From software APIs to web service ontologies: a semi-automatic extraction method

Successful employment of semantic web services depends on the availability of high quality ontologies to describe the domains of these services. As always, building such ontologies is difficult and costly, thus hampering web service deployment. Our hypothesis is that since the functionality offered by a web service is reflected by the underlying software, domain ontologies could be built by analyzing the documentation of that software. We verify this hypothesis in the domain of RDF ontology storage tools.We implemented and fine-tuned a semi-automatic method to extract domain ontologies from software documentation. The quality of the extracted ontologies was verified against a high quality hand-built ontology of the same domain. Despite the low linguistic quality of the corpus, our method allows extracting a considerable amount of information for a domain ontology

Using metadata and context information in sharing personal content of mobile users

The thesis discusses possibilities for using metadata and context information in annotating, sharing, and searching user-created content in the mobile domain. The first part of the thesis discusses metadata, ontologies, context information, and imaging. The latter part of the thesis describes a prototype system for classifying and annotating digital photographs and storing context information as metadata of the photographs in a mobile phone. Another role of the prototype system is to perform context- and ontology-based information retrieval using a mobile phone user interface. The prototype system contains a limited RDF metadata engine and an ontology browser for mobile phones, as well as a server-side metadata and content repository. The implementation demonstrates that a part of the creation-time context, such as the location and temporal context, can be automatically gathered in a mobile phone, and stored as metadata for the content. In addition, the same parts of context information can be used for searching. The content and the metadata can be stored on a server and shared with other users. The prototype is built around a tourism scenario that works as an example of how these technologies can be used in a mobile phone

A Grid-Enabled Digital Library System for Natural Disaster Metadata

Abstract. The need to organize and publish metadata about European research results in the field of natural disasters has been met with the help of two innovative technologies: the Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA) and the Resource Description Framework (RDF). OGSA provides a common platform for sharing distributed metadata securely. RDF facilitates the creation and exchange of metadata. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a Grid-based digital library for natural-disaster research metadata. We describe the EU-MEDIN RDF schema that we propose to standardize the description of natural-disaster resources, and the gDisDL Grid service-based architecture for storing and querying of RDF metadata in a secure and distributed manner. Finally, we describe a prototype implementation of gDisDL using the Jena RDF Library by HP and the Globus 3 toolkit

Information and Communication Technologies for Integrated Operations of Ships

Over the past three decades, information and communication technologies have filled our daily life with great comfort and convenience. As the technology keeps evolving, user expectations for more challenging cases that can benefit from advanced information and communication technologies are increasing, e.g., the scenario of Integrated Operations (IO) for ships in the maritime domain. However, to realize integrated operations for ships is a complex task that involves addressing problems such as interoperability among heterogeneous operation applications and connectivity within harsh maritime communication environments. The common approach was to tackle these challenges separately by service integration and communication integration, respectively: each utilizes optimized and independent implementations. Separate solutions work fine within their own contexts, whereas conflicts and inconsistencies can be identified by integrating them together for specific maritime scenarios. Therefore, connection between separate solutions needs to be studied. In this dissertation, we first take a look at complex systems to obtain useful methodologies applied to integrated operations for ships. Then we study IO of ships from different perspectives and divide the complex task into sub-tasks. We explore separate approaches to these sub-tasks, examine the connection in between, resolve inconsistencies if there are any, and continue the exploration process till a compatible and integrated solution can be accomplished. In general, this journey represents our argument for an integration-oriented complex system development approach. In concrete, it shows the way on how to achieve IO of ships by both providing connectivity in harsh communication environments and allowing interoperability among heterogeneous operation applications, and most importantly by ensuring the synergy in between. This synergy also gives hints on the evolution towards a next generation network architecture for the future Internet

Information Infrastructure Laboratory

This paper reports on some initial work on a NetAPI for accessing and updating RDF data over the web. The NetAPI includes actions for conditional extraction or update of RDF data, actions for model upload and download and also the ability to enquire about the capabilities of a hosting server. An initial experimental system is described which partially implements these ideas within the Jena RDF toolkit