Semantic web services for simulation component reuse and interoperability: An ontology approach

Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) Simulation Packages (CSPs) are widely used in industry primarily due to economic factors associated with developing proprietary software platforms. Regardless of their widespread use, CSPs have yet to operate across organizational boundaries. The limited reuse and interoperability of CSPs are affected by the same semantic issues that restrict the inter-organizational use of software components and web services. The current representations of Web components are predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinning required to support discovery on the emerging Semantic Web. The authors present new research that partially alleviates the problem of limited semantic reuse and interoperability of simulation components in CSPs. Semantic models, in the form of ontologies, utilized by the authors’ Web service discovery and deployment architecture provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved through a simulation component ontology that is used to identify required components at varying levels of granularity (i.e. including both abstract and specialized components). Selected simulation components are loaded into a CSP, modified according to the requirements of the new model and executed. The research presented here is based on the development of an ontology, connector software, and a Web service discovery architecture. The ontology is extracted from simulation scenarios involving airport, restaurant and kitchen service suppliers. The ontology engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter-organizational simulation, by adopting a less intrusive interface between participants Although specific to CSPs this work has wider implications for the simulation community. The reason being that the community as a whole stands to benefit through from an increased awareness of the state-of-the-art in Software Engineering (for example, ontology-supported component discovery and reuse, and service-oriented computing), and it is expected that this will eventually lead to the development of a unique Software Engineering-inspired methodology to build simulations in future

Virtual community based secure service discovery and access for 3D video steaming applications

The Freehand I-Share project aims to define the mechanisms for trust, willingness, resource discovery and sharing mechanisms in virtual communities. To improve the secure and performance of a 3D video streaming application, which is a research vehicle of the I-Share project, we propose a virtual community based access control approach for secure service discovery and access (VICSDA) which groups services in virtual communities and only grants authenticated community members to discover and access these community services. There are two main contributions associated with this approach. First, different from most of the other access control approaches it adopts a dual access control mechanism which allows community services to define their local access control policy besides following the community membership policy. Second, behavior of these community services is monitored in order to guarantee a better QoS provision. Using this approach, the 3D video streaming application can be guaranteed with authentication and message confidentiality through the dual secure service discovery and access mechanism. Better application performance can also be achieved through the community member behavior audit.</p

Publication and Discovery of Semantically Annotated Geospatial Web Services

Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Informatics - Informatics for Environmental Protection, Sustainable Development and Risk Management, August 29 - 31, 2012 Umweltbundesamt DessauEnvironmental information and services have become a crucial asset in the creation of decission support systems. Unfortunately, this information and services are not usually exposed in an interoperable and standard way, limiting their reusability and impact in the community. Publishing and discovering geospatial information and services on the Web is therefore an important challenge in order to create a breeding ground for collaboration and more sophisticated environmental platforms. Based on common standards defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) as the starting point to ensure interoperability, we propose a discovery mechanism based on semantic annotations. OGC service descriptions are annotated with SAWSDL and linked to concepts in domain ontologies, following a common semantic service model. We seamlessly integrate the semantics in the standard OGC discovery infrastructure, extending the CSW service catalogues with semantic publication and discovery. Semantics queries can be created based on formal languages like WSML, significantly improving the precission of discovery. In this paper we present our approach, which provides a semantic infrastructure for publication and discovery of environmentally enabled web services

Fasilitasi Masyarakat untuk Meningkatkan Minat Belajar Membaca Al-Quran melalui BBQ Metode ’Usmani di Desa Wagir Kidul

The majority of the community in Wagir Kidul practices Islam, but there are still many who have not been touched by Quranic reading education. The aim of this community service is to enhance the interest in learning to read the Quran among the residents of Wagir Kidul village Pulung Ponorogo, Indonesia. The method employed in this community service is the Asset Based Community-Driven Development (ABCD) approach, consisting of five implementation stages: Inculturation, Discovery, Design, Define, and Reflection. The result of this community service is the implementation of the Quran Reading Development (BBQ) program using the 'Usmani' method, with two face-to-face sessions every week, totaling five sessions. The program had 42 participants from the Wagir Kidul community, including junior high school students to the elderly, in the fifth session. The follow-up plan for this community service is to continue the Quran Reading Development (BBQ) program until completing the recitation of eight books, which is estimated to take approximately nine months. Mayoritas masyarakat Wagir Kidul beragama Islam tetapi masih banyak yang belum tersentuh pendidikan baca Al-Qur’an. Tujuan dari pengabdian masyarakat ini adalah untuk meningkatkan minat belajar membaca Al-Qur’an pada masyarakat desa Wagir Kidul Pulung Ponorogo, Indonesia. Metode yang digunakan pada pengabdian masyarakat ini adalah metode Asset Based Community-Driven Development (ABCD) dengan lima tahap pelaksanaan yaitu; Inkulturasi, Discovery, Design, Define, dan Refleksi. Hasil dari pengabdian masyarakat ini adalah terlaksananya Bina Baca Al-Qur’an (BBQ) Metode ’Usmani dua kali tatap muka setiap minggunya dengan jumlah pertemuan sebanyak lima kali dengan peserta masyarakat Wagir Kidul usia SLTP sampai lansia sebanyak 42 peserta pada pertemuan kelima. Rencana tindak lanjut terhadap pengabdian masyarakat ini adalah BBQ&nbsp; dilanjutkan sampai khatam delapan buku, waktu yang dibutuhkan kurang lebih sembilan bulan

STARGATE : Static Repository Gateway and Toolkit. Final Project Report

STARGATE (Static Repository Gateway and Toolkit) was funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and is intended to demonstrate the ease of use of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) Static Repository technology, and the potential benefits offered to publishers in making their metadata available in this way This technology offers a simpler method of participating in many information discovery services than creating fully-fledged OAI-compliant repositories. It does this by allowing the infrastructure and technical support required to participate in OAI-based services to be shifted from the data provider (the journal) to a third party and allows a single third party gateway provider to provide intermediation for many data providers (journals). Specifically, STARGATE has created a series of Static Repositories of publisher metadata provided by a selection of Library and Information Science journals. It has demonstrated the interoperability of these repositories by exposing their metadata via a Static Repository Gateway for harvesting and cross-searching by external service providers. The project has conducted a critical evaluation of the Static Repository approach in conjunction with the participating publishers and service providers. The technology works. The project has demonstrated that Static Repositories are easy to create and that the differences between fully-fledged and static OAI Repositories have no impact on the participation of small journal publishers in OAI-based services. The problems for a service that arise out of the use of Static Repositories are parallel to those created by any other repository dealing with journal articles. Problems arise from the diversity of metadata element sets provided by a given journal and the lack of specific metadata elements for the articles' volume and issue details. Another issue for the use of publishers' metadata arise as the collection policies of some existing services only allow Open Access materials to be included in them. The project recommends that the use of Static Repositories continues to be explored - in particular as a flexible way to expose existing sets of structured information to OAI services and to create the opportunity to enhance the metadata as part of the process. The project further recommends that the publishing community consider the creation or adoption of an application profile for journal articles to support information discovery that can search by volume and issue. Significant further use of the Static Repository technology by small journal publishers will require the future creation and maintenance of a community-specific Static Repository Gateway. Further use will also require advocacy within the publishing community but might initially be most effectively kick-started through the creation of OAI repositories based on metadata held by the commercial services which publish or mediate access to electronic copies of journals on behalf of small publishers

The Semantic Automated Discovery and Integration (SADI) Web service Design-Pattern, API and Reference Implementation

Background. &#xd;&#xa;The complexity and inter-related nature of biological data poses a difficult challenge for data and tool integration. There has been a proliferation of interoperability standards and projects over the past decade, none of which has been widely adopted by the bioinformatics community. Recent attempts have focused on the use of semantics to assist integration, and Semantic Web technologies are being welcomed by this community.&#xd;&#xa;&#xd;&#xa;Description. &#xd;&#xa;SADI &#x2013; Semantic Automated Discovery and Integration &#x2013; is a lightweight set of fully standards-compliant Semantic Web service design patterns that simplify the publication of services of the type commonly found in bioinformatics and other scientific domains. Using Semantic Web technologies at every level of the Web services &#x201c;stack&#x201d;, SADI services consume and produce instances of OWL Classes following a small number of very straightforward best-practices. In addition, we provide codebases that support these best-practices, and plug-in tools to popular developer and client software that dramatically simplify deployment of services by providers, and the discovery and utilization of those services by their consumers.&#xd;&#xa;&#xd;&#xa;Conclusions.&#xd;&#xa;SADI Services are fully compliant with, and utilize only foundational Web standards; are simple to create and maintain for service providers; and can be discovered and utilized in a very intuitive way by biologist end-users. In addition, the SADI design patterns significantly improve the ability of software to automatically discover appropriate services based on user-needs, and automatically chain these into complex analytical workflows. We show that, when resources are exposed through SADI, data compliant with a given ontological model can be automatically gathered, or generated, from these distributed, non-coordinating resources - a behavior we have not observed in any other Semantic system. Finally, we show that, using SADI, data dynamically generated from Web services can be explored in a manner very similar to data housed in static triple-stores, thus facilitating the intersection of Web services and Semantic Web technologies

A Linked Data representation of the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics

The recent publication of public sector information (PSI) data sets has brought to the attention of the scientific community the redundant presence of location based context. At the same time it stresses the inadequacy of current Linked Data services for exploiting the semantics of such contextual dimensions for easing entity retrieval and browsing. In this paper describes our approach for supporting the publication of geographical subdivisions in Linked Data format for supporting the e-government and public sector in publishing their data sets. The topological knowledge published can be reused in order to enrich the geographical context of other data sets, in particular we propose an exploitation scenario using statistical data sets described with the SCOVO ontology. The topological knowledge is then exploited within a service that supports the navigation and retrieval of statistical geographical entities for the EU territory. Geographical entities, in the extent of this paper, are linked data resources that describe objects that have a geographical extension. The data and services presented in this paper allows the discovery of resources that contain or are contained by a given entity URI and their representation within map widgets. We present an approach for a geography based service that helps in querying qualitative spatial relations for the EU statistical geography (proper containment so far). We also provide a rationale for publishing geographical information in Linked Data format based on our experience, within the EnAKTing project, in publishing UK PSI data

NoTube – making TV a medium for personalized interaction

In this paper, we introduce NoTube’s vision on deploying semantics in interactive TV context in order to contextualize distributed applications and lift them to a new level of service that provides context-dependent and personalized selection of TV content. Additionally, lifting content consumption from a single-user activity to a community-based experience in a connected multi-device environment is central to the project. Main research questions relate to (1) data integration and enrichment - how to achieve unified and simple access to dynamic, growing and distributed multimedia content of diverse formats? (2) user and context modeling - what is an appropriate framework for context modeling, incorporating task-, domain and device-specific viewpoints? (3) context-aware discovery of resources - how could rather fuzzy matchmaking between potentially infinite contexts and available media resources be achieved? (4) collaborative architecture for TV content personalization - how can the combined information about data, context and user be put at disposal of both content providers and end-users in the view of creating extremely personalized services under controlled privacy and security policies? Thus, with the grand challenge in mind - to put the TV viewer back in the driver's seat – we focus on TV content as a medium for personalized interaction between people based on a service architecture that caters for a variety of content metadata, delivery channels and rendering devices

Towards a service-oriented e-infrastructure for multidisciplinary environmental research

Research e-infrastructures are considered to have generic and thematic parts. The generic part provids high-speed networks, grid (large-scale distributed computing) and database systems (digital repositories and data transfer systems) applicable to all research commnities irrespective of discipline. Thematic parts are specific deployments of e-infrastructures to support diverse virtual research communities. The needs of a virtual community of multidisciplinary envronmental researchers are yet to be investigated. We envisage and argue for an e-infrastructure that will enable environmental researchers to develop environmental models and software entirely out of existing components through loose coupling of diverse digital resources based on the service-oriented achitecture. We discuss four specific aspects for consideration for a future e-infrastructure: 1) provision of digital resources (data, models & tools) as web services, 2) dealing with stateless and non-transactional nature of web services using workflow management systems, 3) enabling web servce discovery, composition and orchestration through semantic registries, and 4) creating synergy with existing grid infrastructures

Degree of Practice of the Concept of Community School from the Perspective of Discovery School Teachers in Amman

The present study aimed to identify the degree of the practice of the concept of community school from the perspective of discovery school teachers in Amman, Amman, and its relationship to the variables of gender, experience and academic qualification.  The sample consisted of (342) teachers, and the instrument used in this study is a thirty-six-paragraph questionnaire, where appropriate statistical methods used to analyze data. The study has resulted that the degree of the practice of the concept of community school among teachers of discovery schools was high, medium and low, and there was no statistically significant differences for the degree of practice due to gender and academic qualification, and there were statistically significant differences due to the variable of experience in favor of those teachers of (10) years or more. Based on the results, a number of recommendations have been made, including the adoption of mainstream concept of community school and its activation in all schools, to develop the idea of participation between the school and the community, so as to achieve a positive change reflected upon the level of students’ academic achievement, community service and core promotion in extracurricular development through constructive positive activities, to achieve optimizing relationship among the students and the local community members for upgrading an educational environment extended outside the school campus. Key words: concept of community school, discovery schools, teachers, degree of practice