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

Toward Semantics-aware Representation of Digital Business Processes

An extended enterprise (EE) can be described by a set of models each representing a specific aspect of the EE. Aspects can for example be the process flow or the value description. However, different models are done by different people, which may use different terminology, which prevents relating the models. Therefore, we propose a framework consisting of process flow and value aspects and in addition a static domain model with structural and relational components. Further, we outline the usage of the static domain model to enable relating the different aspects

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

Legal crowdsourcing and relational law : what the semantic web can do for legal education

Crowdsourcing and Relational Law are interrelated concepts that can be successfully applied to the legal domain and, more specifically, to the field of legal education. 'Crowdsourcing' means 'participation of people (crowds)' and refers theoretically to the aggregated production of a common knowledge in a global data space. 'Relational law' refers to the regulatory link between Web 2.0 and 3.0, based on trust and dialogue, which emerges from the intertwining of top-down existing legal systems and bottom-up participation (the Web of People). Legal education today has a major role to play in the broad space opened up in terms of future potential of the Semantic Web. The following paper places a lens on the educational value of crowdsourcing and the relational approach to governance and law

Knowledge Graphs Evolution and Preservation -- A Technical Report from ISWS 2019

One of the grand challenges discussed during the Dagstuhl Seminar "Knowledge Graphs: New Directions for Knowledge Representation on the Semantic Web" and described in its report is that of a: "Public FAIR Knowledge Graph of Everything: We increasingly see the creation of knowledge graphs that capture information about the entirety of a class of entities. [...] This grand challenge extends this further by asking if we can create a knowledge graph of "everything" ranging from common sense concepts to location based entities. This knowledge graph should be "open to the public" in a FAIR manner democratizing this mass amount of knowledge." Although linked open data (LOD) is one knowledge graph, it is the closest realisation (and probably the only one) to a public FAIR Knowledge Graph (KG) of everything. Surely, LOD provides a unique testbed for experimenting and evaluating research hypotheses on open and FAIR KG. One of the most neglected FAIR issues about KGs is their ongoing evolution and long term preservation. We want to investigate this problem, that is to understand what preserving and supporting the evolution of KGs means and how these problems can be addressed. Clearly, the problem can be approached from different perspectives and may require the development of different approaches, including new theories, ontologies, metrics, strategies, procedures, etc. This document reports a collaborative effort performed by 9 teams of students, each guided by a senior researcher as their mentor, attending the International Semantic Web Research School (ISWS 2019). Each team provides a different perspective to the problem of knowledge graph evolution substantiated by a set of research questions as the main subject of their investigation. In addition, they provide their working definition for KG preservation and evolution

Knowledge driven approaches to e-learning recommendation.

Learners often have difficulty finding and retrieving relevant learning materials to support their learning goals because of two main challenges. The vocabulary learners use to describe their goals is different from that used by domain experts in teaching materials. This challenge causes a semantic gap. Learners lack sufficient knowledge about the domain they are trying to learn about, so are unable to assemble effective keywords that identify what they wish to learn. This problem presents an intent gap. The work presented in this thesis focuses on addressing the semantic and intent gaps that learners face during an e-Learning recommendation task. The semantic gap is addressed by introducing a method that automatically creates background knowledge in the form of a set of rich learning-focused concepts related to the selected learning domain. The knowledge of teaching experts contained in e-Books is used as a guide to identify important domain concepts. The concepts represent important topics that learners should be interested in. An approach is developed which leverages the concept vocabulary for representing learning materials and this influences retrieval during the recommendation of new learning materials. The effectiveness of our approach is evaluated on a dataset of Machine Learning and Data Mining papers, and our approach outperforms benchmark methods. The results confirm that incorporating background knowledge into the representation of learning materials provides a shared vocabulary for experts and learners, and this enables the recommendation of relevant materials. We address the intent gap by developing an approach which leverages the background knowledge to identify important learning concepts that are employed for refining learners' queries. This approach enables us to automatically identify concepts that are similar to queries, and take advantage of distinctive concept terms for refining learners' queries. Using the refined query allows the search to focus on documents that contain topics which are relevant to the learner. An e-Learning recommender system is developed to evaluate the success of our approach using a collection of learner queries and a dataset of Machine Learning and Data Mining learning materials. Users with different levels of expertise are employed for the evaluation. Results from experts, competent users and beginners all showed that using our method produced documents that were consistently more relevant to learners than when the standard method was used. The results show the benefits in using our knowledge driven approaches to help learners find relevant learning materials

Use of a Fast Information Extraction Method as a Decision Support Tool

Ad-hoc extraction of information from documents can ensure the transparency of decisions made by an organization. Different Information Extraction methods have been applied to extract information from various domains. Most widely known methods use manually annotated training documents that require high development time. The automated training methods are not scalable to large application domains. We have developed a semi-automated knowledge-engineering method for building the knowledge-base with minimal efforts. Because our method reduces manual processing of the training data, the development process is very fast. We have developed a prototype application to extract information from the project-reports of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. The fast development process of our system, its scalability to large application domains, and its high extraction effectiveness will help the transparency of management decisions by extracting and mining relevant information

Foundational Challenges in Automated Data and Ontology Cleaning in the Semantic Web

The application of automated reasoning systems to data cleaning in the Semantic Web raises many challenges on the foundational basis of cleaning agent design. The authors discuss some of them. They finally argue that logic trust in the Semantic Web can only be achieved if it is based on certified reasoning.Junta de Andalucía TIC-13

Report of the Stanford Linked Data Workshop

The Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SULAIR) with the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) conducted at week-long workshop on the prospects for a large scale, multi-national, multi-institutional prototype of a Linked Data environment for discovery of and navigation among the rapidly, chaotically expanding array of academic information resources. As preparation for the workshop, CLIR sponsored a survey by Jerry Persons, Chief Information Architect emeritus of SULAIR that was published originally for workshop participants as background to the workshop and is now publicly available. The original intention of the workshop was to devise a plan for such a prototype. However, such was the diversity of knowledge, experience, and views of the potential of Linked Data approaches that the workshop participants turned to two more fundamental goals: building common understanding and enthusiasm on the one hand and identifying opportunities and challenges to be confronted in the preparation of the intended prototype and its operation on the other. In pursuit of those objectives, the workshop participants produced:1. a value statement addressing the question of why a Linked Data approach is worth prototyping;2. a manifesto for Linked Libraries (and Museums and Archives and …);3. an outline of the phases in a life cycle of Linked Data approaches;4. a prioritized list of known issues in generating, harvesting & using Linked Data;5. a workflow with notes for converting library bibliographic records and other academic metadata to URIs;6. examples of potential “killer apps” using Linked Data: and7. a list of next steps and potential projects.This report includes a summary of the workshop agenda, a chart showing the use of Linked Data in cultural heritage venues, and short biographies and statements from each of the participants