Edhibou: a Customizable Interface for Decision Support in a Semantic Portal

International audienceThe Semantic Web is becoming more and more a reality, as the required technologies have reached an appropriate level of maturity. However, at this stage, it is important to provide tools facilitating the use and deployment of these technologies by end-users. In this paper, we describe EdHibou, an automatically generated, ontology-based graphical user interface that integrates in a semantic portal. The particularity of EdHibou is that it makes use of OWL reasoning capabilities to provide intelligent features, such as decision support, upon the underlying ontology. We present an application of EdHibou to medical decision support based on a formalization of clinical guidelines in OWL and show how it can be customized thanks to an ontology of graphical components

Semantic web support for open-source software development

Open-source software is unique in that the development of the product is performed in public over the Internet by developers who elect to contribute to the project and rarely if ever meet face-to-face. Software development is a knowledge intensive process and the information generated in open-source software development projects is typically housed in a central Internet repository. Open-source repositories typically contains vast amounts of information, much of it unstructured, meaning that even if a question has previously been discussed and dealt with it is not a trivial task to locate it, leading to rework, confusion amongst developers and possibly deterring new developers from getting involved.This paper develops an ontology based software development architecture for open-source software development. Such an architecture would enable better categorisation of information, communication, co-ordination and the development of sophisticated search agents

Improving User Interaction on Ontology-based Peer Data Management Systems

The issue of user interaction for query formulation and execution has been investigated for distributed and dynamic environments, such as Peer Data Management System (PDMS). Many of these PDMS are semantic based and composed by data peers which export schemas that are represented by ontologies. In the literature we can find some proposed PDMS interfaces, but none of them addresses, in a general way, the needs of a PDMS for user interaction. In this work we propose a visual user query interface for ontology-based PDMS. It provides a simple and straightforward interaction with this type of system. It aims not only providing a natural visual query interface but also supporting a precise and direct manipulation of the data schemas for query generation

SWI-Prolog and the Web

Where Prolog is commonly seen as a component in a Web application that is either embedded or communicates using a proprietary protocol, we propose an architecture where Prolog communicates to other components in a Web application using the standard HTTP protocol. By avoiding embedding in external Web servers development and deployment become much easier. To support this architecture, in addition to the transfer protocol, we must also support parsing, representing and generating the key Web document types such as HTML, XML and RDF. This paper motivates the design decisions in the libraries and extensions to Prolog for handling Web documents and protocols. The design has been guided by the requirement to handle large documents efficiently. The described libraries support a wide range of Web applications ranging from HTML and XML documents to Semantic Web RDF processing. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP)Comment: 31 pages, 24 figures and 2 tables. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP

View-based user interfaces for the Semantic Web

This thesis explores the possibilities of using the view-based search paradigm to create intelligent user interfaces on the Semantic Web. After surveying several semantic search techniques, the view-based search paradigm is explained, and argued to fit in a valuable niche in the field. To test the argument, numerous portals with different user interfaces and data were built using the paradigm. Based on the results of these experiments, this thesis argues that the paradigm provides a strong, extensible and flexible base on which to built semantic user interfaces. Designing the actual systems to be as adaptable as possible is also discussed

OntoViews -- A Tool for Creating Semantic Web Portals

This paper presents a semantic web portal tool ONTOVIEWS for publishing RDF content on the web. ONTOVIEWS provides the portal designer with a content-based search engine server, Ontogator, and a link recommendation system server, Ontodella. The user interface is created by combining these servers with the Apache Cocoon framework. From the end-user’s viewpoint, the key idea of ONTOVIEWS is to combine the multi-facet search paradigm, developed within the information retrieval research community, with semantic web RDFS ontologies, and extend the search service with a semantic browsing facility based on ontological reasoning. ONTOVIEWS is presented from the viewpoints of the enduser, architecture, and implementation. The implementation described is modular, easily modified and extended, and provides a good practical basis for creating semantic portals on the web. As a proof of concept, application of ONTOVIEWS to a deployed semantic web portal is discussed