Collaborative editing of knowledge resources for cross-lingual text mining

The need to smoothly deal with textual documents expressed in different languages is increasingly becoming a relevant issue in modern text mining environments. Recently the research on this field has been considerably fostered by the necessity for Web users to easily search and browse the growing amount of heterogeneous multilingual contents available on-line as well as by the related spread of the Semantic Web. A common approach to cross-lingual text mining relies on the exploitation of sets of properly structured multilingual knowledge resources. The involvement of huge communities of users spread over different locations represents a valuable aid to create, enrich, and refine these knowledge resources. Collaborative editing Web environments are usually exploited to this purpose. This thesis analyzes the features of several knowledge editing tools, both semantic wikis and ontology editors, and discusses the main challenges related to the design and development of this kind of tools. Subsequently, it presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of the Wikyoto Knowledge Editor, called also Wikyoto. Wikyoto is the collaborative editing Web environment that enables Web users lacking any knowledge engineering background to edit the multilingual network of knowledge resources exploited by KYOTO, a cross-lingual text mining system developed in the context of the KYOTO European Project. To experiment real benefits from social editing of knowledge resources, it is important to provide common Web users with simplified and intuitive interfaces and interaction patterns. Users need to be motivated and properly driven so as to supply information useful for cross-lingual text mining. In addition, the management and coordination of their concurrent editing actions involve relevant technical issues. In the design of Wikyoto, all these requirements have been considered together with the structure and the set of knowledge resources exploited by KYOTO. Wikyoto aims at enabling common Web users to formalize cross-lingual knowledge by exploiting simplified language-driven interactions. At the same time, Wikyoto generates the set of complex knowledge structures needed by computers to mine information from textual contents. The learning curve of Wikyoto has been kept as shallow as possible by hiding the complexity of the knowledge structures to the users. This goal has been pursued by both enhancing the simplicity and interactivity of knowledge editing patterns and by using natural language interviews to carry out the most complex knowledge editing tasks. In this context, TMEKO, a methodology useful to support users to easily formalize cross-lingual information by natural language interviews has been defined. The collaborative creation of knowledge resources has been evaluated in Wikyoto

Web 2.0, language resources and standards to automatically build a multilingual named entity lexicon

This paper proposes to advance in the current state-of-the-art of automatic Language Resource (LR) building by taking into consideration three elements: (i) the knowledge available in existing LRs, (ii) the vast amount of information available from the collaborative paradigm that has emerged from the Web 2.0 and (iii) the use of standards to improve interoperability. We present a case study in which a set of LRs for different languages (WordNet for English and Spanish and Parole-Simple-Clips for Italian) are extended with Named Entities (NE) by exploiting Wikipedia and the aforementioned LRs. The practical result is a multilingual NE lexicon connected to these LRs and to two ontologies: SUMO and SIMPLE. Furthermore, the paper addresses an important problem which affects the Computational Linguistics area in the present, interoperability, by making use of the ISO LMF standard to encode this lexicon. The different steps of the procedure (mapping, disambiguation, extraction, NE identification and postprocessing) are comprehensively explained and evaluated. The resulting resource contains 974,567, 137,583 and 125,806 NEs for English, Spanish and Italian respectively. Finally, in order to check the usefulness of the constructed resource, we apply it into a state-of-the-art Question Answering system and evaluate its impact; the NE lexicon improves the system’s accuracy by 28.1%. Compared to previous approaches to build NE repositories, the current proposal represents a step forward in terms of automation, language independence, amount of NEs acquired and richness of the information represented

Km4City Ontology Building vs Data Harvesting and Cleaning for Smart-city Services

Presently, a very large number of public and private data sets are available from local governments. In most cases, they are not semantically interoperable and a huge human effort would be needed to create integrated ontologies and knowledge base for smart city. Smart City ontology is not yet standardized, and a lot of research work is needed to identify models that can easily support the data reconciliation, the management of the complexity, to allow the data reasoning. In this paper, a system for data ingestion and reconciliation of smart cities related aspects as road graph, services available on the roads, traffic sensors etc., is proposed. The system allows managing a big data volume of data coming from a variety of sources considering both static and dynamic data. These data are mapped to a smart-city ontology, called KM4City (Knowledge Model for City), and stored into an RDF-Store where they are available for applications via SPARQL queries to provide new services to the users via specific applications of public administration and enterprises. The paper presents the process adopted to produce the ontology and the big data architecture for the knowledge base feeding on the basis of open and private data, and the mechanisms adopted for the data verification, reconciliation and validation. Some examples about the possible usage of the coherent big data knowledge base produced are also offered and are accessible from the RDF-Store and related services. The article also presented the work performed about reconciliation algorithms and their comparative assessment and selection

Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web

Video semantic content analysis framework based on ontology combined MPEG-7

The rapid increase in the available amount of video data is creating a growing demand for efficient methods for understanding and managing it at the semantic level. New multimedia standard, MPEG-7, provides the rich functionalities to enable the generation of audiovisual descriptions and is expressed solely in XML Schema which provides little support for expressing semantic knowledge. In this paper, a video semantic content analysis framework based on ontology combined MPEG-7 is presented. Domain ontology is used to define high level semantic concepts and their relations in the context of the examined domain. MPEG-7 metadata terms of audiovisual descriptions and video content analysis algorithms are expressed in this ontology to enrich video semantic analysis. OWL is used for the ontology description. Rules in Description Logic are defined to describe how low-level features and algorithms for video analysis should be applied according to different perception content. Temporal Description Logic is used to describe the semantic events, and a reasoning algorithm is proposed for events detection. The proposed framework is demonstrated in sports video domain and shows promising results

Video semantic content analysis based on ontology

The rapid increase in the available amount of video data is creating a growing demand for efficient methods for understanding and managing it at the semantic level. New multimedia standards, such as MPEG-4 and MPEG-7, provide the basic functionalities in order to manipulate and transmit objects and metadata. But importantly, most of the content of video data at a semantic level is out of the scope of the standards. In this paper, a video semantic content analysis framework based on ontology is presented. Domain ontology is used to define high level semantic concepts and their relations in the context of the examined domain. And low-level features (e.g. visual and aural) and video content analysis algorithms are integrated into the ontology to enrich video semantic analysis. OWL is used for the ontology description. Rules in Description Logic are defined to describe how features and algorithms for video analysis should be applied according to different perception content and low-level features. Temporal Description Logic is used to describe the semantic events, and a reasoning algorithm is proposed for events detection. The proposed framework is demonstrated in a soccer video domain and shows promising results