Collaboratively Patching Linked Data

Today's Web of Data is noisy. Linked Data often needs extensive preprocessing to enable efficient use of heterogeneous resources. While consistent and valid data provides the key to efficient data processing and aggregation we are facing two main challenges: (1st) Identification of erroneous facts and tracking their origins in dynamically connected datasets is a difficult task, and (2nd) efforts in the curation of deficient facts in Linked Data are exchanged rather rarely. Since erroneous data often is duplicated and (re-)distributed by mashup applications it is not only the responsibility of a few original publishers to keep their data tidy, but progresses to be a mission for all distributers and consumers of Linked Data too. We present a new approach to expose and to reuse patches on erroneous data to enhance and to add quality information to the Web of Data. The feasibility of our approach is demonstrated by example of a collaborative game that patches statements in DBpedia data and provides notifications for relevant changes.Comment: 2nd International Workshop on Usage Analysis and the Web of Data (USEWOD2012) in the 21st International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2012), Lyon, France, April 17th, 201

Provenance-based trust for grid computing: Position Paper

Current evolutions of Internet technology such as Web Services, ebXML, peer-to-peer and Grid computing all point to the development of large-scale open networks of diverse computing systems interacting with one another to perform tasks. Grid systems (and Web Services) are exemplary in this respect and are perhaps some of the first large-scale open computing systems to see widespread use - making them an important testing ground for problems in trust management which are likely to arise. From this perspective, today's grid architectures suffer from limitations, such as lack of a mechanism to trace results and lack of infrastructure to build up trust networks. These are important concerns in open grids, in which "community resources" are owned and managed by multiple stakeholders, and are dynamically organised in virtual organisations. Provenance enables users to trace how a particular result has been arrived at by identifying the individual services and the aggregation of services that produced such a particular output. Against this background, we present a research agenda to design, conceive and implement an industrial-strength open provenance architecture for grid systems. We motivate its use with three complex grid applications, namely aerospace engineering, organ transplant management and bioinformatics. Industrial-strength provenance support includes a scalable and secure architecture, an open proposal for standardising the protocols and data structures, a set of tools for configuring and using the provenance architecture, an open source reference implementation, and a deployment and validation in industrial context. The provision of such facilities will enrich grid capabilities by including new functionalities required for solving complex problems such as provenance data to provide complete audit trails of process execution and third-party analysis and auditing. As a result, we anticipate that a larger uptake of grid technology is likely to occur, since unprecedented possibilities will be offered to users and will give them a competitive edge

QoS-Aware Middleware for Web Services Composition

The paradigmatic shift from a Web of manual interactions to a Web of programmatic interactions driven by Web services is creating unprecedented opportunities for the formation of online Business-to-Business (B2B) collaborations. In particular, the creation of value-added services by composition of existing ones is gaining a significant momentum. Since many available Web services provide overlapping or identical functionality, albeit with different Quality of Service (QoS), a choice needs to be made to determine which services are to participate in a given composite service. This paper presents a middleware platform which addresses the issue of selecting Web services for the purpose of their composition in a way that maximizes user satisfaction expressed as utility functions over QoS attributes, while satisfying the constraints set by the user and by the structure of the composite service. Two selection approaches are described and compared: one based on local (task-level) selection of services and the other based on global allocation of tasks to services using integer programming

Is a Semantic Web Agent a Knowledge-Savvy Agent?

The issue of knowledge sharing has permeated the field of distributed AI and in particular, its successor, multiagent systems. Through the years, many research and engineering efforts have tackled the problem of encoding and sharing knowledge without the need for a single, centralized knowledge base. However, the emergence of modern computing paradigms such as distributed, open systems have highlighted the importance of sharing distributed and heterogeneous knowledge at a larger scale—possibly at the scale of the Internet. The very characteristics that define the Semantic Web—that is, dynamic, distributed, incomplete, and uncertain knowledge—suggest the need for autonomy in distributed software systems. Semantic Web research promises more than mere management of ontologies and data through the definition of machine-understandable languages. The openness and decentralization introduced by multiagent systems and service-oriented architectures give rise to new knowledge management models, for which we can’t make a priori assumptions about the type of interaction an agent or a service may be engaged in, and likewise about the message protocols and vocabulary used. We therefore discuss the problem of knowledge management for open multi-agent systems, and highlight a number of challenges relating to the exchange and evolution of knowledge in open environments, which pertinent to both the Semantic Web and Multi Agent System communities alike

Multi-tier agent architecture for open service ecosystems

Proceeding volume: Vol-918Peer reviewe

Service-oriented middleware for managing inter-enterprise collaborations

Peer reviewe

Emergent Capabilities for Collaborative Teams in the Evolving Web Environment

This paper reports on our investigation of the latest advances for the Social Web, Web 2.0 and the Linked Data Web. These advances are discussed in terms of the latest capabilities that are available (or being made available) on the Web at the time of writing this paper. Such capabilities can be of significant benefit to teams, especially those comprised of multinational, geographically-dispersed team members. The specific context of coalition members in a rapidly formed diverse military context such as disaster relief or humanitarian aid is considered, where close working between non-government organisations and non-military teams will help to achieve results as quickly and efficiently as possible. The heterogeneity one finds in such teams, coupled with a lack of dedicated private network infrastructure, poses a number of challenges for collaboration, and the current paper represents an attempt to assess whether nascent Web-based capabilities can support such teams in terms of both their collaborative activities and their access to (and sharing of) information resources