Issues with Evaluating and Using Publicly Available Ontologies

The proliferation of ontologies in the public domain and the ease of accessing them offers new opportunities for knowledge sharing and interoperability in an open, distributed environment, but it also poses interesting challenges for knowledge and Web engineers alike. In this paper we discuss and analyse those challenges with emphasis on the need to evaluate publicly available ontologies prior to use. We elaborate on a number of issues ranging from technological concerns to strategic and political issues. We drawn our experiences from the field of ontology mapping on the Semantic Web, a necessity that enables many of Semantic Web's proclaimed features

The Semantic Web Revisited

The original Scientific American article on the Semantic Web appeared in 2001. It described the evolution of a Web that consisted largely of documents for humans to read to one that included data and information for computers to manipulate. The Semantic Web is a Web of actionable information--information derived from data through a semantic theory for interpreting the symbols.This simple idea, however, remains largely unrealized. Shopbots and auction bots abound on the Web, but these are essentially handcrafted for particular tasks; they have little ability to interact with heterogeneous data and information types. Because we haven't yet delivered large-scale, agent-based mediation, some commentators argue that the Semantic Web has failed to deliver. We argue that agents can only flourish when standards are well established and that the Web standards for expressing shared meaning have progressed steadily over the past five years. Furthermore, we see the use of ontologies in the e-science community presaging ultimate success for the Semantic Web--just as the use of HTTP within the CERN particle physics community led to the revolutionary success of the original Web. This article is part of a special issue on the Future of AI

A 'likely benefit' from aligning Web 2.0 technologies with an institutions learning and teaching agenda

This paper demonstrates a ‘likely benefit’, and a practical view of expected challenges, when incorporating Web 2.0 technologies in a contemporary higher education context. After first exploring which factors potentially influence a shift in thinking about learning and teaching in a Web 2.0 context this paper then addresses the important role, or the affordance, of an integrated Learning Management System (LMS) and the pedagogical applications of Web 2.0 technologies. It then uses a series of case study from the University of Southern Queensland, a large distance education provider in Australia, to support these propositions. Overall, this paper suggests that the goals and ideals of Web 2.0/ Pedagogy 2.0 can be achieved, or at least stimulated, within an institutional LMS environment, as long as the LMS environment is aligned with these ideals

Towards the Semantic Grid: A State of the Art Survey of Semantic Web Services and their Applicability to Collaborative Design, Engineering, and Procurement

Today, organizations within the engineering and manufacturing domains place as much emphasis on the management and flow of knowledge through a value chain as they do commodities that are more tangible in nature. For example, parts suppliers in the Canadian automotive sector are often asked to collaborate with auto manufacturers in designing and engineering their product, instead of simply producing and supplying it. Such fundamental changes in the overarching economics of this industry have led to a greater focus on collaboration, both in terms of communicating across geographic divides to design components, as well as new requirements to merge heterogeneous data stores in order to manage this distributed procurement process. Our work on this project centred on finding solutions to the above by surveying the state of the industry, as well as assessing the potential employability of related tools in the workplace. It was concluded that the Access Grid (a low-cost, open-source videoconferencing platform) held significant potential to facilitate the high-quality sharing of audiovisual material, while semantic technologies (the “semantic web” and “semantic web services”) represented a feasible solution to the issues of data integration. When combined, these technologies form the “semantic grid”, the focus of this paper. Overall, it is concluded that the past and present business success of this ICT in the information management sector may, with future work, link databases with the visualization interface to provide concurrent cost-benefit analyses

CS AKTive Space, or how we learned to stop worrying and love the semantic Web

(AKT) project is to investigate how to operationalise the knowledge management mantra of “getting the right content to the right place at the right time and in the right form. ” A significant result of the first three years of this six year project is CS AKTive Space (CAS), a Semantic Web application that won the 2003 Semantic Web Challenge. The challenge criteri

A Nine Month Progress Report on an Investigation into Mechanisms for Improving Triple Store Performance

This report considers the requirement for fast, efficient, and scalable triple stores as part of the effort to produce the Semantic Web. It summarises relevant information in the major background field of Database Management Systems (DBMS), and provides an overview of the techniques currently in use amongst the triple store community. The report concludes that for individuals and organisations to be willing to provide large amounts of information as openly-accessible nodes on the Semantic Web, storage and querying of the data must be cheaper and faster than it is currently. Experiences from the DBMS field can be used to maximise triple store performance, and suggestions are provided for lines of investigation in areas of storage, indexing, and query optimisation. Finally, work packages are provided describing expected timetables for further study of these topics

Rule-Based Intelligence on the Semantic Web: Implications for Military Capabilities

Rules are a key element of the Semantic Web vision, promising to provide a foundation for reasoning capabilities that underpin the intelligent manipulation and exploitation of information content. Although ontologies provide the basis for some forms of reasoning, it is unlikely that ontologies, by themselves, will support the range of knowledge-based services that are likely to be required on the Semantic Web. As such, it is important to consider the contribution that rule-based systems can make to the realization of advanced machine intelligence on the Semantic Web. This report aims to review the current state-of-the-art with respect to semantic rule-based technologies. It provides an overview of the rules, rule languages and rule engines that are currently available to support ontology-based reasoning, and it discusses some of the limitations of these technologies in terms of their inability to cope with uncertain or imprecise data and their poor performance in some reasoning contexts. This report also describes the contribution of reasoning systems to military capabilities, and suggests that current technological shortcomings pose a significant barrier to the widespread adoption of reasoning systems within the defence community. Some solutions to these shortcomings are presented and a timescale for technology adoption within the military domain is proposed. It is suggested that application areas such as semantic integration, semantic interoperability, data fusion and situation awareness provide the best opportunities for technology adoption within the 2015 timeframe. Other capabilities, such as decision support and the emulation of human-style reasoning capabilities are seen to depend on the resolution of significant challenges that may hinder attempts at technology adoption and exploitation within the 2020 timeframe

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