Semantic adaptability for the systems interoperability

In the current global and competitive business context, it is essential that enterprises adapt their knowledge resources in order to smoothly interact and collaborate with others. However, due to the existent multiculturalism of people and enterprises, there are different representation views of business processes or products, even inside a same domain. Consequently, one of the main problems found in the interoperability between enterprise systems and applications is related to semantics. The integration and sharing of enterprises knowledge to build a common lexicon, plays an important role to the semantic adaptability of the information systems. The author proposes a framework to support the development of systems to manage dynamic semantic adaptability resolution. It allows different organisations to participate in a common knowledge base building, letting at the same time maintain their own views of the domain, without compromising the integration between them. Thus, systems are able to be aware of new knowledge, and have the capacity to learn from it and to manage its semantic interoperability in a dynamic and adaptable way. The author endorses the vision that in the near future, the semantic adaptability skills of the enterprise systems will be the booster to enterprises collaboration and the appearance of new business opportunities

Flexible virtual learning environments: a schema-driven approach using sematic web concepts

Flexible e-Iearning refers to an intelligent educational mechanism that focuses on simulating and improving traditional education as far as possible on the Web by integrating various electronic approaches, technologies, and equipment. This mechanism aims to promote the personalized development and management of e-learning Web services and applications. The main value of this method is that it provides high-powered individualization in pedagogy for students and staff.Here, the thesis mainly studied three problems in meeting the practical requirements of users in education. The first question is how a range of teaching styles (e.g. command and guided discovery) can be supported. The second one is how varieties of instructional processes can be authored. The third question is how these processes can be controlled by learners and educators in terms of their personalized needs during the execution of instruction.In this research, through investigating the existing e-Iearning approaches and technologies, the main technical problems of current virtual learning environments (VLEs) were analyzed. Next, by using the Semantic Web concepts as well as relevant standards, a schema-driven approach was created. This method can support users' individualized operations in the Web-based education. Then, a flexible e-learning system based on the approach was designed and implemented to map a range of extensive didactic paradigms. Finally, a case study was completed to evaluate the research results. The main findings of the assessment were that the flexible VLE implemented a range of teaching styles and the personalized creation and control of educational processes

Concepts enacted: confronting the obstacles and paradoxes inherent in pursuing a scientific understanding of the building blocks of human thought

This thesis confronts a fundamental shortcoming in cognitive science research: a failure to be explicit about the theory of concepts underlying cognitive science research and a resulting failure to justify that theory philosophically or otherwise. It demonstrates how most contemporary debates over theories of concepts divide over whether concepts are best understood as (mental) representations or as non-representational abilities. It concludes that there can be no single correct ontology, and that both perspectives are logically necessary. It details three critical distinctions that are frequently neglected: between concepts as we possess and employ them non-reflectively, and concepts as we reflect upon them; between the private (subjective) and public (inter-subjective) aspects of concepts; and between concepts as approached from a realist versus anti-realist perspective. Metaphysical starting points fundamentally shape conclusions. The main contribution of this thesis is a pragmatic, meticulously detailed, and distinctive account of concepts in terms of their essential nature, core properties, and context of application. This is done within the framework of Peter Gärdenfors’ conceptual spaces theory of concepts, which is offered as a bridging account, best able to tie existing theories together into one framework. A set of extensions to conceptual spaces theory, called the unified conceptual space theory, are offered as a means of pushing Gärdenfors’ theory in a more algorithmically amenable and empirically testable direction. The unified conceptual space theory describes how all of an agent’s many different conceptual spaces, as described by Gärdenfors, are mapped together into one unified space of spaces, and how an analogous process happens at the societal level. The unified conceptual space theory is put to work offering a distinctive account of the co-emergence of concepts and experience out of a circularly causal process. Finally, an experimental application of the theory is presented, in the form of a simple computer program

Privacy support and evaluation on an ontological basis

This work is concerned with user perceived privacy and how clients (which we call data subjects here) can be empowered to control their own data consistently with their own interests. To support building and evaluation of privacy-aware applications, we describe a privacy ontology, how the privacy principles relate to that and how they are influenced by the core concepts as well as by each other. We use this influence of the privacy principles to evaluate the level of privacy for a particular transaction, when applying and extending the core concepts for an application domain

Interoperability and the Need for Intelligent Software: A Historical Perspective

With the objective of defining the interoperability theme of this year’s conference it is the purpose of this paper1 to trace the evolution of intelligent software from data-centric applications that essentially encapsulate their data environment to ontology-based applications with automated reasoning capabilities. The author draws a distinction between human intelligence and component capabilities within a more general definition of intelligence; - a kind of intelligence that can be embedded in computer software. The primary vehicle in the quest for intelligent software has been the gradual recognition of the central role played by data and information, rather than the logic and functionality of the application. The three milestones in this evolution have been: the separation of data management from the internal domain of the application; the development of standard data exchange protocols such as XML that allow machine interpretable structure and meaning to be added to data exchange packages; and, the ability to build information models that are rich in relationships and are thereby capable of supporting the automated reasoning capabilities of software agents. The author suggests that the vision of a Semantic Web environment in which ontology-based Web services with intelligent capabilities are able to discover each other and individually or in self-configured groups perform useful tasks, is not only feasible but imminently realizable. The capabilities of an experimental proof-of-concept system featuring semantic Web services that was demonstrated during the 2002 meeting of this annual conference series is described in summary form

Financial news analysis using a semantic web approach

In this paper we present StockWatcher, an OWL-based web application that enables the extraction of relevant news items from RSS feeds concerning the NASDAQ-100 listed companies. The application's goal is to present a customized, aggregated view of the news categorized by different topics. We distinguish between four relevant news categories: i) news regarding the company itself, ii) news regarding direct competitors of the company, iii) news regarding important people of the company, and iv) news regarding the industry in which the company is active. At the same time, the system presented in this chapter is able to rate these news items based on their relevance. We identify three possible effects that a news message can have on the company, and thus on the stock price of that company: i) positive, ii) negative, and iii) neutral. Currently, StockWatcher provides support for the NASDAQ-100 companies. The selection of the relevant news items is based on a customizable user portfolio that may consist of one or more of these companies

Culture boundaries in semantic web

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.Culture, being created by any and every of us, is the expression form of the society. We easily manipulate this term in everyday life, but defining the culture brings a lot of discussions in between scientists. The most common approach of understanding culture is from anthropologists (Harris & Johnson, 2006; Tylor, 1871) who associate culture with the common developed complex pattern of the society life expressed through knowledge, believes, art, morality, laws, traditions and other features. Approaching extinct cultures all this can be found and interpreted just from archaeological artefacts. Despite many culture definitions, the spatio-temporal aspect of culture is brought mostly by archaeologists. All in all the culture and cultural area understandings remain very fuzzy, though culture area is always formalized as a crispy one. Due to such fuzziness, author would guess, there was no hurry for cultural area or boundary digitalization as it happened with other cultural data in Europe within last decades. The cultural boundary question stayed 'taboo' in semantic web also, that is recently developing for cultural data in order to help to represent the meaning in a restricted sense. It is therefore in this thesis the culture boundary representation in semantic web is analyzed

Storing an OWL 2 Ontology in a Relational Database Structure

This paper examines the possibility of storing OWL 2 based ontology information in a classical relational database and reviews some existing methods for ontology databases. In most cases a database is a fitting solution for storing and sharing information among systems, clients or agents. Similarly, in order to make domain ontology information more accessible to systems, in a comparable way, it can be stored and provided in a database form. As of today, there is no consensus on a specific ontology database structure. The main focus of this paper is specifically on OWL 2 as a basis for the description of ontology centric information in a database. The Web Ontology Language OWL 2 is a language for describing ontology information for the Semantic Web. As such it consists of a list of reserved words and grammatical rules for defining many parts of ontology knowledge. Based on this language specification this paper examines the possibility of storing information in a relational database for the description of domain ontology information. By creating a database structure based on OWL2 it is feasible to obtain an approach to storing information about the domain ontology in an utilizable way, by using its descriptive abilities. Nowadays multiple approaches to storing ontology information and OWL in databases exist; most of them are based on storing RDF data or provide persistence for specific OWL software libraries. The examination of the existing approaches provided in this paper, shows how they differ from the goal of obtaining a general, more easily usable and less software library specific database for domain ontology centric information. This paper describes a version of a simple relational database capable of holding and providing ontology knowledge on demand, which can be implemented on a database management system of choice.