Automated syntactic mediation for Web service integration

As the Web Services and Grid community adopt Semantic Web technology, we observe a shift towards higher-level workflow composition and service discovery practices. While this provides excellent functionality to non-expert users, more sophisticated middleware is required to hide the details of service invocation and service integration. An investigation of a common Bioinformatics use case reveals that the execution of high-level workflow designs requires additional processing to harmonise syntactically incompatible service interfaces. In this paper, we present an architecture to support the automatic reconciliation of data formats in such Web Service worklflows. The mediation of data is driven by ontologies that encapsulate the information contained in heterogeneous data structures supplying a common, conceptual data representation. Data conversion is carried out by a Configurable Mediator component, consuming mappings between \xml schemas and \owl ontologies. We describe our system and give examples of our mapping language against the background of a Bioinformatics use case

Legal knowledge acquisition and multimedia applications

Search, retrieval, and management of multimedia contents are challenging tasks for users and researchers alike. The aim of e-sentencias Project is to develop a software-hardware system for the global management of the multimedia contents produced by the Spanish Civil Courts. We apply technologies such as the Semantic Web, ontologies, NLP techniques, audio-video segmentation and IR. The ultimate goal is to obtain an automatic classification of images and segments of the audiovisual records that, coupled with textual semantics, allows anefficient navigation and retrieval of judicial documents and additional legal sources

Colaboración de herramientas mediante interfaces basadas en Servicios Web: la aplicación de videoconferencia Marte

El documento detalla la arquitectura ideada dentro del proyecto europeo ECOSPACE para la interoperabilidad de las herramientas de los e-Profesionales, empleando una aproximación orientada a servicios. Cada aplicación de un entorno de trabajo colaborativo debe ofrecer interfaces basadas en servicios web; en particular aquí se contempla el caso de la videoconferencia, como ejemplo representativo de sistema de funcionalidades avanzadas. Adicionalmente, los distintos servicios pueden componerse y orquestarse para ofrecer otros de mayor complejidad; para demostrar la flexibilidad y potencia de esta solución, se incluye un ejemplo que involucra múltiples herramientas. Finalmente, se contempla la posibilidad de usar otro tipo de interfaces, más extendidas actualmente, pero que implicarían un cambio profundo en la arquitectura y, por tanto, en las aplicaciones

Integration of structural and semantic models for multimedia metadata management

The management and exchange of multimedia data is challenging due to the variety of formats, standards and intended applications. In addition, production of multimedia data is rapidly increasing due to the availability of off-the-shelf, modern digital devices that can be used by even inexperienced users. It is likely that this volume of information will only increase in the future. A key goal of the MUSCLE (Multimedia Understanding through Semantics, Computation and Learning) network is to develop tools, technologies and standards to facilitate the interoperability of multimedia content and support the exchange of such data. One approach for achieving this was the creation of a specific "E-Team", composed of the authors, to discuss core questions and practical issues based on the participant's individual work. In this paper, we present the relevant points of view with regards to sharing experiences and to extracting and integrating multimedia data and metadata from different modes (text, images, video). © 2007 IEEE

Semantic Approach for Discovery and Visualization of Academic Information Structured with OAI-PMH

There are different channels to communicate the results of a scientific research; however, several research communities state that the Open Access (OA) is the future of acad emic publishing. These Open Ac cess Platforms have adopted OAI - PMH (Open Archives Initiative - the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) as a standard for communication and interoperability. Nevertheless, it is significant to highlight that the open source know ledge discovery services based on an index of OA have not been developed. Therefore, it is necessary to address Knowledge Discovery (KD) within these platforms aiming at studen ts, teachers and/ or researchers , to recover both , the resources requested and th e resources that are not explicitly requested – which are also appropriate . This objective represents an important issue fo r structured resources under OAI - PMH. This fact is caused because interoperability with other developments carried out outside their implementation environment is generally not a priority (Level 1 "Shared term definitions"). It is here , where the Semantic Web (SW) beco mes a cornerstone of this work. Consequently, we propose OntoOAIV, a semantic approach for the selective knowledge disco very an d visu alization into structured information with OAI - PMH, focused on supporting the activities of scientific or academic research for a specific user. Because of the academic nature of the structured resources with OAI - PMH, the field of application chosen is the context information of a student. Finally, in order to validate the proposed approach, we use the RUDAR (Roskilde University Digital Archive) and REDALYC (Red de Revistas Científicas de América Latina y el Caribe, España y Portugal) repositor ies, which imple ment the OAI - PMH protocol , as well as one s tudent profile for carrying out KD

On the KLM properties of a fuzzy DL with Typicality

The paper investigates the properties of a fuzzy logic of typicality. The extension of fuzzy logic with a typicality operator was proposed in recent work to define a fuzzy multipreference semantics for Multilayer Perceptrons, by regarding the deep neural network as a conditional knowledge base. In this paper, we study its properties. First, a monotonic extension of a fuzzy ALC with typicality is considered (called ALC^FT) and a reformulation the KLM properties of a preferential consequence relation for this logic is devised. Most of the properties are satisfied, depending on the reformulation and on the fuzzy combination functions considered. We then strengthen ALC^FT with a closure construction by introducing a notion of faithful model of a weighted knowledge base, which generalizes the notion of coherent model of a conditional knowledge base previously introduced, and we study its properties.Comment: 15 page

The usability of semantic search tools: a review

The goal of semantic search is to improve on traditional search methods by exploiting the semantic metadata. In this paper, we argue that supporting iterative and exploratory search modes is important to the usability of all search systems. We also identify the types of semantic queries the users need to make, the issues concerning the search environment and the problems that are intrinsic to semantic search in particular. We then review the four modes of user interaction in existing semantic search systems, namely keyword-based, form-based, view-based and natural language-based systems. Future development should focus on multimodal search systems, which exploit the advantages of more than one mode of interaction, and on developing the search systems that can search heterogeneous semantic metadata on the open semantic Web

Integrating institutional repositories into the Semantic Web

The Web has changed the face of scientific communication; and the Semantic Web promises new ways of adding value to research material by making it more accessible to automatic discovery, linking, and analysis. Institutional repositories contain a wealth of information which could benefit from the application of this technology. In this thesis I describe the problems inherent in the informality of traditional repository metadata, and propose a data model based on the Semantic Web which will support more efficient use of this data, with the aim of streamlining scientific communication and promoting efficient use of institutional research output