ODESeW. Automatic Generation of Knowledge Portals for Intranets and Extranets

This paper presents ODESeW (Semantic Web Portal based on WebODE platform [1]) as an ontology-based application that automatically generates and manages a knowledge portal for Intranets and Extranets. ODESeW is designed on the top of WebODE ontology engineering platform. This paper shows the service architecture that allows configuring the visualization of ontology-based information for different kinds of users, establishing reading and updating access policies to its content, and performing consistency checking between the portal information and the ontologies underlying it

A decision support system for fostering smart energy efficient districts

The role of ICT is becoming prominent in tackling some of the urban societal challenges such as energy wastage and increasing carbon emissions. In this context, the concept of DAREED aims to deliver an integrated decision support system (DSS) to drive energy efficiency and low carbon activities at both a building and district level. The main aim of this paper is to present the technical concept of the Best Practices recommendation component of the DAREED system. This component seeks to compare and identify existing best practices to recommend practical actions to various stakeholders (e.g. building managers, citizens) in order to improve energy performance considering the global needs of a building. This paper also discusses the context of the three field trial sites (based in UK, Spain and Italy) in which the DAREED platform along with the best practices tool is to be tested and validated.This work evolved in the context of the project DAREED (Decision support Advisor for innovative business models and useR engagement for smart Energy Efficient Districts), www.dareed.eu, a project cofunded by the EC within FP7, Grant agreement no: 609082

An Approach to Construct Dynamic Service Mashups using Lightweight Semantics

Thousands of Web services have been available online, and mashups built upon them have been creating added value. However, mashups are mostly developed with a predefined set of services and components. The extensions to them always involve programming work. Furthermore, when a service is unavailable, it is challenging for mashups to smoothly switch to an alternative that others similar functionalities. To address these problems, this paper presents a novel approach to enable mashups to select and invoke semantic Web services on they. To extend a mashup with new semantic services, developers are only required to register and publish them as Linked Data. By refining the strategies of service selection, mashups can behave more adaptively and other higher fault-tolerance

Socialising around media. Improving the second screen experience through semantic analysis, context awareness and dynamic communities

SAM is a social media platform that enhances the experience of watching video content in a conventional living room setting, with a service that lets the viewer use a second screen (such as a smart phone) to interact with content, context and communities related to the main video content. This article describes three key functionalities used in the SAM platform in order to create an advanced interactive and social second screen experience for users: semantic analysis, context awareness and dynamic communities. Both dataset-based and end user evaluations of system functionalities are reported in order to determine the effectiveness and efficiency of the components directly involved and the platform as a whole

Metadata enhanced content management in media companies

Media companies are facing new opportunities and challenges. Communications, computing, and content industries are converging into a single, horizontally connected content value chain, where changes are frequent and activities are highly interdependent. However, before convergence and digital content are taken seriously, media companies must understand what is expected from them, how their operations will be affected, and why they should be involved. The production, distribution, and use of content rely heavily on computers and automation. This requires the content essence to be enhanced with explicit descriptions of semantics, or more specifically, semantic metadata. However, semantic metadata is useful only if its nature is understood clearly, and when its structure and usage are well defined. For this purpose, ontologies are needed to capture the essential characteristics of the content domain into a limited set of meaningful concepts. The creation and management of ontologies and semantic metadata require skills and activities that do not necessarily exist in traditional print-based publishing or broadcasting. Companies developing ontologies must understand the essential characteristics of available content, user needs, and planned or existing use of content. Furthermore, they must be able to express this information explicitly in an ontology and then reflect changes in the environment back to that ontology. Content production and distribution should be flexible and able to support the reuse of content. This thesis introduces two abstract models, a component model and a process model. Both models assist in the understanding and analysis of electronic publishing of content for multiple media products and on multiple media platforms. When semantic metadata, ontologies, and improved publishing processes are available, new advanced content-based products, such as personalized information feeds, are possible. The SmartPush project, for which the author was the project manager and worked as a researcher, has shown that semantic metadata is useful in creating advanced content-based products, and that media companies are willing to alter their existing publishing processes. Media companies participating in the SmartPush project have acknowledged the impact of our work on their plans and operations. Their acknowledgement emphasizes the practical importance of semantic metadata, ontologies, improved electronic publishing process, and personalization research.reviewe

Music domain ontology applications for intelligent web searching

The Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web that at-tempts to reach a state in the future where everything on the Web willno longer be only machine-readable, but also machine-understandable.Three important technologies for developing the Semantic Web are al-ready in place: Extensible Markup Language (XML), the ResourceDescription Framework (RDF), and Web Ontology Language (OWL).An ontology language is a formal language used to encode ontologies.An ontology is an explicit speci¯cation of a conceptualization. Manydisciplines now develop standardized ontologies that domain expertscan use to share and annotate information in their ¯elds, and whichcan be used for reasoning about the objects within a particular do-main. It includes machine-interpretable de¯nitions of basic conceptsin the domain and relations among them. In this work, we develop anontology of Argentinean music. Despite being highly speci¯c, we illus-trate how such an ontology can be expanded and used in applicationsthat carry out complex music related searches. These applications canbe embedded later on in electronic devices with some form of wirelessnetworking capability, such as mobile phones, enriching their currentfunctionality

Towards an approach for weaving preferences into web services operation

Existing approaches on Web services privacy dominate solutions from a users’ perspective, giving little consideration to the preferences of Web service providers. The integration of service providers’ preferences into Web services’ operations is discussed in this paper. A Web service provider indicates peer Web services that it could interact with as well as the data that they could exchange with. We focus on Privacy and (trust) Partnership preferences based on which, we develop a Specification for Privacy and Partnership Preferences (S3P). This specification suggests a list of exceptional actions to deploy at run-time when these preferences are not met. An integration model of these preferences into Web services design is illustrated throughout a running scenario, and an implementation framework proves the S3P concept.Zakaria Maamar, Quan Z. Sheng, Yacine Atif, Sujith Samuel Mathew, Khouloud Boukad

MPEG-SCORM : ontologia de metadados interoperáveis para integração de padrões multimídia e e-learning

Orientador: Yuzo IanoTese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de ComputaçãoResumo: A convergência entre as mídias digitais propõe uma integração entre as TIC, focadas no domínio do multimídia (sob a responsabilidade do Moving Picture Experts Group, constituindo o subcomitê ISO / IEC JTC1 SC29), e as TICE, (TIC para a Educação, geridas pelo ISO / IEC JTC1 SC36), destacando-se os padrões MPEG, empregados na forma de conteúdo e metadados para o multimídia, e as TICE, aplicadas à Educação a Distância, ou e-Learning (o aprendizado eletrônico). Neste sentido, coloca-se a problemática de desenvolver uma correspondência interoperável de bases normativas, atingindo assim uma proposta inovadora na convergência entre as mídias digitais e as aplicações para e-Learning, essencialmente multimídia. Para este fim, propõe-se criar e aplicar uma ontologia de metadados interoperáveis para web, TV digital e extensões para dispositivos móveis, baseada na integração entre os padrões de metadados MPEG-21 e SCORM, empregando a linguagem XPathAbstract: The convergence of digital media offers an integration of the ICT, focused on telecommunications and multimedia domain (under responsibility of the Moving Picture Experts Group, ISO/IEC JTC1 SC29), with the ICTE (the ICT for Education, managed by the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36), highlighting the MPEG formats, featured as content and as description metadata potentially applied to the Multimedia or Digital TV and as a technology applied to e-Learning. Regarding this, it is presented the problem of developing an interoperable matching for normative bases, achieving an innovative proposal in the convergence between digital Telecommunications and applications for e-Learning, both essentially multimedia. To achieve this purpose, it is proposed to creating a ontology for interoperability between educational applications in Digital TV environments and vice-versa, simultaneously facilitating the creation of learning metadata based objects for Digital TV programs as well as providing multimedia video content as learning objects for Distance Education. This ontology is designed as interoperable metadata for the Web, Digital TV and e-Learning, built on the integration between MPEG-21 and SCORM metadata standards, employing the XPath languageDoutoradoTelecomunicações e TelemáticaDoutor em Engenharia ElétricaCAPE

User data discovery and aggregation: the CS-UDD algorithm

In the social web, people use social systems for sharing content and opinions, for communicating with friends, for tagging, etc. People usually have different accounts and different profiles on all of these systems. Several tools for user data aggregation and people search have been developed and protocols and standards for data portability have been defined. This paper presents an approach and an algorithm, named Cross-System User Data Discovery (CS-UDD), to retrieve and aggregate user data distributed on social websites. It is designed to crawl websites, retrieve profiles that may belong to the searched user, correlate them, aggregate the discovered data and return them to the searcher which may, for example, be an adaptive system. The user attributes retrieved, namely attribute-value pairs, are associated with a certainty factor that expresses the confidence that they are true for the searched user. To test the algorithm, we ran it on two popular social networks, MySpace and Flickr. The evaluation has demonstrated the ability of the CS-UDD algorithm to discover unknown user attributes and has revealed high precision of the discovered attributes