Semantic web technologies for video surveillance metadata

Video surveillance systems are growing in size and complexity. Such systems typically consist of integrated modules of different vendors to cope with the increasing demands on network and storage capacity, intelligent video analytics, picture quality, and enhanced visual interfaces. Within a surveillance system, relevant information (like technical details on the video sequences, or analysis results of the monitored environment) is described using metadata standards. However, different modules typically use different standards, resulting in metadata interoperability problems. In this paper, we introduce the application of Semantic Web Technologies to overcome such problems. We present a semantic, layered metadata model and integrate it within a video surveillance system. Besides dealing with the metadata interoperability problem, the advantages of using Semantic Web Technologies and the inherent rule support are shown. A practical use case scenario is presented to illustrate the benefits of our novel approach

Extending OWL-S for the Composition of Web Services Generated With a Legacy Application Wrapper

Despite numerous efforts by various developers, web service composition is still a difficult problem to tackle. Lot of progressive research has been made on the development of suitable standards. These researches help to alleviate and overcome some of the web services composition issues. However, the legacy application wrappers generate nonstandard WSDL which hinder the progress. Indeed, in addition to their lack of semantics, WSDLs have sometimes different shapes because they are adapted to circumvent some technical implementation aspect. In this paper, we propose a method for the semi automatic composition of web services in the context of the NeuroLOG project. In this project the reuse of processing tools relies on a legacy application wrapper called jGASW. The paper describes the extensions to OWL-S in order to introduce and enable the composition of web services generated using the jGASW wrapper and also to implement consistency checks regarding these services.Comment: ICIW 2012, The Seventh International Conference on Internet and Web Applications and Services, Stuttgart : Germany (2012

Declarative Ajax Web Applications through SQL++ on a Unified Application State

Implementing even a conceptually simple web application requires an inordinate amount of time. FORWARD addresses three problems that reduce developer productivity: (a) Impedance mismatch across the multiple languages used at different tiers of the application architecture. (b) Distributed data access across the multiple data sources of the application (SQL database, user input of the browser page, session data in the application server, etc). (c) Asynchronous, incremental modification of the pages, as performed by Ajax actions. FORWARD belongs to a novel family of web application frameworks that attack impedance mismatch by offering a single unifying language. FORWARD's language is SQL++, a minimally extended SQL. FORWARD's architecture is based on two novel cornerstones: (a) A Unified Application State (UAS), which is a virtual database over the multiple data sources. The UAS is accessed via distributed SQL++ queries, therefore resolving the distributed data access problem. (b) Declarative page specifications, which treat the data displayed by pages as rendered SQL++ page queries. The resulting pages are automatically incrementally modified by FORWARD. User input on the page becomes part of the UAS. We show that SQL++ captures the semi-structured nature of web pages and subsumes the data models of two important data sources of the UAS: SQL databases and JavaScript components. We show that simple markup is sufficient for creating Ajax displays and for modeling user input on the page as UAS data sources. Finally, we discuss the page specification syntax and semantics that are needed in order to avoid race conditions and conflicts between the user input and the automated Ajax page modifications. FORWARD has been used in the development of eight commercial and academic applications. An alpha-release web-based IDE (itself built in FORWARD) enables development in the cloud.Comment: Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Database Programming Languages (DBPL 2013), August 30, 2013, Riva del Garda, Trento, Ital

Recovering Grammar Relationships for the Java Language Specification

Grammar convergence is a method that helps discovering relationships between different grammars of the same language or different language versions. The key element of the method is the operational, transformation-based representation of those relationships. Given input grammars for convergence, they are transformed until they are structurally equal. The transformations are composed from primitive operators; properties of these operators and the composed chains provide quantitative and qualitative insight into the relationships between the grammars at hand. We describe a refined method for grammar convergence, and we use it in a major study, where we recover the relationships between all the grammars that occur in the different versions of the Java Language Specification (JLS). The relationships are represented as grammar transformation chains that capture all accidental or intended differences between the JLS grammars. This method is mechanized and driven by nominal and structural differences between pairs of grammars that are subject to asymmetric, binary convergence steps. We present the underlying operator suite for grammar transformation in detail, and we illustrate the suite with many examples of transformations on the JLS grammars. We also describe the extraction effort, which was needed to make the JLS grammars amenable to automated processing. We include substantial metadata about the convergence process for the JLS so that the effort becomes reproducible and transparent

Interchanging lexical resources on the Semantic Web

Lexica and terminology databases play a vital role in many NLP applications, but currently most such resources are published in application-specific formats, or with custom access interfaces, leading to the problem that much of this data is in ‘‘data silos’’ and hence difficult to access. The Semantic Web and in particular the Linked Data initiative provide effective solutions to this problem, as well as possibilities for data reuse by inter-lexicon linking, and incorporation of data categories by dereferencable URIs. The Semantic Web focuses on the use of ontologies to describe semantics on the Web, but currently there is no standard for providing complex lexical information for such ontologies and for describing the relationship between the lexicon and the ontology. We present our model, lemon, which aims to address these gap

Ontologies on the semantic web

As an informational technology, the World Wide Web has enjoyed spectacular success. In just ten years it has transformed the way information is produced, stored, and shared in arenas as diverse as shopping, family photo albums, and high-level academic research. The “Semantic Web” was touted by its developers as equally revolutionary but has not yet achieved anything like the Web’s exponential uptake. This 17 000 word survey article explores why this might be so, from a perspective that bridges both philosophy and IT

Peirce, meaning and the semantic web

The so-called ‘Semantic Web’ is phase II of Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision for the WWW, whereby resources would no longer be indexed merely ‘syntactically’, via opaque character-strings, but via their meanings. We argue that one roadblock to Semantic Web development has been researchers’ adherence to a Cartesian, ‘private’ account of meaning, which has been dominant for the last 400 years, and which understands the meanings of signs as what their producers intend them to mean. It thus strives to build ‘silos of meaning’ which explicitly and antecedently determine what signs on the Web will mean in all possible situations. By contrast, the field is moving forward insofar as it embraces Peirce’s ‘public’, evolutionary account of meaning, according to which the meaning of signs just is the way they are interpreted and used to produce further signs. Given the extreme interconnectivity of the Web, it is argued that silos of meaning are unnecessary as plentiful machine-understandable data about the meaning of Web resources exists already in the form of those resources themselves, for applications that are able to leverage it, and it is Peirce’s account of meaning which can best make sense of the recent explosion in ‘user-defined content’ on the Web, and its relevance to achieving Semantic Web goals