User interaction and uptake challenges to successfully deploying Semantic Web technologies

The Semantic Web community could benefit greatly from 'eating its own dog food' in order to better understand the challenges and opportunities of a Semantic Web from the user perspective. In this paper we describe the deployment of Semantic Web applications and services at the 3rd European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC2006), before presenting results of an evaluation into how these technologies were experienced by delegates. Based on themes identified in the evaluation we highlight seven user interaction and uptake challenges raised by the conference experience, and discuss how these may generalize to the widespread deployment of Semantic Web technologies

On the emergent Semantic Web and overlooked issues

The emergent Semantic Web, despite being in its infancy, has already received a lotof attention from academia and industry. This resulted in an abundance of prototype systems and discussion most of which are centred around the underlying infrastructure. However, when we critically review the work done to date we realise that there is little discussion with respect to the vision of the Semantic Web. In particular, there is an observed dearth of discussion on how to deliver knowledge sharing in an environment such as the Semantic Web in effective and efficient manners. There are a lot of overlooked issues, associated with agents and trust to hidden assumptions made with respect to knowledge representation and robust reasoning in a distributed environment. These issues could potentially hinder further development if not considered at the early stages of designing Semantic Web systems. In this perspectives paper, we aim to help engineers and practitioners of the Semantic Web by raising awareness of these issues

Knowledge society arguments revisited in the semantic technologies era

In the light of high profile governmental and international efforts to realise the knowledge society, I review the arguments made for and against it from a technology standpoint. I focus on advanced knowledge technologies with applications on a large scale and in open- ended environments like the World Wide Web and its ambitious extension, the Semantic Web. I argue for a greater role of social networks in a knowledge society and I explore the recent developments in mechanised trust, knowledge certification, and speculate on their blending with traditional societal institutions. These form the basis of a sketched roadmap for enabling technologies for a knowledge society

Semantic web services for simulation component reuse and interoperability: An ontology approach

Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) Simulation Packages (CSPs) are widely used in industry primarily due to economic factors associated with developing proprietary software platforms. Regardless of their widespread use, CSPs have yet to operate across organizational boundaries. The limited reuse and interoperability of CSPs are affected by the same semantic issues that restrict the inter-organizational use of software components and web services. The current representations of Web components are predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinning required to support discovery on the emerging Semantic Web. The authors present new research that partially alleviates the problem of limited semantic reuse and interoperability of simulation components in CSPs. Semantic models, in the form of ontologies, utilized by the authors’ Web service discovery and deployment architecture provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved through a simulation component ontology that is used to identify required components at varying levels of granularity (i.e. including both abstract and specialized components). Selected simulation components are loaded into a CSP, modified according to the requirements of the new model and executed. The research presented here is based on the development of an ontology, connector software, and a Web service discovery architecture. The ontology is extracted from simulation scenarios involving airport, restaurant and kitchen service suppliers. The ontology engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter-organizational simulation, by adopting a less intrusive interface between participants Although specific to CSPs this work has wider implications for the simulation community. The reason being that the community as a whole stands to benefit through from an increased awareness of the state-of-the-art in Software Engineering (for example, ontology-supported component discovery and reuse, and service-oriented computing), and it is expected that this will eventually lead to the development of a unique Software Engineering-inspired methodology to build simulations in future

From Method Fragments to Method Services

In Method Engineering (ME) science, the key issue is the consideration of information system development methods as fragments. Numerous ME approaches have produced several definitions of method parts. Different in nature, these fragments have nevertheless some common disadvantages: lack of implementation tools, insufficient standardization effort, and so on. On the whole, the observed drawbacks are related to the shortage of usage orientation. We have proceeded to an in-depth analysis of existing method fragments within a comparison framework in order to identify their drawbacks. We suggest overcoming them by an improvement of the ?method service? concept. In this paper, the method service is defined through the service paradigm applied to a specific method fragment ? chunk. A discussion on the possibility to develop a unique representation of method fragment completes our contribution

Linked open government data: lessons from Data.gov.uk

The movement to publish government data is an opportunity to populate the linked data Web with data of good provenance. The benefits range from transparency to public service improvement, citizen engagement to the creation of social and economic value. There are many challenges to be met before the vision is implemented, and this paper describes the efforts of the EnAKTing project to extract value from data.gov.uk, through the stages of locating data sources, integrating data into the linked data Web, and browsing and querying it