10,715 research outputs found
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
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Technical Issues in the Development of Knowledge-Based Services for the Semantic Web
The Semantic Web aims to extend the current Web with formal semantics in order to improve how users experience the Web, by ameliorating current activities and supporting the automation of some others. So far, current Semantic Web prototypes mostly aim at collecting and exposing information. Still, a semantic layer can support applying Knowledge-Based Systems techniques to the development of brand-new fully-fledged Knowledge-Based Services for the Web. In this paper, we present the technical issues that have to be faced in the development of such a kind of application by presenting the Online Design of Events Application: a Semantic Web-based design support system that assists event organisers in the process of preparing events such as workshops and conferences, by effectively reasoning over an inter-organisational process across the Web
Towards a Context Knowledge Taxonomy. Combined Methodologies to Improve a Fast-Search Concept Extraction for an Ontology Population
Context in Architectural Design can be defined-related-comparable to hypothesis and boundary conditions in mathematics. An eco-system that influences it by means of natural and artificial events, space and time dimension. The research has the aim to analyze the critical issues related to Context by providing a contribution to the study of interactions between Context Knowledge and Architectural Design and how it can be used to improve the performance of the buildings and reducing design mistakes. The research focusing on formal ontologies, has developed a model that enables a semantic approach to design application programs, to manage information, to answer design questions and to have a clear relation between the formal representation of the context domain and its meanings. This context model provides an advancement on the state of the art in simplified design assumptions, in term of ontology ambiguity and complexity reduction, by using algorithms to extract and optimize branches of the graph. The extraction does not limit the number of relations, that can be extended and improve context taxonomy coherency and accuracy
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FABilT – finding answers in a billion triples
This submission presents the application of two coupled systems to the Billion Triples Challenge. The first system (Watson) provides the infrastructure which allows the second one (PowerAqua) to pose natural language queries to the billion triple datasets. Watson is a gateway to the Semantic Web: it crawls and indexes semantic data online to provide a variety of access mechanisms for human users and applications.We show here how we indexed most of the datasets provided for the challenge, thus obtaining an infrastructure (comprising web services, API, web interface, etc.) which supports the exploration of these datasets and makes them available to any Watson-based application. PowerAqua is an open domain question answering system which allows users to pose natural language queries to large scale collections of heterogeneous semantic data. In this paper, we discuss the issues we faced in configuring
PowerAqua and Watson for the challenge and report on our results. The system composed of Watson and PowerAqua, and applied to the Billion Triples Challenge, is called FABilT
Report on the EHCR (Deliverable 26.2)
This deliverable is the second for Workpackage 26. The first, submitted after
Month 12, summarised the areas of research that the partners had identified as
being relevant to the semantic indexing of the EHR. This second one reports
progress on the key threads of work identified by the partners during the project to
contribute towards semantically interoperable and processable EHRs.
This report provides a set of short summaries on key topics that have emerged as
important, and to which the partners are able to make strong contributions. Some of
these are also being extended via two new EU Framework 6 proposals that include
WP26 partners: this is also a measure of the success of this Network of Excellence
Multi Visualization and Dynamic Query for Effective Exploration of Semantic Data
Semantic formalisms represent content in a uniform way according to ontologies. This enables manipulation and reasoning via automated means (e.g. Semantic Web services), but limits the user’s ability to explore the semantic data from a point of view that originates from knowledge representation motivations. We show how, for user consumption, a visualization of semantic data according to some easily graspable dimensions (e.g. space and time) provides effective sense-making of data. In this paper, we look holistically at the interaction between users and semantic data, and propose multiple visualization strategies and dynamic filters to support the exploration of semantic-rich data.
We discuss a user evaluation and how interaction challenges could be overcome to create an effective user-centred framework for the visualization and manipulation of semantic data. The approach has been implemented and evaluated on a real company archive
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