PlanetOnto: from news publishing to integrated knowledge management support

Given a scenario in which members of an academic community collaboratively construct and share an archive of news items, several knowledge management challenges arise. The authors' integrated suite of tools, called PlanetOnto, supports a speedy but high quality publishing process, allows ontology-driven document formalization and augments standard browsing and search facilities with deductive knowledge retrieva

The Information-Flow Approach to Ontology-Based Semantic Integration

In this article we argue for the lack of formal foundations for ontology-based semantic alignment. We analyse and formalise the basic notions of semantic matching and alignment and we situate them in the context of ontology-based alignment in open-ended and distributed environments, like the Web. We then use the mathematical notion of information flow in a distributed system to ground three hypotheses that enable semantic alignment. We draw our exemplar applications of this work from a variety of interoperability scenarios including ontology mapping, theory of semantic interoperability, progressive ontology alignment, and situated semantic alignment

Methodologies, tools and languages for building ontologies. Where is their meeting point?

In this paper we review and compare the main methodologies, tools and languages for building ontologies that have been reported in the literature, as well as the main relationships among them. Ontology technology is nowadays mature enough: many methodologies, tools and languages are already available. The future work in this field should be driven towards the creation of a common integrated workbench for ontology developers to facilitate ontology development, exchange, evaluation, evolution and management, to provide methodological support for these tasks, and translations to and from different ontology languages. This workbench should not be created from scratch, but instead integrating the technology components that are currently available

Foundational Ontologies meet Ontology Matching: A Survey

Ontology matching is a research area aimed at finding ways to make different ontologies interoperable. Solutions to the problem have been proposed from different disciplines, including databases, natural language processing, and machine learning. The role of foundational ontologies for ontology matching is an important one. It is multifaceted and with room for development. This paper presents an overview of the different tasks involved in ontology matching that consider foundational ontologies. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of existing proposals and highlight the challenges to be addressed in the future

Features for Killer Apps from a Semantic Web Perspective

There are certain features that that distinguish killer apps from other ordinary applications. This chapter examines those features in the context of the semantic web, in the hope that a better understanding of the characteristics of killer apps might encourage their consideration when developing semantic web applications. Killer apps are highly tranformative technologies that create new e-commerce venues and widespread patterns of behaviour. Information technology, generally, and the Web, in particular, have benefited from killer apps to create new networks of users and increase its value. The semantic web community on the other hand is still awaiting a killer app that proves the superiority of its technologies. The authors hope that this chapter will help to highlight some of the common ingredients of killer apps in e-commerce, and discuss how such applications might emerge in the semantic web

Towards a killer app for the Semantic Web

Killer apps are highly transformative technologies that create new markets and widespread patterns of behaviour. IT generally, and the Web in particular, has benefited from killer apps to create new networks of users and increase its value. The Semantic Web community on the other hand is still awaiting a killer app that proves the superiority of its technologies. There are certain features that distinguish killer apps from other ordinary applications. This paper examines those features in the context of the Semantic Web, in the hope that a better understanding of the characteristics of killer apps might encourage their consideration when developing Semantic Web applications

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

An Ontology Based Approach Towards A Universal Description Framework for Home Networks

Current home networks typically involve two or more machines sharing network resources. The vision for the home network has grown from a simple computer network, to every day appliances embedded with network capabilities. In this environment devices and services within the home can interoperate, regardless of protocol or platform. Network clients can discover required resources by performing network discovery over component descriptions. Common approaches to this discovery process involve simple matching of keywords or attribute/value pairings. Interest emerging from the Semantic Web community has led to ontology languages being applied to network domains, providing a logical and semantically rich approach to both describing and discovering network components. In much of the existing work within this domain, developers have focused on defining new description frameworks in isolation from existing protocol frameworks and vocabularies. This work proposes an ontology-based description framework which takes the ontology approach to the next step, where existing description frameworks are in- corporated into the ontology-based framework, allowing discovery mechanisms to cover multiple existing domains. In this manner, existing protocols and networking approaches can participate in semantically-rich discovery processes. This framework also includes a system architecture developed for the purpose of reconciling existing home network solutions with the ontology-based discovery process. This work also describes an implementation of the approach and is deployed within a home-network environment. This implementation involves existing home networking frameworks, protocols and components, allowing the claims of this work to be examined and evaluated from a ‘real-world’ perspective

A review and comparison of ontology-based approaches to robot autonomy

Within the next decades, robots will need to be able to execute a large variety of tasks autonomously in a large variety of environments. To relax the resulting programming effort, a knowledge-enabled approach to robot programming can be adopted to organize information in re-usable knowledge pieces. However, for the ease of reuse, there needs to be an agreement on the meaning of terms. A common approach is to represent these terms using ontology languages that conceptualize the respective domain. In this work, we will review projects that use ontologies to support robot autonomy. We will systematically search for projects that fulfill a set of inclusion criteria and compare them with each other with respect to the scope of their ontology, what types of cognitive capabilities are supported by the use of ontologies, and which is their application domain.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft