WSC-07: Evolving the Web Services Challenge

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an evolving architectural paradigm where businesses can expose their capabilities as modular, network-accessible software services. By decomposing capabilities into modular services, organizations can share their offerings at multiple levels of granularity while also creating unique access points for their peer organizations. The true impact of SOA will be realized when 3rd party organizations can obtain a variety of services, on-demand, and create higher-order composite business processes. The Web Services Challenge (WSC) is a forum where academic and industry researchers can share experiences of developing tools that automate the integration of web services. In the third year (i.e. WSC-07) of the Web Services Challenge, software platforms will address several new composition challenges. Requests and results will be transmitted within SOAP messages. In addition, semantic representations will be both represented in the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and in the Web Ontology Language (OWL). Finally, composite processes will have both sequential and concurrent branches

Forecasting the Spreading of Technologies in Research Communities

Technologies such as algorithms, applications and formats are an important part of the knowledge produced and reused in the research process. Typically, a technology is expected to originate in the context of a research area and then spread and contribute to several other fields. For example, Semantic Web technologies have been successfully adopted by a variety of fields, e.g., Information Retrieval, Human Computer Interaction, Biology, and many others. Unfortunately, the spreading of technologies across research areas may be a slow and inefficient process, since it is easy for researchers to be unaware of potentially relevant solutions produced by other research communities. In this paper, we hypothesise that it is possible to learn typical technology propagation patterns from historical data and to exploit this knowledge i) to anticipate where a technology may be adopted next and ii) to alert relevant stakeholders about emerging and relevant technologies in other fields. To do so, we propose the Technology-Topic Framework, a novel approach which uses a semantically enhanced technology-topic model to forecast the propagation of technologies to research areas. A formal evaluation of the approach on a set of technologies in the Semantic Web and Artificial Intelligence areas has produced excellent results, confirming the validity of our solution

TechMiner: Extracting Technologies from Academic Publications

In recent years we have seen the emergence of a variety of scholarly datasets. Typically these capture ‘standard’ scholarly entities and their connections, such as authors, affiliations, venues, publications, citations, and others. However, as the repositories grow and the technology improves, researchers are adding new entities to these repositories to develop a richer model of the scholarly domain. In this paper, we introduce TechMiner, a new approach, which combines NLP, machine learning and semantic technologies, for mining technologies from research publications and generating an OWL ontology describing their relationships with other research entities. The resulting knowledge base can support a number of tasks, such as: richer semantic search, which can exploit the technology dimension to support better retrieval of publications; richer expert search; monitoring the emergence and impact of new technologies, both within and across scientific fields; studying the scholarly dynamics associated with the emergence of new technologies; and others. TechMiner was evaluated on a manually annotated gold standard and the results indicate that it significantly outperforms alternative NLP approaches and that its semantic features improve performance significantly with respect to both recall and precision

EASTWEB: building an integrated leading Euro-Asian higher education and research community in the field of the Semantic WEB

Based on the experience of the EC funded project EASTWEB, a project involving Universities from Italy (main partner), Austria, Ireland, Poland, China, India and Thailand, we describe a set of on going and planned collaboration activities. We highlight what we see the major advantages but also the difficulties in carrying out such a program

A Framework for the Evaluation of Semantics-based Service Composition Approaches

The benefits of service composition are being largely acknowledged in the literature nowadays. However, as the amount of available services increases, it becomes difficult to manage, discover, select and compose them, so that automation is required in these processes. This can be achieved by using semantic information represented in ontologies. Currently there are many different approaches that support semantics-based service composition. However, still little effort has been spent on creating a common methodology to evaluate and compare such approaches. In this paper we present our initial ideas to create an evaluation framework for semantics-based service composition approaches. We use a collection of existing services, and define a set of evaluation metrics, confusion matrix-based and time-based. Furthermore, we present how composition evaluation scenarios are generated from the collection of services and specify the strategy to be used in the evaluation process. We demonstrate the proposed framework through an example. Currently there are mechanisms and initiatives to address the evaluation of the semantics-based service discovery and matchmaking approaches. However, still few efforts have been spent on the creation of comprehensive evaluation mechanisms for semantics-based service composition approaches

The Hidden Web, XML and Semantic Web: A Scientific Data Management Perspective

The World Wide Web no longer consists just of HTML pages. Our work sheds light on a number of trends on the Internet that go beyond simple Web pages. The hidden Web provides a wealth of data in semi-structured form, accessible through Web forms and Web services. These services, as well as numerous other applications on the Web, commonly use XML, the eXtensible Markup Language. XML has become the lingua franca of the Internet that allows customized markups to be defined for specific domains. On top of XML, the Semantic Web grows as a common structured data source. In this work, we first explain each of these developments in detail. Using real-world examples from scientific domains of great interest today, we then demonstrate how these new developments can assist the managing, harvesting, and organization of data on the Web. On the way, we also illustrate the current research avenues in these domains. We believe that this effort would help bridge multiple database tracks, thereby attracting researchers with a view to extend database technology.Comment: EDBT - Tutorial (2011