23,483 research outputs found
Value-driven partner search for <i>Energy from Waste</i> projects
Energy from Waste (EfW) projects require complex value chains to operate effectively. To identify business partners, plant operators need to network with organisations whose strategic objectives are aligned with their own. Supplier organisations need to work out where they fit in the value chain. Our aim is to support people in identifying potential business partners, based on their organisationâs interpretation of value. Value for an organisation should reflect its strategy and may be interpreted using key priorities and KPIs (key performance indicators). KPIs may comprise any or all of knowledge, operational, economic, social and convenience indicators. This paper presents an ontology for modelling and prioritising connections within the business environment, and in the process provides means for defining value and mapping these to corresponding KPIs. The ontology is used to guide the design of a visual representation of the environment to aid partner search
A Survey of Volunteered Open Geo-Knowledge Bases in the Semantic Web
Over the past decade, rapid advances in web technologies, coupled with
innovative models of spatial data collection and consumption, have generated a
robust growth in geo-referenced information, resulting in spatial information
overload. Increasing 'geographic intelligence' in traditional text-based
information retrieval has become a prominent approach to respond to this issue
and to fulfill users' spatial information needs. Numerous efforts in the
Semantic Geospatial Web, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), and the
Linking Open Data initiative have converged in a constellation of open
knowledge bases, freely available online. In this article, we survey these open
knowledge bases, focusing on their geospatial dimension. Particular attention
is devoted to the crucial issue of the quality of geo-knowledge bases, as well
as of crowdsourced data. A new knowledge base, the OpenStreetMap Semantic
Network, is outlined as our contribution to this area. Research directions in
information integration and Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) are then
reviewed, with a critical discussion of their current limitations and future
prospects
XML Matchers: approaches and challenges
Schema Matching, i.e. the process of discovering semantic correspondences
between concepts adopted in different data source schemas, has been a key topic
in Database and Artificial Intelligence research areas for many years. In the
past, it was largely investigated especially for classical database models
(e.g., E/R schemas, relational databases, etc.). However, in the latest years,
the widespread adoption of XML in the most disparate application fields pushed
a growing number of researchers to design XML-specific Schema Matching
approaches, called XML Matchers, aiming at finding semantic matchings between
concepts defined in DTDs and XSDs. XML Matchers do not just take well-known
techniques originally designed for other data models and apply them on
DTDs/XSDs, but they exploit specific XML features (e.g., the hierarchical
structure of a DTD/XSD) to improve the performance of the Schema Matching
process. The design of XML Matchers is currently a well-established research
area. The main goal of this paper is to provide a detailed description and
classification of XML Matchers. We first describe to what extent the
specificities of DTDs/XSDs impact on the Schema Matching task. Then we
introduce a template, called XML Matcher Template, that describes the main
components of an XML Matcher, their role and behavior. We illustrate how each
of these components has been implemented in some popular XML Matchers. We
consider our XML Matcher Template as the baseline for objectively comparing
approaches that, at first glance, might appear as unrelated. The introduction
of this template can be useful in the design of future XML Matchers. Finally,
we analyze commercial tools implementing XML Matchers and introduce two
challenging issues strictly related to this topic, namely XML source clustering
and uncertainty management in XML Matchers.Comment: 34 pages, 8 tables, 7 figure
An information assistant system for the prevention of tunnel vision in crisis management
In the crisis management environment, tunnel vision is a set of bias in decision makersâ cognitive process which often leads to incorrect understanding of the real crisis situation, biased perception of information, and improper decisions. The tunnel vision phenomenon is a consequence of both the challenges in the task and the natural limitation in a human beingâs cognitive process. An information assistant system is proposed with the purpose of preventing tunnel vision. The system serves as a platform for monitoring the on-going crisis event. All information goes through the system before arrives at the user. The system enhances the data quality, reduces the data quantity and presents the crisis information in a manner that prevents or repairs the userâs cognitive overload. While working with such a system, the users (crisis managers) are expected to be more likely to stay aware of the actual situation, stay open minded to possibilities, and make proper decisions
A schema-based P2P network to enable publish-subscribe for multimedia content in open hypermedia systems
Open Hypermedia Systems (OHS) aim to provide efficient dissemination, adaptation and integration of hyperlinked multimedia resources. Content available in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks could add significant value to OHS provided that challenges for efficient discovery and prompt delivery of rich and up-to-date content are successfully addressed. This paper proposes an architecture that enables the operation of OHS over a P2P overlay network of OHS servers based on semantic annotation of (a) peer OHS servers and of (b) multimedia resources that can be obtained through the link services of the OHS. The architecture provides efficient resource discovery. Semantic query-based subscriptions over this P2P network can enable access to up-to-date content, while caching at certain peers enables prompt delivery of multimedia content. Advanced query resolution techniques are employed to match different parts of subscription queries (subqueries). These subscriptions can be shared among different interested peers, thus increasing the efficiency of multimedia content dissemination
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
Pragmatic Ontology Evolution: Reconciling User Requirements and Application Performance
Increasingly, organizations are adopting ontologies to describe their large catalogues of items. These ontologies need to evolve regularly in response to changes in the domain and the emergence of new requirements. An important step of this process is the selection of candidate concepts to include in the new version of the ontology. This operation needs to take into account a variety of factors and in particular reconcile user requirements and application performance. Current ontology evolution methods focus either on ranking concepts according to their relevance or on preserving compatibility with existing applications. However, they do not take in consideration the impact of the ontology evolution process on the performance of computational tasks â e.g., in this work we focus on instance tagging, similarity computation, generation of recommendations, and data clustering. In this paper, we propose the Pragmatic Ontology Evolution (POE) framework, a novel approach for selecting from a group of candidates a set of concepts able to produce a new version of a given ontology that i) is consistent with the a set of user requirements (e.g., max number of concepts in the ontology), ii) is parametrised with respect to a number of dimensions (e.g., topological considerations), and iii) effectively supports relevant computational tasks. Our approach also supports users in navigating the space of possible solutions by showing how certain choices, such as limiting the number of concepts or privileging trendy concepts rather than historical ones, would reflect on the application performance. An evaluation of POE on the real-world scenario of the evolving Springer Nature taxonomy for editorial classification yielded excellent results, demonstrating a significant improvement over alternative approaches
An ontology of agile aspect oriented software development
Both agile methods and aspect oriented programming (AOP) have emerged in recent years as new paradigms in software development. Both promise to free the process of building software systems from some of the constraints of more traditional approaches. As a software engineering approach on the one hand, and a software development tool on the other, there is the potential for them to be used in conjunction. However, thus far, there has been little interplay between the two. Nevertheless, there is some evidence that there may be untapped synergies that may be exploited, if the appropriate approach is taken to integrating AOP with agile methods. This paper takes an ontological approach to supporting this integration, proposing ontology enabled development based on an analysis of existing ontologies of aspect oriented programming, a proposed ontology of agile methods, and a derived ontology of agile aspect oriented development
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