Combination of DROOL rules and Protégé knowledge bases in the ONTO-H annotation tool

ONTO-H is a semi-automatic collaborative tool for the semantic annotation of documents, built as a Protégé 3.0 tab plug-in. Among its multiple functionalities aimed at easing the document annotation process, ONTO-H uses a rule-based system to create cascading annotations out from a single drag and drop operation from a part of a document into an already existing concept or instance of the domain ontology being used for annotation. It also gives support to the detection of name conflicts and instance duplications in the creation of the annotations. The rule system runs on top of the open source rule engine DROOLS and is connected to the domain ontology used for annotation by means of an ad-hoc programmed Java proxy

Neogeography: The Challenge of Channelling Large and Ill-Behaved Data Streams

Neogeography is the combination of user generated data and experiences with mapping technologies. In this article we present a research project to extract valuable structured information with a geographic component from unstructured user generated text in wikis, forums, or SMSes. The extracted information should be integrated together to form a collective knowledge about certain domain. This structured information can be used further to help users from the same domain who want to get information using simple question answering system. The project intends to help workers communities in developing countries to share their knowledge, providing a simple and cheap way to contribute and get benefit using the available communication technology

A Change Support Model for Distributed Collaborative Work

Distributed collaborative software development tends to make artifacts and decisions inconsistent and uncertain. We try to solve this problem by providing an information repository to reflect the state of works precisely, by managing the states of artifacts/products made through collaborative work, and the states of decisions made through communications. In this paper, we propose models and a tool to construct the artifact-related part of the information repository, and explain the way to use the repository to resolve inconsistencies caused by concurrent changes of artifacts. We first show the model and the tool to generate the dependency relationships among UML model elements as content of the information repository. Next, we present the model and the method to generate change support workflows from the information repository. These workflows give us the way to efficiently modify the change-related artifacts for each change request. Finally, we define inconsistency patterns that enable us to be aware of the possibility of inconsistency occurrences. By combining this mechanism with version control systems, we can make changes safely. Our models and tool are useful in the maintenance phase to perform changes safely and efficiently.Comment: 10 pages, 13 figures, 4 table

Growing a Tree in the Forest: Constructing Folksonomies by Integrating Structured Metadata

Many social Web sites allow users to annotate the content with descriptive metadata, such as tags, and more recently to organize content hierarchically. These types of structured metadata provide valuable evidence for learning how a community organizes knowledge. For instance, we can aggregate many personal hierarchies into a common taxonomy, also known as a folksonomy, that will aid users in visualizing and browsing social content, and also to help them in organizing their own content. However, learning from social metadata presents several challenges, since it is sparse, shallow, ambiguous, noisy, and inconsistent. We describe an approach to folksonomy learning based on relational clustering, which exploits structured metadata contained in personal hierarchies. Our approach clusters similar hierarchies using their structure and tag statistics, then incrementally weaves them into a deeper, bushier tree. We study folksonomy learning using social metadata extracted from the photo-sharing site Flickr, and demonstrate that the proposed approach addresses the challenges. Moreover, comparing to previous work, the approach produces larger, more accurate folksonomies, and in addition, scales better.Comment: 10 pages, To appear in the Proceedings of ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining(KDD) 201

Geoscience after IT: Part L. Adjusting the emerging information system to new technology

Coherent development depends on following widely used standards that respect our vast legacy of existing entries in the geoscience record. Middleware ensures that we see a coherent view from our desktops of diverse sources of information. Developments specific to managing the written word, map content, and structured data come together in shared metadata linking topics and information types

EcoGIS – GIS tools for ecosystem approaches to fisheries management

Executive Summary: The EcoGIS project was launched in September 2004 to investigate how Geographic Information Systems (GIS), marine data, and custom analysis tools can better enable fisheries scientists and managers to adopt Ecosystem Approaches to Fisheries Management (EAFM). EcoGIS is a collaborative effort between NOAA’s National Ocean Service (NOS) and National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), and four regional Fishery Management Councils. The project has focused on four priority areas: Fishing Catch and Effort Analysis, Area Characterization, Bycatch Analysis, and Habitat Interactions. Of these four functional areas, the project team first focused on developing a working prototype for catch and effort analysis: the Fishery Mapper Tool. This ArcGIS extension creates time-and-area summarized maps of fishing catch and effort from logbook, observer, or fishery-independent survey data sets. Source data may come from Oracle, Microsoft Access, or other file formats. Feedback from beta-testers of the Fishery Mapper was used to debug the prototype, enhance performance, and add features. This report describes the four priority functional areas, the development of the Fishery Mapper tool, and several themes that emerged through the parallel evolution of the EcoGIS project, the concept and implementation of the broader field of Ecosystem Approaches to Management (EAM), data management practices, and other EAM toolsets. In addition, a set of six succinct recommendations are proposed on page 29. One major conclusion from this work is that there is no single “super-tool” to enable Ecosystem Approaches to Management; as such, tools should be developed for specific purposes with attention given to interoperability and automation. Future work should be coordinated with other GIS development projects in order to provide “value added” and minimize duplication of efforts. In addition to custom tools, the development of cross-cutting Regional Ecosystem Spatial Databases will enable access to quality data to support the analyses required by EAM. GIS tools will be useful in developing Integrated Ecosystem Assessments (IEAs) and providing pre- and post-processing capabilities for spatially-explicit ecosystem models. Continued funding will enable the EcoGIS project to develop GIS tools that are immediately applicable to today’s needs. These tools will enable simplified and efficient data query, the ability to visualize data over time, and ways to synthesize multidimensional data from diverse sources. These capabilities will provide new information for analyzing issues from an ecosystem perspective, which will ultimately result in better understanding of fisheries and better support for decision-making. (PDF file contains 45 pages.