool for Collaborative Ontology Reuse and Evaluation. The system receives an informal description of a specific semantic domain and determines which ontologies from a repository are the most appropriate to describe the given domain. For this task, the environment is divided into three modules. The first component receives the problem description as a set of terms, and allows the user to refine and enlarge it using WordNet. The second module applies multiple automatic criteria to evaluate the ontologies of the repository, and determines which ones fit best the problem description. A ranked list of ontologies is returned for each criterion, and the lists are combined by means of rank fusion techniques. Finally, the third component uses manual user evaluations in order to incorporate a human, collaborative assessment of the ontologies. The new version of the system incorporates several novelties, such as its implementation as a web application; the incorporation of a NLP module to manage the problem definitions; modifications on the automatic ontology retrieval strategies; and a collaborative framework to find potential relevant terms according to previous user queries. Finally, we present some early experiments on ontology retrieval and evaluation, showing the benefits of our system

A Survey of Volunteered Open Geo-Knowledge Bases in the Semantic Web

Over the past decade, rapid advances in web technologies, coupled with innovative models of spatial data collection and consumption, have generated a robust growth in geo-referenced information, resulting in spatial information overload. Increasing 'geographic intelligence' in traditional text-based information retrieval has become a prominent approach to respond to this issue and to fulfill users' spatial information needs. Numerous efforts in the Semantic Geospatial Web, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), and the Linking Open Data initiative have converged in a constellation of open knowledge bases, freely available online. In this article, we survey these open knowledge bases, focusing on their geospatial dimension. Particular attention is devoted to the crucial issue of the quality of geo-knowledge bases, as well as of crowdsourced data. A new knowledge base, the OpenStreetMap Semantic Network, is outlined as our contribution to this area. Research directions in information integration and Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) are then reviewed, with a critical discussion of their current limitations and future prospects

Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web

Measuring concept similarities in multimedia ontologies: analysis and evaluations

The recent development of large-scale multimedia concept ontologies has provided a new momentum for research in the semantic analysis of multimedia repositories. Different methods for generic concept detection have been extensively studied, but the question of how to exploit the structure of a multimedia ontology and existing inter-concept relations has not received similar attention. In this paper, we present a clustering-based method for modeling semantic concepts on low-level feature spaces and study the evaluation of the quality of such models with entropy-based methods. We cover a variety of methods for assessing the similarity of different concepts in a multimedia ontology. We study three ontologies and apply the proposed techniques in experiments involving the visual and semantic similarities, manual annotation of video, and concept detection. The results show that modeling inter-concept relations can provide a promising resource for many different application areas in semantic multimedia processing