The ACCENT Policy Wizard

The ACCENT project (Advanced Component Control Enhancing Network Technologies) developed a practical and comprehensive policy system for call control/Internet telephony. The policy system has subsequently been extended for management of sensor networks/wind farms and of home care/telecare. This report focuses on a web-based policy wizard that acts as the primary interface between end users and the policy system. The policy wizard has an intimate knowledge of the APPEL policy language (Adaptable and Programmable Policy Environment and Language). The wizard allows end users to create policies using nearnatural language without knowing or seeing XML, and to upload them to the policy system. The wizard also provides a number of convenience functions such as predefined policy templates, editing and activating existing policies, and defining policy variables. Relative to the version of December 2005, this Technical Report has been updated as follows to reflect changes in the policy wizard: - The whole report has been updated to reflect later work on the PROSEN and MATCH projects. As a result, the ACCENT and APPEL acronyms have changed. Call control, however, remains are the primary illustration of the approach in this report. - Chapter 1 is now named ‘Introduction’, and a brief ‘Conclusion’ chapter has been added in section 4. - Chapter 2 has been updated to sheet screenshots of the new policy wizard. The wizard now handles resolution policies. - The wizard now makes use of ontologies, as described briefly in section 3.1. All domain-specific knowledge is held outside the wizard, so that largely common code can be used across all domains. As a result, the wizard configuration now also refers to the POPPET server. - Section 3.6 describes a new code structure that allows different versions of the wizard to coexist. - A brief explanation has been given in section 3.8 of what is involved in supporting a new application domain with the wizard

Design issues for agent-based resource locator systems

While knowledge is viewed by many as an asset, it is often difficult to locate particularitems within a large electronic corpus. This paper presents an agent based framework for the location of resources to resolve a specific query, and considers the associated design issue. Aspects of the work presented complements current research into both expertise finders and recommender systems. The essential issues for the proposed design are scalability, together ith the ability to learn and adapt to changing resources. As knowledge is often implicit within electronic resources, and therefore difficult to locate, we have proposed the use of ontologies, to extract the semantics and infer meaning to obtain the results required. We explore the use of communities of practice, applying ontology-based networks, and e-mail message exchanges to aid the resource discovery process

Ontologies on the semantic web

As an informational technology, the World Wide Web has enjoyed spectacular success. In just ten years it has transformed the way information is produced, stored, and shared in arenas as diverse as shopping, family photo albums, and high-level academic research. The “Semantic Web” was touted by its developers as equally revolutionary but has not yet achieved anything like the Web’s exponential uptake. This 17 000 word survey article explores why this might be so, from a perspective that bridges both philosophy and IT

Back to practice, a decade of research in E-government

E-government is a multidisciplinary field of research based initially on empirical insights from practice. Efforts to theoretically found the field have opened perspectives from multiple research domains. The goal of this chapter is to review evolution of the e-government field from an institutional and an academic point of view. Our position is that e-government is an emergent multidisciplinary field of research in which focus on practice is a prominent characteristic. Each chapter of the book is then briefly presented and is positioned according to a vision of the e-government domain of research.E-government, Case study, E-administration, Public domain

BioMeRSA: The Biology media repository with semantic augmentation

With computers now capable of easily handling all kinds of multimedia files in vast quantity, and with the Internet now well-suited to exchange these files, we are faced with the challenge of organizing this data in such a way so as to make the information most useful and accessible. This holds true as well for media pertaining to the field of biology, where multimedia is particularly useful in education, as well as in research. To help address this, a software system with a Web-based interface has been developed for improving the accuracy and specificity of multimedia searching and browsing by integrating semantic data pertaining to the field of biology from the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). Using the Biology Media Repository with Semantic Augmentation (BioMeRSA) system, users who are considered to be `experts\u27 can associate concepts from UMLS with multimedia files submitted by other users to provide semantic context for the files. These annotations are used to retrieve relevant files in the searching and browsing interfaces. A wide variety of image files are currently supported, with some limited support for video and audio files