Upper Tag Ontology (UTO) For Integrating Social Tagging Data

Data integration and mediation have become central concerns of information technology over the past few decades. With the advent of the Web and the rapid increases in the amount of data and the number of Web documents and users, researchers have focused on enhancing the interoperability of data through the development of metadata schemes. Other researchers have looked to the wealth of metadata generated by bookmarking sites on the Social Web. While several existing ontologies have capitalized on the semantics of metadata created by tagging activities, the Upper Tag Ontology (UTO) emphasizes the structure of tagging activities to facilitate modeling of tagging data and the integration of data from different bookmarking sites as well as the alignment of tagging ontologies. UTO is described and its utility in modeling, harvesting, integrating, searching, and analyzing data is demonstrated with metadata harvested from three major social tagging systems (Delicious, Flickr, and YouTube)

A Survey on Linked Data and the Social Web as facilitators for TEL recommender systems

Personalisation, adaptation and recommendation are central features of TEL environments. In this context, information retrieval techniques are applied as part of TEL recommender systems to filter and recommend learning resources or peer learners according to user preferences and requirements. However, the suitability and scope of possible recommendations is fundamentally dependent on the quality and quantity of available data, for instance, metadata about TEL resources as well as users. On the other hand, throughout the last years, the Linked Data (LD) movement has succeeded to provide a vast body of well-interlinked and publicly accessible Web data. This in particular includes Linked Data of explicit or implicit educational nature. The potential of LD to facilitate TEL recommender systems research and practice is discussed in this paper. In particular, an overview of most relevant LD sources and techniques is provided, together with a discussion of their potential for the TEL domain in general and TEL recommender systems in particular. Results from highly related European projects are presented and discussed together with an analysis of prevailing challenges and preliminary solutions.LinkedU

BlogForever D2.6: Data Extraction Methodology

This report outlines an inquiry into the area of web data extraction, conducted within the context of blog preservation. The report reviews theoretical advances and practical developments for implementing data extraction. The inquiry is extended through an experiment that demonstrates the effectiveness and feasibility of implementing some of the suggested approaches. More specifically, the report discusses an approach based on unsupervised machine learning that employs the RSS feeds and HTML representations of blogs. It outlines the possibilities of extracting semantics available in blogs and demonstrates the benefits of exploiting available standards such as microformats and microdata. The report proceeds to propose a methodology for extracting and processing blog data to further inform the design and development of the BlogForever platform

Distributed Semantic Social Networks: Architecture, Protocols and Applications

Online social networking has become one of the most popular services on the Web. Especially Facebook with its 845Mio+ monthly active users and 100Mrd+ friendship relations creates a Web inside the Web. Drawing on the metaphor of islands, Facebook is becoming more like a continent. However, users are locked up on this continent with hardly any opportunity to communicate easily with users on other islands and continents or even to relocate trans-continentally. In addition to that, privacy, data ownership and freedom of communication issues are problematically in centralized environments. The idea of distributed social networking enables users to overcome the drawbacks of centralized social networks. The goal of this thesis is to provide an architecture for distributed social networking based on semantic technologies. This architecture consists of semantic artifacts, protocols and services which enable social network applications to work in a distributed environment and with semantic interoperability. Furthermore, this thesis presents applications for distributed semantic social networking and discusses user interfaces, architecture and communication strategies for this application category.Soziale Netzwerke gehören zu den beliebtesten Online Diensten im World Wide Web. Insbesondere Facebook mit seinen mehr als 845 Mio. aktiven Nutzern im Monat und mehr als 100 Mrd. Nutzer- Beziehungen erzeugt ein eigenständiges Web im Web. Den Nutzern dieser Sozialen Netzwerke ist es jedoch schwer möglich mit Nutzern in anderen Sozialen Netzwerken zu kommunizieren oder aber mit ihren Daten in ein anderes Netzwerk zu ziehen. Zusätzlich dazu werden u.a. Privatsphäre, Eigentumsrechte an den eigenen Daten und uneingeschränkte Freiheit in der Kommunikation als problematisch empfunden. Die Idee verteilter Soziale Netzwerke ermöglicht es, diese Probleme zentralisierter Sozialer Netzwerke zu überwinden. Das Ziel dieser Arbeit ist die Darstellung einer Architektur verteilter Soziale Netzwerke welche auf semantischen Technologien basiert. Diese Architektur besteht aus semantischen Artefakten, Protokollen und Diensten und ermöglicht die Kommunikation von Sozialen Anwendungen in einer verteilten Infrastruktur. Darüber hinaus präsentiert diese Arbeit mehrere Applikationen für verteilte semantische Soziale Netzwerke und diskutiert deren Nutzer-Schnittstellen, Architektur und Kommunikationsstrategien. 

Ubiquitous Semantic Applications

As Semantic Web technology evolves many open areas emerge, which attract more research focus. In addition to quickly expanding Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud, various embeddable metadata formats (e.g. RDFa, microdata) are becoming more common. Corporations are already using existing Web of Data to create new technologies that were not possible before. Watson by IBM an artificial intelligence computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language can be a great example. On the other hand, ubiquitous devices that have a large number of sensors and integrated devices are becoming increasingly powerful and fully featured computing platforms in our pockets and homes. For many people smartphones and tablet computers have already replaced traditional computers as their window to the Internet and to the Web. Hence, the management and presentation of information that is useful to a user is a main requirement for today’s smartphones. And it is becoming extremely important to provide access to the emerging Web of Data from the ubiquitous devices. In this thesis we investigate how ubiquitous devices can interact with the Semantic Web. We discovered that there are five different approaches for bringing the Semantic Web to ubiquitous devices. We have outlined and discussed in detail existing challenges in implementing this approaches in section 1.2. We have described a conceptual framework for ubiquitous semantic applications in chapter 4. We distinguish three client approaches for accessing semantic data using ubiquitous devices depending on how much of the semantic data processing is performed on the device itself (thin, hybrid and fat clients). These are discussed in chapter 5 along with the solution to every related challenge. Two provider approaches (fat and hybrid) can be distinguished for exposing data from ubiquitous devices on the Semantic Web. These are discussed in chapter 6 along with the solution to every related challenge. We conclude our work with a discussion on each of the contributions of the thesis and propose future work for each of the discussed approach in chapter 7

The building and application of a semantic platform for an e-research society

This thesis reviews the area of e-Research (the use of electronic infrastructure to support research) and considers how the insight gained from the development of social networking sites in the early 21st century might assist researchers in using this infrastructure. In particular it examines the myExperiment project, a website for e-Research that allows users to upload, share and annotate work flows and associated files, using a social networking framework. This Virtual Organisation (VO) supports many of the attributes required to allow a community of users to come together to build an e-Research society. The main focus of the thesis is how the emerging society that is developing out of my-Experiment could use Semantic Web technologies to provide users with a significantly richer representation of their research and research processes to better support reproducible research. One of the initial major contributions was building an ontology for myExperiment. Through this it became possible to build an API for generating and delivering this richer representation and an interface for querying it. Having this richer representation it has been possible to follow Linked Data principles to link up with other projects that have this type of representation. Doing this has allowed additional data to be provided to the user and has begun to set in context the data produced by myExperiment. The way that the myExperiment project has gone about this task and consideration of how changes may affect existing users, is another major contribution of this thesis. Adding a semantic representation to an emergent e-Research society like myExperiment,has given it the potential to provide additional applications. In particular the capability to support Research Objects, an encapsulation of a scientist's research or research process to support reproducibility. The insight gained by adding a semantic representation to myExperiment, has allowed this thesis to contribute towards the design of the architecture for these Research Objects that use similar Semantic Web technologies. The myExperiment ontology has been designed such that it can be aligned with other ontologies. Scientific Discourse, the collaborative argumentation of different claims and hypotheses, with the support of evidence from experiments, to construct, confirm or disprove theories requires the capability to represent experiments carried out in silico. This thesis discusses how, as part of the HCLS Scientific Discourse subtask group, the myExperiment ontology has begun to be aligned with other scientific discourse ontologies to provide this capability. It also compares this alignment of ontologies with the architecture for Research Objects. This thesis has also examines how myExperiment's Linked Data and that of other projects can be used in the design of novel interfaces. As a theoretical exercise, it considers how this Linked Data might be used to support a Question-Answering system, that would allow users to query myExperiment's data in a more efficient and user-friendly way. It concludes by reviewing all the steps undertaken to provide a semantic platform for an emergent e-Research society to facilitate the sharing of research and its processes to support reproducible research. It assesses their contribution to enhancing the features provided by myExperiment, as well as e-Research as a whole. It considers how the contributions provided by this thesis could be extended to produce additional tools that will allow researchers to make greater use of the rich data that is now available, in a way that enhances their research process rather than significantly changing it or adding extra workload

A Semantics-based User Interface Model for Content Annotation, Authoring and Exploration

The Semantic Web and Linked Data movements with the aim of creating, publishing and interconnecting machine readable information have gained traction in the last years. However, the majority of information still is contained in and exchanged using unstructured documents, such as Web pages, text documents, images and videos. This can also not be expected to change, since text, images and videos are the natural way in which humans interact with information. Semantic structuring of content on the other hand provides a wide range of advantages compared to unstructured information. Semantically-enriched documents facilitate information search and retrieval, presentation, integration, reusability, interoperability and personalization. Looking at the life-cycle of semantic content on the Web of Data, we see quite some progress on the backend side in storing structured content or for linking data and schemata. Nevertheless, the currently least developed aspect of the semantic content life-cycle is from our point of view the user-friendly manual and semi-automatic creation of rich semantic content. In this thesis, we propose a semantics-based user interface model, which aims to reduce the complexity of underlying technologies for semantic enrichment of content by Web users. By surveying existing tools and approaches for semantic content authoring, we extracted a set of guidelines for designing efficient and effective semantic authoring user interfaces. We applied these guidelines to devise a semantics-based user interface model called WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) which enables integrated authoring, visualization and exploration of unstructured and (semi-)structured content. To assess the applicability of our proposed WYSIWYM model, we incorporated the model into four real-world use cases comprising two general and two domain-specific applications. These use cases address four aspects of the WYSIWYM implementation: 1) Its integration into existing user interfaces, 2) Utilizing it for lightweight text analytics to incentivize users, 3) Dealing with crowdsourcing of semi-structured e-learning content, 4) Incorporating it for authoring of semantic medical prescriptions

Connected Information Management

Society is currently inundated with more information than ever, making efficient management a necessity. Alas, most of current information management suffers from several levels of disconnectedness: Applications partition data into segregated islands, small notes don’t fit into traditional application categories, navigating the data is different for each kind of data; data is either available at a certain computer or only online, but rarely both. Connected information management (CoIM) is an approach to information management that avoids these ways of disconnectedness. The core idea of CoIM is to keep all information in a central repository, with generic means for organization such as tagging. The heterogeneity of data is taken into account by offering specialized editors. The central repository eliminates the islands of application-specific data and is formally grounded by a CoIM model. The foundation for structured data is an RDF repository. The RDF editing meta-model (REMM) enables form-based editing of this data, similar to database applications such as MS access. Further kinds of data are supported by extending RDF, as follows. Wiki text is stored as RDF and can both contain structured text and be combined with structured data. Files are also supported by the CoIM model and are kept externally. Notes can be quickly captured and annotated with meta-data. Generic means for organization and navigation apply to all kinds of data. Ubiquitous availability of data is ensured via two CoIM implementations, the web application HYENA/Web and the desktop application HYENA/Eclipse. All data can be synchronized between these applications. The applications were used to validate the CoIM ideas

Réseau social pour l’initiation de synergies industrielles

RÉSUMÉ : La recherche présentée dans cette thèse puise dans le domaine de l'écologie industrielle, précisément la symbiose industrielle (SI), en supposant qu'il est possible pour une ou plusieurs entreprises de trouver des débouchés à leurs matières résiduelles. La symbiose qui commence généralement par des relations d’affaires, des opérations de rapprochement et de collaboration entre deux ou plusieurs entreprises (synergies industrielles) aboutit à la mise en œuvre du développement durable à une échelle territoriale. Jusqu’à récemment, la majorité des contributions dans ce domaine portait sur les aspects conceptuels de la symbiose industrielle et les études de cas. Les études de cas avaient pour but de présenter un aperçu général des initiatives ou de projets spécifiques de symbiose industrielle ou d’examiner plusieurs cas au niveau d’une industrie en particulier, d’une région, d’une ville ou même d’une entreprise afin d’effectuer principalement des comparaisons. Plus tard, d'autres études ont commencé à analyser la performance économique et environnementale de la symbiose industrielle et ont ainsi proposé de nouvelles idées ou stratégies pour sa mise en œuvre. Malheureusement, les aspects sociaux sont restés la plupart du temps peu explorés. Bien que les dernières publications aient partiellement abordé ces lacunes, Spekkink, (2016), entre autres, reconnaît le rôle joué par les aspects sociaux, et plus particulièrement l’aspect de la confiance, et bien que la modélisation ait relativement aidé à comprendre l’évolution de la symbiose industrielle et à optimiser les flux de matières en expérimentant des scénarios divers (Cao et al., 2009; Kim et al., 2012), il y a encore peu de compréhension en ce qui concerne l’apport des dimensions sociales et comment elles affectent l'émergence et le fonctionnement des réseaux de symbioses industrielles. L’objectif de ce travail est dans un premier temps de présenter d’une part, la valeur ajoutée des médias sociaux ainsi que leurs fonctions dans l’initiation, la promotion et le développement d’un réseau industriel visant l'identification d'opportunités efficaces de mise en valeur de sous-produits en contexte de symbiose industrielle. Ce travail propose notamment un cadre conceptuel permettant de mieux comprendre la contribution des médias sociaux au développement des symbioses industrielles. Ce travail propose de plus une application du web sémantique au partage des connaissances et à l’identification d’opportunités de synergies industrielles dans le cadre des réseaux sociaux. Finalement, un modèle de simulation à base d’agents est proposé pour illustrer l'influence des relations sociales dans la création des synergies et des symbioses dans un parc industriel selon différentes structures de réseaux (random vs scale-free). À travers ce travail, les conclusions suivantes ont pu être tirées. La première conclusion démontre qu’un réseau social vert enrichi de fonctions sociales peut contribuer à l’émergence de synergies industrielles à travers l’apprentissage, le partage d’informations, le tissage de relations et grâce au rôle de coordination communautaire qu'il peut jouer. Ceci dans le but de soutenir le développement de la symbiose industrielle et de réduire ainsi l’impact collectif des communautés industrielles. La deuxième conclusion démontre qu’il est possible de produire de nouvelles inférences à partir de données issues du web sémantique fondées sur des tags préalablement déterminés et que l’ontologie proposée a la robustesse nécessaire pour réaliser cette tâche. En effet, la structure de l’ontologie exprimée en OWL (Langage interopérable du web sémantique permettant de concevoir des fichiers répondants au vocabulaire et à la sémantique de la logique des descriptions) et son exploitation par les requêtes SPARQL (le langage de requête du web sémantique) a permis de générer des relations validées entre des ressources issues du web afin d’identifier des relations de synergies potentielles entre acteurs industriels. Notons tout de même qu’un certain travail reste à réaliser avant d’envisager de mettre en production une telle ontologie. En effet, il importe d’identifier clairement les sources web d’informations et d'analyser leur qualité d'un point de vue du contenu des connaissances. Pour chacune de ces sources, il importe de méticuleusement choisir les tags appropriés et de les regrouper sous des catégories exploitables. De plus, une analyse plus approfondie des cas d’utilisation de cette approche permettrait aussi de mieux structurer les ontologies et d’orienter leur développement pour la mise en œuvre d’une solution répondant adéquatement aux exigences attendues du système. Finalement, la troisième contribution de ce travail supporte la conclusion que la dynamique et la structure sociale impliquées au sein des parcs industriels influencent le développement des symbioses industrielles. Bien que le modèle de simulation utilisé et les expériences réalisées ne permettent que de déterminer de façon générale leur impact sur la vitesse de développement des synergies industrielles, ces expériences démontrent que dans des conditions générales similaires, la structure et la dynamique des relations sociales influencent la matérialisation des synergies potentielles existantes au sein d’un groupe d’acteurs industriels. Cependant, plus de travail est nécessaire pour valider ces résultats et étudier plus en profondeur à la fois les facteurs sociaux qui favorisent la création des synergies industrielles, mais aussi pour étudier l’impact potentiel de médias sociaux dans divers contextes et dynamiques de symbioses industrielles. De plus, sur le plan méthodologique, les expériences réalisées illustrent comment un tel modèle peut être utilisé comme outil complémentaire aux études de cas empiriques très répandues dans ce domaine. Ces trois contributions ont pour buts à long terme de permettre le développement d’outils informatiques afin de supporter les animateurs de réseaux éco-industriels, les agents de développement économique, les conseils municipaux, les consultants ou les centres de recherche dans l'évaluation des bénéfices économiques et environnementaux potentiels de synergies industrielles. Ce projet a été mené en collaboration avec le Centre de Transfert Technologique en Écologie Industrielle, situé à Sorel- Tracy, Québec, Canada.----------ABSTRACT : The research presented in this thesis draws from the field of industrial ecology, precisely industrial symbiosis (IS), assuming that it is possible for a company or more to find outlets for their waste. The symbiosis that usually starts with business relations, reconciliation of transactions and collaboration between two or more industrial synergies results in the implementation of sustainable development implementation at a territorial level. Until recently, the majority of contributions in this area focused on the conceptual aspects of industrial symbiosis and case studies. The purpose of the case studies was to provide a general overview of a specific industrial symbiosis project or to examine several cases at the level of a particular industry, region, city or even a company to perform mainly comparisons. Later, other studies began to analyze the economic and environmental performance of industrial symbiosis and thus proposed new ideas or strategies for its implementation. Unfortunately, the social aspects have remained little explored. Although recent publications have partially addressed these gaps, Spekkink (2016), among others, acknowledges the role played by social aspects, particularly the aspect of trust. Although modeling has helped to understand the evolution of industrial symbiosis and the optimization of material flows by experimenting with various scenarios (Cao et al., 2009, Kim et al., 2012), there is still little understanding of the contribution of dimensions and how they affect the emergence and functioning of industrial symbiosis networks. On one hand, the objective of this work is to present the added value of social media and their functions in the initiation, promotion and development of an industrial network that is aimed at identifying opportunities as efficient by-product development in the context of industrial symbiosis. This work proposes in particular a conceptual framework to better understand the contribution of social media to the development of industrial symbiosis. On the other hand, this work also proposes an application of the semantic web to the sharing of knowledge and the identification of opportunities for industrial synergies within the framework of the social networks. Finally, an agent-based simulation model is proposed to illustrate the influence of social relations in the creation of synergies and symbiosis in an industrial park according to different network structures (random vs scale-free). Through this work, the following conclusions can be drawn. The first conclusion demonstrates that a green social network enriched with social functions can contribute to the emergence of industrial synergies through learning, information sharing, relationship building and community coordination. This emergence supports the development of industrial symbiosis and thus reduces the collective impact of industrial communities. The second conclusion demonstrates that it is possible to produce new inferences from semantic web data based on predetermined tags and that the proposed ontology has the necessary robustness to perform this task. Indeed, the structure of the ontology expressed in OWL (Semantic web interoperable language allowed to design files that respond to the vocabulary and semantics of descriptive logic) and its use by SPARQL queries (the query language of the web Semantics) enabled the generation of validated relationships between resources from the web in order to identify potential synergies between industrial players. Let us note, however, that some work remains to be realized before considering putting such an ontology into production. Indeed, it is crucial to clearly identify web sources of information and to analyze their quality from a knowledge content perspective. For each of these sources, it is important to carefully select the appropriate tags and group them into exploitable categories. Moreover, a more in-depth analysis of the use of this approach would also make it possible to better structure the ontologies and guide their development in order to implement a solution that meets the expected requirements of the system. Finally, the third contribution of this work supports the conclusion that the dynamics and social structure involved in industrial parks’ influence the development of industrial symbiosis. Although the simulation model used and the experiments carried out only allow us to determine in general their impact on the rate of development of industrial synergies, these experiments show that under similar general conditions the structure and dynamics of social relations influence the potential synergies within a group of industrial players. However, more work is needed to validate these findings and to explore more deeply both the social factors that favor the creation of industrial synergies and also to study the potential impact of social media in various contexts and dynamics of industrial symbiosis. Moreover, from the methodological point of view, the experiments carried out illustrate how such a model can be used as a complementary tool to the empirical case studies that are widely used in this field. The three long-term objectives of these three contributions are to enable the development of IT tools to support eco-industrial network leaders, economic development officers, municipal councils, consultants or research centers in the evaluation of economic and environmental benefits of industrial synergies. This project was conducted in collaboration with the Technology Transfer Centre in Industrial Ecology, located in Sorel-Tracy, Quebec, Canada