Knowledge Components and Methods for Policy Propagation in Data Flows

Data-oriented systems and applications are at the centre of current developments of the World Wide Web (WWW). On the Web of Data (WoD), information sources can be accessed and processed for many purposes. Users need to be aware of any licences or terms of use, which are associated with the data sources they want to use. Conversely, publishers need support in assigning the appropriate policies alongside the data they distribute. In this work, we tackle the problem of policy propagation in data flows - an expression that refers to the way data is consumed, manipulated and produced within processes. We pose the question of what kind of components are required, and how they can be acquired, managed, and deployed, to support users on deciding what policies propagate to the output of a data-intensive system from the ones associated with its input. We observe three scenarios: applications of the Semantic Web, workflow reuse in Open Science, and the exploitation of urban data in City Data Hubs. Starting from the analysis of Semantic Web applications, we propose a data-centric approach to semantically describe processes as data flows: the Datanode ontology, which comprises a hierarchy of the possible relations between data objects. By means of Policy Propagation Rules, it is possible to link data flow steps and policies derivable from semantic descriptions of data licences. We show how these components can be designed, how they can be effectively managed, and how to reason efficiently with them. In a second phase, the developed components are verified using a Smart City Data Hub as a case study, where we developed an end-to-end solution for policy propagation. Finally, we evaluate our approach and report on a user study aimed at assessing both the quality and the value of the proposed solution

A Framework for Semantic Similarity Measures to enhance Knowledge Graph Quality

Precisely determining similarity values among real-world entities becomes a building block for data driven tasks, e.g., ranking, relation discovery or integration. Semantic Web and Linked Data initiatives have promoted the publication of large semi-structured datasets in form of knowledge graphs. Knowledge graphs encode semantics that describes resources in terms of several aspects or resource characteristics, e.g., neighbors, class hierarchies or attributes. Existing similarity measures take into account these aspects in isolation, which may prevent them from delivering accurate similarity values. In this thesis, the relevant resource characteristics to determine accurately similarity values are identified and considered in a cumulative way in a framework of four similarity measures. Additionally, the impact of considering these resource characteristics during the computation of similarity values is analyzed in three data-driven tasks for the enhancement of knowledge graph quality. First, according to the identified resource characteristics, new similarity measures able to combine two or more of them are described. In total four similarity measures are presented in an evolutionary order. While the first three similarity measures, OnSim, IC-OnSim and GADES, combine the resource characteristics according to a human defined aggregation function, the last one, GARUM, makes use of a machine learning regression approach to determine the relevance of each resource characteristic during the computation of the similarity. Second, the suitability of each measure for real-time applications is studied by means of a theoretical and an empirical comparison. The theoretical comparison consists on a study of the worst case computational complexity of each similarity measure. The empirical comparison is based on the execution times of the different similarity measures in two third-party benchmarks involving the comparison of semantically annotated entities. Ultimately, the impact of the described similarity measures is shown in three data-driven tasks for the enhancement of knowledge graph quality: relation discovery, dataset integration and evolution analysis of annotation datasets. Empirical results show that relation discovery and dataset integration tasks obtain better results when considering semantics encoded in semantic similarity measures. Further, using semantic similarity measures in the evolution analysis tasks allows for defining new informative metrics able to give an overview of the evolution of the whole annotation set, instead of the individual annotations like state-of-the-art evolution analysis frameworks

Linked Data Supported Information Retrieval

Um Inhalte im World Wide Web ausfindig zu machen, sind Suchmaschienen nicht mehr wegzudenken. Semantic Web und Linked Data Technologien ermöglichen ein detaillierteres und eindeutiges Strukturieren der Inhalte und erlauben vollkommen neue Herangehensweisen an die Lösung von Information Retrieval Problemen. Diese Arbeit befasst sich mit den Möglichkeiten, wie Information Retrieval Anwendungen von der Einbeziehung von Linked Data profitieren können. Neue Methoden der computer-gestützten semantischen Textanalyse, semantischen Suche, Informationspriorisierung und -visualisierung werden vorgestellt und umfassend evaluiert. Dabei werden Linked Data Ressourcen und ihre Beziehungen in die Verfahren integriert, um eine Steigerung der Effektivität der Verfahren bzw. ihrer Benutzerfreundlichkeit zu erzielen. Zunächst wird eine Einführung in die Grundlagen des Information Retrieval und Linked Data gegeben. Anschließend werden neue manuelle und automatisierte Verfahren zum semantischen Annotieren von Dokumenten durch deren Verknüpfung mit Linked Data Ressourcen vorgestellt (Entity Linking). Eine umfassende Evaluation der Verfahren wird durchgeführt und das zu Grunde liegende Evaluationssystem umfangreich verbessert. Aufbauend auf den Annotationsverfahren werden zwei neue Retrievalmodelle zur semantischen Suche vorgestellt und evaluiert. Die Verfahren basieren auf dem generalisierten Vektorraummodell und beziehen die semantische Ähnlichkeit anhand von taxonomie-basierten Beziehungen der Linked Data Ressourcen in Dokumenten und Suchanfragen in die Berechnung der Suchergebnisrangfolge ein. Mit dem Ziel die Berechnung von semantischer Ähnlichkeit weiter zu verfeinern, wird ein Verfahren zur Priorisierung von Linked Data Ressourcen vorgestellt und evaluiert. Darauf aufbauend werden Visualisierungstechniken aufgezeigt mit dem Ziel, die Explorierbarkeit und Navigierbarkeit innerhalb eines semantisch annotierten Dokumentenkorpus zu verbessern. Hierfür werden zwei Anwendungen präsentiert. Zum einen eine Linked Data basierte explorative Erweiterung als Ergänzung zu einer traditionellen schlüsselwort-basierten Suchmaschine, zum anderen ein Linked Data basiertes Empfehlungssystem

Sharing Semantic Resources

The Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web in which information, so far created for human consumption, becomes machine readable, “enabling computers and people to work in cooperation”. To turn into reality this vision several challenges are still open among which the most important is to share meaning formally represented with ontologies or more generally with semantic resources. This Semantic Web long-term goal has many convergences with the activities in the field of Human Language Technology and in particular in the development of Natural Language Processing applications where there is a great need of multilingual lexical resources. For instance, one of the most important lexical resources, WordNet, is also commonly regarded and used as an ontology. Nowadays, another important phenomenon is represented by the explosion of social collaboration, and Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia in the world, is object of research as an up to date omni comprehensive semantic resource. The main topic of this thesis is the management and exploitation of semantic resources in a collaborative way, trying to use the already available resources as Wikipedia and Wordnet. This work presents a general environment able to turn into reality the vision of shared and distributed semantic resources and describes a distributed three-layer architecture to enable a rapid prototyping of cooperative applications for developing semantic resources

Exploiting semantic annotations for open information extraction: an experience in the biomedical domain

The increasing amount of unstructured text published on the Web is demanding new tools and methods to automatically process and extract relevant information. Traditional information extraction has focused on harvesting domain-specific, pre-specified relations, which usually requires manual labor and heavy machinery; especially in the biomedical domain, the main efforts have been directed toward the recognition of well-defined entities such as genes or proteins, which constitutes the basis for extracting the relationships between the recognized entities. The intrinsic features and scale of the Web demand new approaches able to cope with the diversity of documents, where the number of relations is unbounded and not known in advance. This paper presents a scalable method for the extraction of domain-independent relations from text that exploits the knowledge in the semantic annotations. The method is not geared to any specific domain (e.g., protein–protein interactions and drug–drug interactions) and does not require any manual input or deep processing. Moreover, the method uses the extracted relations to compute groups of abstract semantic relations characterized by their signature types and synonymous relation strings. This constitutes a valuable source of knowledge when constructing formal knowledge bases, as we enable seamless integration of the extracted relations with the available knowledge resources through the process of semantic annotation. The proposed approach has successfully been applied to a large text collection in the biomedical domain and the results are very encouraging.The work was supported by the CICYT project TIN2011-24147 from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO)

SemTagP: Semantic Community Detection in Folksonomies

International audienceBuilding on top of our results on semantic social network analysis, we present a community detection algorithm, SemTagP, that takes benefits of the semantic data that were captured while structuring the RDF graphs of social networks. SemTagP not only offers to detect but also to label communities by exploiting (in addition to the structure of the social graph) the tags used by people during the social tagging process as well as the semantic relations inferred between tags. Doing so, we are able to refine the partitioning of the social graph with semantic processing and to label the activity of detected communities. We tested and evaluated this algorithm on the social network built from Ph.D. theses funded by ADEME, the French Environment and Energy Management Agency. We showed how this approach allows us to detect and label communities of interest and control the precision of the labels

Ontology Evaluation

Ontology evaluation is the task of measuring the quality of an ontology. It enables us to answer the following main question: How to assess the quality of an ontology for the Web? In this thesis a theoretical framework and several methods breathing life into the framework are presented. The application to the above scenarios is explored, and the theoretical foundations are thoroughly grounded in the practical usage of the emerging Semantic Web

Handling domain knowledge in system design models. An ontology based approach.

Complex systems models are designed in heterogeneous domains and this heterogeneity is rarely considered explicitly when describing and validating processes. Moreover, these systems usually involve several domain experts and several design models corresponding to different analyses (views) of the same system. However, no explicit information regarding the characteristics neither of the domain nor of the performed system analyses is given. In our thesis, we propose a general framework offering first, the formalization of domain knowledge using ontologies and second, the capability to strengthen design models by making explicit references to the domain knowledgeformalized in these ontology. This framework also provides resources for making explicit the features of an analysis by formalizing them within models qualified as ‘’points of view ‘’. We have set up two deployments of our approach: a Model Driven Engineering (MDE) based deployment and a formal methods one based on proof and refinement. This general framework has been validated on several no trivial case studies issued from system engineering