Challenges and potential of the Semantic Web for tourism

The paper explores tourism challenges and potential of the Semantic Web from a theoretical and industry perspective. It first examines tourism business networks and explores a main theme of network interoperability - data standards- followed by technology deficiencies of Web 1.0 and 2.0 and Semantic Web solutions. It then explicates Semantic opportunities and challenges for tourism, including an industry perspective through a qualitative approach. Industry leaders considered that the new Web era was imminent and heralded benefits for supply and demand side interoperability, although management and technical challenges could impede progress and delay realisation

Semantically annotated hypermedia services

Hypermedia systems’ researchers investigate the various approaches in the way documents and resources are linked, navigated and stored in a distributed environment. Unfortunately, those systems fail to provide effortlessly usable discrete services, since it is difficult both to discover and to invoke any of them. This paper proposes the usage of emerging technologies that try to augment the Web resources with semantics in order to provide Hypermedia services that can be easily discovered, and integrated by potential third party developers. In this context, we analyze the benefits for the Hypermedia community upon the adoption of Semantic Web technologies for the description of Hypermedia services, and we implement an initial corresponding ontology

A semantic web services-based infrastructure for context-adaptive process support

Current technologies aimed at supporting processes whether it is a business or learning process - primarily follow a metadata- and data-centric paradigm. Whereas process metadata is usually based on a specific standard specification - such as the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) or the IMS Learning Design Standard - the allocation of resources is done manually at design-time, and the used data is often specific to one process context only. These facts limit the reusability of process models across different standards and contexts. To overcome these issues, we introduce an innovative Semantic Web Service-based framework aimed at changing the current paradigm to a context-adaptive service-oriented approach. Following the idea of layered semantic abstractions, our approach supports the development of abstract semantic process model - reusable across different contexts and standards - that enables a dynamic adaptation to specific actor needs and objectives. To illustrate the application of our framework and establish its feasibility, we describe a prototypical application in the E-Learning domain

A Survey of Volunteered Open Geo-Knowledge Bases in the Semantic Web

Over the past decade, rapid advances in web technologies, coupled with innovative models of spatial data collection and consumption, have generated a robust growth in geo-referenced information, resulting in spatial information overload. Increasing 'geographic intelligence' in traditional text-based information retrieval has become a prominent approach to respond to this issue and to fulfill users' spatial information needs. Numerous efforts in the Semantic Geospatial Web, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), and the Linking Open Data initiative have converged in a constellation of open knowledge bases, freely available online. In this article, we survey these open knowledge bases, focusing on their geospatial dimension. Particular attention is devoted to the crucial issue of the quality of geo-knowledge bases, as well as of crowdsourced data. A new knowledge base, the OpenStreetMap Semantic Network, is outlined as our contribution to this area. Research directions in information integration and Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) are then reviewed, with a critical discussion of their current limitations and future prospects

Issues about the Adoption of Formal Methods for Dependable Composition of Web Services

Web Services provide interoperable mechanisms for describing, locating and invoking services over the Internet; composition further enables to build complex services out of simpler ones for complex B2B applications. While current studies on these topics are mostly focused - from the technical viewpoint - on standards and protocols, this paper investigates the adoption of formal methods, especially for composition. We logically classify and analyze three different (but interconnected) kinds of important issues towards this goal, namely foundations, verification and extensions. The aim of this work is to individuate the proper questions on the adoption of formal methods for dependable composition of Web Services, not necessarily to find the optimal answers. Nevertheless, we still try to propose some tentative answers based on our proposal for a composition calculus, which we hope can animate a proper discussion

Towards adaptive e-learning applications based on Semantic Web Services

The current state of the art in supporting E-Learning objectives is primarily based on providing a learner with learning content by using metadata standards like ADL SCORM 2004 or IMS Learning Design. By following this approach, several issues can be observed including high development costs due to a limited reusability across different standards and learning contexts. To overcome these issues, our approach changes this data-centric paradigm to a highly dynamic service-oriented approach. By following this approach, learning objectives are supported based on a automatic allocation of services instead of a manual composition of learning data. Our approach is fundamentally based on current Semantic Web Service (SWS) technology and considers mappings between different learning metadata standards as well as ontological concepts for E-Learning. Since our approach is based on a dynamic selection and invocation of SWS appropriate to achieve a given learning objective within a specific learning context, it enables the dynamic adaptation to specific learning needs as well as a high level of reusability across different learning contexts

Business integration models in the context of web services.

E-commerce development and applications have been bringing the Internet to business and marketing and reforming our current business styles and processes. The rapid development of the Web, in particular, the introduction of the semantic web and web service technologies, enables business processes, modeling and management to enter an entirely new stage. Traditional web based business data and transactions can now be analyzed, extracted and modeled to discover new business rules and to form new business strategies, let alone mining the business data in order to classify customers or products. In this paper, we investigate and analyze the business integration models in the context of web services using a micro-payment system because a micro-payment system is considered to be a service intensive activity, where many payment tasks involve different forms of services, such as payment method selection for buyers, security support software, product price comparison, etc. We will use the micro-payment case to discuss and illustrate how the web services approaches support and transform the business process and integration model.

Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) in the Semantic Web: A Multi-Dimensional Review

Since the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) specification and its SKOS eXtension for Labels (SKOS-XL) became formal W3C recommendations in 2009 a significant number of conventional knowledge organization systems (KOS) (including thesauri, classification schemes, name authorities, and lists of codes and terms, produced before the arrival of the ontology-wave) have made their journeys to join the Semantic Web mainstream. This paper uses "LOD KOS" as an umbrella term to refer to all of the value vocabularies and lightweight ontologies within the Semantic Web framework. The paper provides an overview of what the LOD KOS movement has brought to various communities and users. These are not limited to the colonies of the value vocabulary constructors and providers, nor the catalogers and indexers who have a long history of applying the vocabularies to their products. The LOD dataset producers and LOD service providers, the information architects and interface designers, and researchers in sciences and humanities, are also direct beneficiaries of LOD KOS. The paper examines a set of the collected cases (experimental or in real applications) and aims to find the usages of LOD KOS in order to share the practices and ideas among communities and users. Through the viewpoints of a number of different user groups, the functions of LOD KOS are examined from multiple dimensions. This paper focuses on the LOD dataset producers, vocabulary producers, and researchers (as end-users of KOS).Comment: 31 pages, 12 figures, accepted paper in International Journal on Digital Librarie