On the evaluation of thesaurus tools compatible with the Semantic Web

P. 711-722Thesauri are valuable knowledge organization systems (KOSs) that support advanced information retrieval. The Semantic Web has brought a renewed interest in thesauri as a support for semantic searches and other added-value services. Tools that manage thesauri permit them to be created, edited and queried. The integrity restrictions on thesauri should also be controlled by these tools. However, there is also the possibility of thesaurus exchange, which becomes relevant in the Semantic Web context, where information exchange is a crucial facility. In fact, interoperability at the information level has received an important boost with the stabilization of the SKOS standard as a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Recommendation. Furthermore, the feasibility of integrating software is a valuable feature for software developers. An evaluation framework for thesaurus tools is proposed, which includes the issues of functionalities, construct support, integrity, information interoperability and feasibility of integrating software. It is original in focusing on SemanticWeb conformity and interoperabilityS

LexOWL: A Bridge from LexGrid to OWL

The Lexical Grid project is an on-going community driven initiative that provides a common terminology model to represent multiple vocabulary and ontology sources as well as a scalable and robust API for accessing such information. In order to add more powerful functionalities to the existing infrastructure and align LexGrid more closely with various Semantic Web technologies, we introduce the LexOWL project for representing the ontologies modeled within the LexGrid environment in OWL (Web Ontology Language). The crux of this effort is to create a “bridge” that functionally connects the LexBIG (a LexGrid API) and the OWL API (an interface that implements OWL) seamlessly. In this paper, we discuss the key aspects of designing and implementing the LexOWL bridge. We compared LexOWL with other OWL converting tools and conclude that LexOWL provides an OWL mapping and converting tool with well-defined interoperability for information in the biomedical domain

HILT : High-Level Thesaurus Project. Phase IV and Embedding Project Extension : Final Report

Ensuring that Higher Education (HE) and Further Education (FE) users of the JISC IE can find appropriate learning, research and information resources by subject search and browse in an environment where most national and institutional service providers - usually for very good local reasons - use different subject schemes to describe their resources is a major challenge facing the JISC domain (and, indeed, other domains beyond JISC). Encouraging the use of standard terminologies in some services (institutional repositories, for example) is a related challenge. Under the auspices of the HILT project, JISC has been investigating mechanisms to assist the community with this problem through a JISC Shared Infrastructure Service that would help optimise the value obtained from expenditure on content and services by facilitating subject-search-based resource sharing to benefit users in the learning and research communities. The project has been through a number of phases, with work from earlier phases reported, both in published work elsewhere, and in project reports (see the project website: http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/). HILT Phase IV had two elements - the core project, whose focus was 'to research, investigate and develop pilot solutions for problems pertaining to cross-searching multi-subject scheme information environments, as well as providing a variety of other terminological searching aids', and a short extension to encompass the pilot embedding of routines to interact with HILT M2M services in the user interfaces of various information services serving the JISC community. Both elements contributed to the developments summarised in this report

Escaping the Trap of too Precise Topic Queries

At the very center of digital mathematics libraries lie controlled vocabularies which qualify the {\it topic} of the documents. These topics are used when submitting a document to a digital mathematics library and to perform searches in a library. The latter are refined by the use of these topics as they allow a precise classification of the mathematics area this document addresses. However, there is a major risk that users employ too precise topics to specify their queries: they may be employing a topic that is only "close-by" but missing to match the right resource. We call this the {\it topic trap}. Indeed, since 2009, this issue has appeared frequently on the i2geo.net platform. Other mathematics portals experience the same phenomenon. An approach to solve this issue is to introduce tolerance in the way queries are understood by the user. In particular, the approach of including fuzzy matches but this introduces noise which may prevent the user of understanding the function of the search engine. In this paper, we propose a way to escape the topic trap by employing the navigation between related topics and the count of search results for each topic. This supports the user in that search for close-by topics is a click away from a previous search. This approach was realized with the i2geo search engine and is described in detail where the relation of being {\it related} is computed by employing textual analysis of the definitions of the concepts fetched from the Wikipedia encyclopedia.Comment: 12 pages, Conference on Intelligent Computer Mathematics 2013 Bath, U

The support of constructs in thesaurus tools from a Semantic Web perspective: Framework to assess standard conformance

15 p.Thesauri are conceptual tools useful to achieve semantic interoperability and reusability, which are relevant goals in the Semantic Web. Thesaurus standards establish, among other issues, the constructs that can appear in a thesaurus. The ISO 25964 standard for thesauri, which supersedes ISO 2788, is the evolution of the ISO thesauri standard to a conceptual approach closer to the Semantic Web. However, it appeared when SKOS -the W3C Recommendation- was already consolidated as the standard for KOS (Knowledge Organization System) representation in the Semantic Web, including thesauri. The evolution from ISO 2788 to ISO 25964, and the relationships between constructs in ISO 2788/ISO 25964 and SKOS, are studied in this paper. From the analysis of this comparison, a methodological framework, that focuses on the construct support, is proposed to evaluate the conformance quality of thesaurus management tools. Target readers are professionals in charge of thesauri edition. A Semantic Web perspective is taken to characterize the effect that using SKOS to represent thesauri can have on the results of the assessment. A proof of concept for the model’s feasibility was performed on two tools and the analysis of the results of this experimental validation is presented. The conclusions highlight the model’s suitability for assessing conformance to the standards concerning support for thesaurus constructs

PowerAqua: fishing the semantic web

The Semantic Web (SW) offers an opportunity to develop novel, sophisticated forms of question answering (QA). Specifically, the availability of distributed semantic markup on a large scale opens the way to QA systems which can make use of such semantic information to provide precise, formally derived answers to questions. At the same time the distributed, heterogeneous, large-scale nature of the semantic information introduces significant challenges. In this paper we describe the design of a QA system, PowerAqua, designed to exploit semantic markup on the web to provide answers to questions posed in natural language. PowerAqua does not assume that the user has any prior information about the semantic resources. The system takes as input a natural language query, translates it into a set of logical queries, which are then answered by consulting and aggregating information derived from multiple heterogeneous semantic sources

From Frequency to Meaning: Vector Space Models of Semantics

Computers understand very little of the meaning of human language. This profoundly limits our ability to give instructions to computers, the ability of computers to explain their actions to us, and the ability of computers to analyse and process text. Vector space models (VSMs) of semantics are beginning to address these limits. This paper surveys the use of VSMs for semantic processing of text. We organize the literature on VSMs according to the structure of the matrix in a VSM. There are currently three broad classes of VSMs, based on term-document, word-context, and pair-pattern matrices, yielding three classes of applications. We survey a broad range of applications in these three categories and we take a detailed look at a specific open source project in each category. Our goal in this survey is to show the breadth of applications of VSMs for semantics, to provide a new perspective on VSMs for those who are already familiar with the area, and to provide pointers into the literature for those who are less familiar with the field