The Resource Description Framework and its Schema

International audienceRDF is a framework to publish statements on the web about anything. It allows anyone to describe resources, in particular Web resources, such as the author, creation date, subject, and copyright of an image. Any information portal or data-based web site can be interested in using the graph model of RDF to open its silos of data about persons, documents, events, products, services, places etc. RDF reuses the web approach to identify resources (URI) and to allow one to explicitly represent any relationship between two resources. Such statements can come from any source on the web and be merged with other statements supporting worldwide data integration. Using and reusing URIs, anyone can say anything about any topic, anyone can add to it, and so on. Additionally, using RDFS, one can define domain-specific classes and properties to describe these resources and organize them in hierarchies. These schemas are also published and exchanged in RDF. RDF not only provides a graph model to publish and link data on the web, it also provides the foundational shared data model on which other capabilities are built: querying (SPARQL is built on top of RDF), embedding (RDFa and GRDDL rely on the RDF model), and reasoning (RDFS and OWL are defined on top of RDF). Semantic web is a web to link data and share the semantics of their schemas. RDF provides a recommendation to publish and link data. RDFS provides a recommendation to share the semantics of their schemas. The couple RDF & RDFS is also reused in several other activities of the W3C

Le Web sémantique n'est pas antisocial

National audienceCet article rebondit sur une série d'articles soulignant l'importance de la prise en compte de l'aspect social dans le Web sémantique mais opposant radicalement l'approche Web sémantique et l'approche sociale. Tout en reconnaissant cette importance, nous montrons ici que ces deux approches sont complémentaires

Folksonomies, Thésaurus et Ontologies : trois artefacts combinés dans la structuration des données du Web

International audienceAu coeur de nos systèmes documentaires, de nos bibliothèques numériques, de nos systèmes d'information, du Web 2.0 et du Web Sémantique, les ontologies, les thésaurus et les folksonomies sont trois des structures de données qui participent à l'indexation des contenus. Parfois confondus, parfois opposés, nous montrons que ces trois « artefacts cognitifs » qui se répandent actuellement dans les applications Web répondent à des besoins différents et peuvent très bien être combinés au sein d'une même application pour permettre différentes fonctionnalités, offrant ainsi différents modèles et permettant différentes pratiques pour l'indexation de contenus en ligne

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Cognitive Foundations for Visual Analytics

In this report, we provide an overview of scientific/technical literature on information visualization and VA. Topics discussed include an update and overview of the extensive literature search conducted for this study, the nature and purpose of the field, major research thrusts, and scientific foundations. We review methodologies for evaluating and measuring the impact of VA technologies as well as taxonomies that have been proposed for various purposes to support the VA community. A cognitive science perspective underlies each of these discussions

Code Red: Mobile, a live/synthetic test bed for firefighter training

The State of Victoria, Australia is prone to disastrous bushfires. The Country Fire Authority of Victoria is the principal bushfire response organisation. Local brigades of mainly volunteers learn how to fight fires through classroom learning and field exercises. The CODE RED: MOBILE test bed features Live/Synthetic elements, where ‘Live’ firefighters participate in an exercise where a virtual or ‘synthetic’ bushfire is delivered to them in the field on an iPad3 in the 7scenes game framework (7scenes.com). A model of the Hanging Rock Reserve, with a bushfire undergoing a wind change, was made in the Sandbox2 game editor (crytek.com). This was a model of the real world location of the exercise. Firefighters were divided into two groups: one group received the information about the bushfire’s progress as dynamic-static movies, and the other group saw static screenshots from the same movies. Both were annotated with further information. This media supported with maps and textual information, was delivered at the real world location of three stages of the bushfire undergoing a wind change at the Hanging Rock Reserve. This experiment showed that either form of media was suitable for training firefighters in a mobile learning and decision making exercise using a mobile device. The participants carried GPS and their movements were tracked. Spatio-temporal analysis was used to detect problems with the design of the exercise, and to find participants with aberrant behaviour or difficulties with the exercise. Fractal analysis of the tracks uncovered five Domains of Spatial Scale. Three of the domains at different spatial scales revealed where participants were walking through open areas in relatively straight paths, in another domain they had to find ways through gateways and over bridges, and at another they were meeting the boundaries of the exercise and turning sharply back, or recrossing their tracks. This data is valuable for the analysis and design Live/Synthetic exercises: at various spatial scales particular exercises can be made more difficult or easier to complete depending on the fitness or expertise of the participants. The research proposes that emergency organisations would benefit from Live/Synthetic exercises using mobile devices, for joint or individual training of firefighters and Incident Management Teams

Enhancing Free-text Interactions in a Communication Skills Learning Environment

Learning environments frequently use gamification to enhance user interactions.Virtual characters with whom players engage in simulated conversations often employ prescripted dialogues; however, free user inputs enable deeper immersion and higher-order cognition. In our learning environment, experts developed a scripted scenario as a sequence of potential actions, and we explore possibilities for enhancing interactions by enabling users to type free inputs that are matched to the pre-scripted statements using Natural Language Processing techniques. In this paper, we introduce a clustering mechanism that provides recommendations for fine-tuning the pre-scripted answers in order to better match user inputs

Graph-Based Inferences in a Semantic Web Server for the Cartography of Competencies in a Telecom Valley

International audienceWe introduce an experience in building a public semantic web server maintaining annotations about the actors of a Telecom Valley. We then focus on an example of inference used in building one type of cartography of the competences of the economic actors of the Telecom Valley. We detailed how this inference exploits the graph model of the semantic web using ontology-based metrics and conceptual clustering. We prove the characteristics of theses metrics and inferences and we give the associated interpretations

Undergraduate and Graduate Course Descriptions, 2007 Fall

Wright State University undergraduate and graduate course descriptions from Fall 2007