Managing contextual information in semantically-driven temporal information systems

Context-aware (CA) systems have demonstrated the provision of a robust solution for personalized information delivery in the current content-rich and dynamic information age we live in. They allow software agents to autonomously interact with users by modeling the user’s environment (e.g. profile, location, relevant public information etc.) as dynamically-evolving and interoperable contexts. There is a flurry of research activities in a wide spectrum at context-aware research areas such as managing the user’s profile, context acquisition from external environments, context storage, context representation and interpretation, context service delivery and matching of context attributes to users‘ queries etc. We propose SDCAS, a Semantic-Driven Context Aware System that facilitates public services recommendation to users at temporal location. This paper focuses on information management and service recommendation using semantic technologies, taking into account the challenges of relationship complexity in temporal and contextual information

Organisational challenges of the semantic web in digital libraries: A Norwegian case study

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2009 Emerald Group Publishing LimitedPurpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine from a socio-technical point of view the impact of semantic web technology on the strategic, organisational and technological levels. The semantic web initiative holds great promise for the future for digital libraries. There is, however, a considerable gap in semantic web research between the contributions in the technological field and research in the organisational field. Design/methodology/approach – A comprehensive case study of the National Library of Norway (NL) is conducted, building on two major sources of information: the documentation of the digitising project of the NL; and interviews with nine different stakeholders at three levels of NL's organisation during June to August 2007. Top managers are interviewed on strategy, middle managers and librarians are interviewed regarding organisational issues and ICT professionals are interviewed on technology issues. Findings – The findings indicate that the highest impact will be at the organisational level. This is mainly because inter-organisational and cross-organisational structures have to be established to address the problems of ontology engineering, and a development framework for ontology engineering in digital libraries must be examined. Originality/value – ICT professionals and library practitioners should be more mindful of organisational issues when planning and executing semantic web projects in digital libraries. In particular, practitioners should be aware that the ontology engineering process and the semantic meta-data production will affect the entire organisation. For public digital libraries this probably will also call for a more open policy towards user groups to properly manage the process of ontology engineering

Assigning Creative Commons Licenses to Research Metadata: Issues and Cases

This paper discusses the problem of lack of clear licensing and transparency of usage terms and conditions for research metadata. Making research data connected, discoverable and reusable are the key enablers of the new data revolution in research. We discuss how the lack of transparency hinders discovery of research data and make it disconnected from the publication and other trusted research outcomes. In addition, we discuss the application of Creative Commons licenses for research metadata, and provide some examples of the applicability of this approach to internationally known data infrastructures.Comment: 9 pages. Submitted to the 29th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2016), Nice (France) 14-16 December 201

Linked education: interlinking educational resources and the web of data

Research on interoperability of technology-enhanced learning (TEL) repositories throughout the last decade has led to a fragmented landscape of competing approaches, such as metadata schemas and interface mechanisms. However, so far Web-scale integration of resources is not facilitated, mainly due to the lack of take-up of shared principles, datasets and schemas. On the other hand, the Linked Data approach has emerged as the de-facto standard for sharing data on the Web and offers a large potential to solve interoperability issues in the field of TEL. In this paper, we describe a general approach to exploit the wealth of already existing TEL data on the Web by allowing its exposure as Linked Data and by taking into account automated enrichment and interlinking techniques to provide rich and well-interlinked data for the educational domain. This approach has been implemented in the context of the mEducator project where data from a number of open TEL data repositories has been integrated, exposed and enriched by following Linked Data principles

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

Mining Threat Intelligence about Open-Source Projects and Libraries from Code Repository Issues and Bug Reports

Open-Source Projects and Libraries are being used in software development while also bearing multiple security vulnerabilities. This use of third party ecosystem creates a new kind of attack surface for a product in development. An intelligent attacker can attack a product by exploiting one of the vulnerabilities present in linked projects and libraries. In this paper, we mine threat intelligence about open source projects and libraries from bugs and issues reported on public code repositories. We also track library and project dependencies for installed software on a client machine. We represent and store this threat intelligence, along with the software dependencies in a security knowledge graph. Security analysts and developers can then query and receive alerts from the knowledge graph if any threat intelligence is found about linked libraries and projects, utilized in their products

A pragmatic approach to semantic repositories benchmarking

The aim of this paper is to benchmark various semantic repositories in order to evaluate their deployment in a commercial image retrieval and browsing application. We adopt a two-phase approach for evaluating the target semantic repositories: analytical parameters such as query language and reasoning support are used to select the pool of the target repositories, and practical parameters such as load and query response times are used to select the best match to application requirements. In addition to utilising a widely accepted benchmark for OWL repositories (UOBM), we also use a real-life dataset from the target application, which provides us with the opportunity of consolidating our findings. A distinctive advantage of this benchmarking study is that the essential requirements for the target system such as the semantic expressivity and data scalability are clearly defined, which allows us to claim contribution to the benchmarking methodology for this class of applications

Towards information profiling: data lake content metadata management

There is currently a burst of Big Data (BD) processed and stored in huge raw data repositories, commonly called Data Lakes (DL). These BD require new techniques of data integration and schema alignment in order to make the data usable by its consumers and to discover the relationships linking their content. This can be provided by metadata services which discover and describe their content. However, there is currently a lack of a systematic approach for such kind of metadata discovery and management. Thus, we propose a framework for the profiling of informational content stored in the DL, which we call information profiling. The profiles are stored as metadata to support data analysis. We formally define a metadata management process which identifies the key activities required to effectively handle this.We demonstrate the alternative techniques and performance of our process using a prototype implementation handling a real-life case-study from the OpenML DL, which showcases the value and feasibility of our approach.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft