Switching Partners: Dancing with the Ontological Engineers

Ontologies are today being applied in almost every field to support the alignment and retrieval of data of distributed provenance. Here we focus on new ontological work on dance and on related cultural phenomena belonging to what UNESCO calls the “intangible heritage.” Currently data and information about dance, including video data, are stored in an uncontrolled variety of ad hoc ways. This serves not only to prevent retrieval, comparison and analysis of the data, but may also impinge on our ability to preserve the data that already exists. Here we explore recent technological developments that are designed to counteract such problems by allowing information to be retrieved across disciplinary, cultural, linguistic and technological boundaries. Software applications such as the ones envisaged here will enable speedier recovery of data and facilitate its analysis in ways that will assist both archiving of and research on dance

Design and semantics of form and movement (DeSForM 2006)

Design and Semantics of Form and Movement (DeSForM) grew from applied research exploring emerging design methods and practices to support new generation product and interface design. The products and interfaces are concerned with: the context of ubiquitous computing and ambient technologies and the need for greater empathy in the pre-programmed behaviour of the ‘machines’ that populate our lives. Such explorative research in the CfDR has been led by Young, supported by Kyffin, Visiting Professor from Philips Design and sponsored by Philips Design over a period of four years (research funding £87k). DeSForM1 was the first of a series of three conferences that enable the presentation and debate of international work within this field: • 1st European conference on Design and Semantics of Form and Movement (DeSForM1), Baltic, Gateshead, 2005, Feijs L., Kyffin S. & Young R.A. eds. • 2nd European conference on Design and Semantics of Form and Movement (DeSForM2), Evoluon, Eindhoven, 2006, Feijs L., Kyffin S. & Young R.A. eds. • 3rd European conference on Design and Semantics of Form and Movement (DeSForM3), New Design School Building, Newcastle, 2007, Feijs L., Kyffin S. & Young R.A. eds. Philips sponsorship of practice-based enquiry led to research by three teams of research students over three years and on-going sponsorship of research through the Northumbria University Design and Innovation Laboratory (nuDIL). Young has been invited on the steering panel of the UK Thinking Digital Conference concerning the latest developments in digital and media technologies. Informed by this research is the work of PhD student Yukie Nakano who examines new technologies in relation to eco-design textiles

A Study on the Use of Ontologies to Represent Collective Knowledge

The development of ontologies has become an area of considerable research interest over the past number of years. Domain ontologies are often developed to represent a shared understanding that in turn indicates cooperative effort by a user community. However, the structure and form that an ontology takes is predicated both on the approach of the developer and the cooperation of the user community. A shift has taken place in recent years from the use of highly specialised and expressive ontologies to simpler knowledge models, progressively developed by community contribution. It is within this context that this thesis investigates the use of ontologies as a means to representing collective knowledge. It investigates the impact of the community on the approach to and outcome of knowledge representation and compares the use of simple terminological ontologies with highly structured expressive ontologies in community-based narrative environments

Multimedia Information Retrieval nelle biblioteche

The paper aims to introduce libraries to the view that operating within the terms of traditional Information Retrieval (IR), only through textual language, is limitative, and that considering broader criteria, as those of Multimedia Information Retrieval (MIR), is necessary. The paper stresses the story of MIR fundamental principles, from early years of questioning on documentation to today’s theories on semantic means. New issues for a LIS methodology of processing and searching multimedia documents are theoretically argued, introducing MIR as a holistic whole composed by content-based and semantic information retrieval methodologies. MIR offers a better information searching way: every kind of digital document can be analyzed and retrieved through the elements of language appropriate to its own nature. MIR approach directly handles the concrete content of documents, also considering semantic aspects. Paper conclusions remark the organic integration of the revolutionary contentual conception of information processing with an improved semantics conception, gathering and composing advantages of both systems for accessing to information.L'articolo vuole introdurre le biblioteche alla prospettiva che operare entro i termini dell'Information Retrieval (IR) tradizionale mediante il solo uso del linguaggio testuale è limitativo, e che prendere in considerazione i criteri più ampi del Multimedia Information Retrieval (MIR) è invece necessario. L'articolo illustra la storia dei principi fondamentali del MIR, a partire dai primi anni di dibattito sulla documentazione fino alle teorie odierne sui significati semantici. Vengono dibattute nuovi argomentazioni teoriche per una metodologia LIS di trattamento e ricerca di documenti multimediali, proponendo il MIR come un tutto olistico composto da metolodogie di information retrieval semantico e basato sul contenuto. Il MIR offre modalità di ricerca migliori: ogni tipologia di documento digitale può essere analizzata e recuperata attraverso elementi del linguaggio appropriato alla sua specifica natura. L'approccio del MIR si basa sulla gestione diretta del contenuto dei documenti, considerando anche gli aspetti semantici. Le conclusioni dell'articolo rimarcano l'integrazione organica della rivoluzione della concezione di tipo contenutistico del trattamento dell'informazione con una concezione semantica migliorata, raccogliendo e componendo i vantaggi di entrambi i sistemi per l'accesso all'informazione

SEAN: multi-ontology semantic annotation for highly accurate closed domains

Semantic annotation has gained momentum with the emergence of the current user-generated content paradigm on the Web. The ever-growing quantity of collaborative data sources has resulted in the requirement for efficient approaches to create, integrate and retrieve information more efficiently in an environment where the users ask for accurate information. The main research challenge of the current work is using manual semantic annotation in a highly accurate closed domain, a conceptual domain with a minimal set of concepts where the benefits of adding semantics, search efficiency, optimization and the cost estimations are viable. This paper presents a semantic annotation approach for highly accurate closed domain based on multi-ontology annotation (domain and application ontologies).Publicad