An architecture for establishing legal semantic workflows in the context of integrated law enforcement

A previous version of this paper was presented at the Third Workshop on Legal Knowledge and the Semantic Web (LK&SW-2016), EKAW-2016, November 19th, Bologna, ItalyTraditionally the integration of data from multiple sources is done on an ad-hoc basis for each to "silos" that prevent sharing data across different agencies or tasks, and is unable to cope with the modern environment, where workflows, tasks, and priorities frequently change. Operating within the Data to Decision Cooperative Research Centre (D2D CRC), the authors are currently involved in the Integrated Law Enforcement Project, which has the goal of developing a federated data platform that will enable the execution of integrated analytics on data accessed from different external and internal sources, thereby providing effective support to an investigator or analyst working to evaluate evidence and manage lines of inquiries in the investigation. Technical solutions should also operate ethically, in compliance with the law, and subject to good governance principles

A classification of emerging and traditional grid systems

The grid has evolved in numerous distinct phases. It started in the early ’90s as a model of metacomputing in which supercomputers share resources; subsequently, researchers added the ability to share data. This is usually referred to as the first-generation grid. By the late ’90s, researchers had outlined the framework for second-generation grids, characterized by their use of grid middleware systems to “glue” different grid technologies together. Third-generation grids originated in the early millennium when Web technology was combined with second-generation grids. As a result, the invisible grid, in which grid complexity is fully hidden through resource virtualization, started receiving attention. Subsequently, grid researchers identified the requirement for semantically rich knowledge grids, in which middleware technologies are more intelligent and autonomic. Recently, the necessity for grids to support and extend the ambient intelligence vision has emerged. In AmI, humans are surrounded by computing technologies that are unobtrusively embedded in their surroundings. However, third-generation grids’ current architecture doesn’t meet the requirements of next-generation grids (NGG) and service-oriented knowledge utility (SOKU).4 A few years ago, a group of independent experts, arranged by the European Commission, identified these shortcomings as a way to identify potential European grid research priorities for 2010 and beyond. The experts envision grid systems’ information, knowledge, and processing capabilities as a set of utility services.3 Consequently, new grid systems are emerging to materialize these visions. Here, we review emerging grids and classify them to motivate further research and help establish a solid foundation in this rapidly evolving area

myTea: Connecting the Web to Digital Science on the Desktop

Bioinformaticians regularly access the hundreds of databases and tools that are available to them on the Web. None of these tools communicate with each other, causing the scientist to copy results manually from a Web site into a spreadsheet or word processor. myGrids' Taverna has made it possible to create templates (workflows) that automatically run searches using these databases and tools, cutting down what previously took days of work into hours, and enabling the automated capture of experimental details. What is still missing in the capture process, however, is the details of work done on that material once it moves from the Web to the desktop: if a scientist runs a process on some data, there is nothing to record why that action was taken; it is likewise not easy to publish a record of this process back to the community on the Web. In this paper, we present a novel interaction framework, built on Semantic Web technologies, and grounded in usability design practice, in particular the Making Tea method. Through this work, we introduce a new model of practice designed specifically to (1) support the scientists' interactions with data from the Web to the desktop, (2) provide automatic annotation of process to capture what has previously been lost and (3) associate provenance services automatically with that data in order to enable meaningful interrogation of the process and controlled sharing of the results

Past, present and future of information and knowledge sharing in the construction industry: Towards semantic service-based e-construction

The paper reviews product data technology initiatives in the construction sector and provides a synthesis of related ICT industry needs. A comparison between (a) the data centric characteristics of Product Data Technology (PDT) and (b) ontology with a focus on semantics, is given, highlighting the pros and cons of each approach. The paper advocates the migration from data-centric application integration to ontology-based business process support, and proposes inter-enterprise collaboration architectures and frameworks based on semantic services, underpinned by ontology-based knowledge structures. The paper discusses the main reasons behind the low industry take up of product data technology, and proposes a preliminary roadmap for the wide industry diffusion of the proposed approach. In this respect, the paper stresses the value of adopting alliance-based modes of operation

Modelling trust in semantic web applications

This paper examines some of the barriers to the adoption of car-sharing, termed carpooling in the US, and develops a framework for trusted recommendations. The framework is established on a semantic modelling approach putting forward its suitability to resolving adoption barriers while also highlighting the characteristics of trust that can be exploited. Identification is made of potential vocabularies, ontologies and public social networks which can be used as the basis for deriving direct and indirect trust values in an implementation

Training of Crisis Mappers and Map Production from Multi-sensor Data: Vernazza Case Study (Cinque Terre National Park, Italy)

This aim of paper is to presents the development of a multidisciplinary project carried out by the cooperation between Politecnico di Torino and ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action). The goal of the project was the training in geospatial data acquiring and processing for students attending Architecture and Engineering Courses, in order to start up a team of "volunteer mappers". Indeed, the project is aimed to document the environmental and built heritage subject to disaster; the purpose is to improve the capabilities of the actors involved in the activities connected in geospatial data collection, integration and sharing. The proposed area for testing the training activities is the Cinque Terre National Park, registered in the World Heritage List since 1997. The area was affected by flood on the 25th of October 2011. According to other international experiences, the group is expected to be active after emergencies in order to upgrade maps, using data acquired by typical geomatic methods and techniques such as terrestrial and aerial Lidar, close-range and aerial photogrammetry, topographic and GNSS instruments etc.; or by non conventional systems and instruments such us UAV, mobile mapping etc. The ultimate goal is to implement a WebGIS platform to share all the data collected with local authorities and the Civil Protectio

The Entity Registry System: Implementing 5-Star Linked Data Without the Web

Linked Data applications often assume that connectivity to data repositories and entity resolution services are always available. This may not be a valid assumption in many cases. Indeed, there are about 4.5 billion people in the world who have no or limited Web access. Many data-driven applications may have a critical impact on the life of those people, but are inaccessible to those populations due to the architecture of today's data registries. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a new open-source system that can be used as a general-purpose entity registry suitable for deployment in poorly-connected or ad-hoc environments.Comment: 16 pages, authors are listed in alphabetical orde

Legal Ontologies for the spanish e-Government

The Electronic Government is a new field of applications for the semantic web where ontologies are becoming an important research technology. The e-Government faces considerable challenges to achieve interoperability given the semantic differences of interpretation, complexity and width of scope. In this paper we present the results obtained in an ongoing project commissioned by the Spanish government that seeks strategies for the e-Government to reduce the problems encountered when delivering services to citizens. We also introduce an e-Government ontology model; within this model a set of legal ontologies are devoted to representing the Real-estate transaction domain used to illustrate this paper