Towards Analytics Aware Ontology Based Access to Static and Streaming Data (Extended Version)

Real-time analytics that requires integration and aggregation of heterogeneous and distributed streaming and static data is a typical task in many industrial scenarios such as diagnostics of turbines in Siemens. OBDA approach has a great potential to facilitate such tasks; however, it has a number of limitations in dealing with analytics that restrict its use in important industrial applications. Based on our experience with Siemens, we argue that in order to overcome those limitations OBDA should be extended and become analytics, source, and cost aware. In this work we propose such an extension. In particular, we propose an ontology, mapping, and query language for OBDA, where aggregate and other analytical functions are first class citizens. Moreover, we develop query optimisation techniques that allow to efficiently process analytical tasks over static and streaming data. We implement our approach in a system and evaluate our system with Siemens turbine data

A semantic sensor web for environmental decision support applications

Sensing devices are increasingly being deployed to monitor the physical world around us. One class of application for which sensor data is pertinent is environmental decision support systems, e.g., flood emergency response. For these applications, the sensor readings need to be put in context by integrating them with other sources of data about the surrounding environment. Traditional systems for predicting and detecting floods rely on methods that need significant human resources. In this paper we describe a semantic sensor web architecture for integrating multiple heterogeneous datasets, including live and historic sensor data, databases, and map layers. The architecture provides mechanisms for discovering datasets, defining integrated views over them, continuously receiving data in real-time, and visualising on screen and interacting with the data. Our approach makes extensive use of web service standards for querying and accessing data, and semantic technologies to discover and integrate datasets. We demonstrate the use of our semantic sensor web architecture in the context of a flood response planning web application that uses data from sensor networks monitoring the sea-state around the coast of England

4Sensing - decentralized processing for participatory sensing data

Trabalho apresentado no âmbito do Mestrado em Engenharia Informática, como requisito parcial para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática.Participatory sensing is a new application paradigm, stemming from both technical and social drives, which is currently gaining momentum as a research domain. It leverages the growing adoption of mobile phones equipped with sensors, such as camera, GPS and accelerometer, enabling users to collect and aggregate data, covering a wide area without incurring in the costs associated with a large-scale sensor network. Related research in participatory sensing usually proposes an architecture based on a centralized back-end. Centralized solutions raise a set of issues. On one side, there is the implications of having a centralized repository hosting privacy sensitive information. On the other side, this centralized model has financial costs that can discourage grassroots initiatives. This dissertation focuses on the data management aspects of a decentralized infrastructure for the support of participatory sensing applications, leveraging the body of work on participatory sensing and related areas, such as wireless and internet-wide sensor networks, peer-to-peer data management and stream processing. It proposes a framework covering a common set of data management requirements - from data acquisition, to processing, storage and querying - with the goal of lowering the barrier for the development and deployment of applications. Alternative architectural approaches - RTree, QTree and NTree - are proposed and evaluated experimentally in the context of a case-study application - SpeedSense - supporting the monitoring and prediction of traffic conditions, through the collection of speed and location samples in an urban setting, using GPS equipped mobile phones

A dynamic dashboarding application for fleet monitoring using semantic web of things technologies

In industry, dashboards are often used to monitor fleets of assets, such as trains, machines or buildings. In such industrial fleets, the vast amount of sensors evolves continuously, new sensor data exchange protocols and data formats are introduced, new visualization types may need to be introduced and existing dashboard visualizations may need to be updated in terms of displayed sensors. These requirements motivate the development of dynamic dashboarding applications. These, as opposed to fixed-structure dashboard applications, allow users to create visualizations at will and do not have hard-coded sensor bindings. The state-of-the-art in dynamic dashboarding does not cope well with the frequent additions and removals of sensors that must be monitored—these changes must still be configured in the implementation or at runtime by a user. Also, the user is presented with an overload of sensors, aggregations and visualizations to select from, which may sometimes even lead to the creation of dashboard widgets that do not make sense. In this paper, we present a dynamic dashboard that overcomes these problems. Sensors, visualizations and aggregations can be discovered automatically, since they are provided as RESTful Web Things on a Web Thing Model compliant gateway. The gateway also provides semantic annotations of the Web Things, describing what their abilities are. A semantic reasoner can derive visualization suggestions, given the Thing annotations, logic rules and a custom dashboard ontology. The resulting dashboarding application automatically presents the available sensors, visualizations and aggregations that can be used, without requiring sensor configuration, and assists the user in building dashboards that make sense. This way, the user can concentrate on interpreting the sensor data and detecting and solving operational problems early

Model driven design and data integration in semantic web information systems

The Web is quickly evolving in many ways. It has evolved from a Web of documents into a Web of applications in which a growing number of designers offer new and interactive Web applications with people all over the world. However, application design and implementation remain complex, error-prone and laborious. In parallel there is also an evolution from a Web of documents into a Web of `knowledge' as a growing number of data owners are sharing their data sources with a growing audience. This brings the potential new applications for these data sources, including scenarios in which these datasets are reused and integrated with other existing and new data sources. However, the heterogeneity of these data sources in syntax, semantics and structure represents a great challenge for application designers. The Semantic Web is a collection of standards and technologies that offer solutions for at least the syntactic and some structural issues. If offers semantic freedom and flexibility, but this leaves the issue of semantic interoperability. In this thesis we present Hera-S, an evolution of the Model Driven Web Engineering (MDWE) method Hera. MDWEs allow designers to create data centric applications using models instead of programming. Hera-S especially targets Semantic Web sources and provides a flexible method for designing personalized adaptive Web applications. Hera-S defines several models that together define the target Web application. Moreover we implemented a framework called Hydragen, which is able to execute the Hera-S models to run the desired Web application. Hera-S' core is the Application Model (AM) in which the main logic of the application is defined, i.e. defining the groups of data elements that form logical units or subunits, the personalization conditions, and the relationships between the units. Hera-S also uses a so-called Domain Model (DM) that describes the content and its structure. However, this DM is not Hera-S specific, but instead allows any Semantic Web source representation as its DM, as long as its content can be queried by the standardized Semantic Web query language SPARQL. The same holds for the User Model (UM). The UM can be used for personalization conditions, but also as a source of user-related content if necessary. In fact, the difference between DM and UM is conceptual as their implementation within Hydragen is the same. Hera-S also defines a presentation model (PM) which defines presentation details of elements like order and style. In order to help designers with building their Web applications we have introduced a toolset, Hera Studio, which allows to build the different models graphically. Hera Studio also provides some additional functionality like model checking and deployment of the models in Hydragen. Both Hera-S and its implementation Hydragen are designed to be flexible regarding the user of models. In order to achieve this Hydragen is a stateless engine that queries for relevant information from the models at every page request. This allows the models and data to be changed in the datastore during runtime. We show that one way to exploit this flexibility is by applying aspect-orientation to the AM. Aspect-orientation allows us to dynamically inject functionality that pervades the entire application. Another way to exploit Hera-S' flexibility is in reusing specialized components, e.g. for presentation generation. We present a configuration of Hydragen in which we replace our native presentation generation functionality by the AMACONT engine. AMACONT provides more extensive multi-level presentation generation and adaptation capabilities as well aspect-orientation and a form of semantic based adaptation. Hera-S was designed to allow the (re-)use of any (Semantic) Web datasource. It even opens up the possibility for data integration at the back end, by using an extendible storage layer in our database of choice Sesame. However, even though theoretically possible it still leaves much of the actual data integration issue. As this is a recurring issue in many domains, a broader challenge than for Hera-S design only, we decided to look at this issue in isolation. We present a framework called Relco which provides a language to express data transformation operations as well as a collection of techniques that can be used to (semi-)automatically find relationships between concepts in different ontologies. This is done with a combination of syntactic, semantic and collaboration techniques, which together provide strong clues for which concepts are most likely related. In order to prove the applicability of Relco we explore five application scenarios in different domains for which data integration is a central aspect. This includes a cultural heritage portal, Explorer, for which data from several datasources was integrated and was made available by a mapview, a timeline and a graph view. Explorer also allows users to provide metadata for objects via a tagging mechanism. Another application is SenSee: an electronic TV-guide and recommender. TV-guide data was integrated and enriched with semantically structured data from several sources. Recommendations are computed by exploiting the underlying semantic structure. ViTa was a project in which several techniques for tagging and searching educational videos were evaluated. This includes scenarios in which user tags are related with an ontology, or other tags, using the Relco framework. The MobiLife project targeted the facilitation of a new generation of mobile applications that would use context-based personalization. This can be done using a context-based user profiling platform that can also be used for user model data exchange between mobile applications using technologies like Relco. The final application scenario that is shown is from the GRAPPLE project which targeted the integration of adaptive technology into current learning management systems. A large part of this integration is achieved by using a user modeling component framework in which any application can store user model information, but which can also be used for the exchange of user model data

OptiqueVQS: A visual query system over ontologies for industry

An important application of semantic technologies in industry has been the formalisation of information models using OWL 2 ontologies and the use of RDF for storing and exchanging application data. Moreover, legacy data can be virtualised as RDF using ontologies following the ontology-based data access (OBDA) approach. In all these applications, it is important to provide domain experts with query formulation tools for expressing their information needs in terms of queries over ontologies. In this work, we present such a tool, OptiqueVQS, which is designed based on our experience with OBDA applications in Statoil and Siemens and on best HCI practices for interdisciplinary engineering environments. OptiqueVQS implements a number of unique techniques distinguishing it from analogous query formulation systems. In particular, it exploits ontology projection techniques to enable graph-based navigation over an ontology during query construction. Secondly, while OptiqueVQS is primarily ontology driven, it exploits sampled data to enhance selection of data values for some data attributes. Finally, OptiqueVQS is built on well-grounded requirements, design rationale, and quality attributes. We evaluated OptiqueVQS with both domain experts and casual users and qualitatively compared our system against prominent visual systems for ontology-driven query formulation and exploration of semantic data. OptiqueVQS is available online and can be downloaded together with an example OBDA scenario

Compact semantic representations of observational data

Das Konzept des Internet der Dinge (IoT) ist in mehreren Bereichen weit verbreitet, damit Geräte miteinander interagieren und bestimmte Aufgaben erfüllen können. IoT-Geräte umfassen verschiedene Konzepte, z.B. Sensoren, Programme, Computer und Aktoren. IoT-Geräte beobachten ihre Umgebung, um Informationen zu sammeln und miteinander zu kommunizieren, um gemeinsame Aufgaben zu erfüllen. Diese Vorrichtungen erzeugen kontinuierlich Beobachtungsdatenströme, die zu historischen Daten werden, wenn diese Beobachtungen gespeichert werden. Durch die Zunahme der Anzahl der IoT-Geräte wird eine große Menge an Streaming- und historischen Beobachtungsdaten erzeugt. Darüber hinaus wurden mehrere Ontologien, wie die Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) Ontologie, für die semantische Annotation von Beobachtungsdaten vorgeschlagen - entweder Stream oder historisch. Das Resource Description Framework (RDF) ist ein weit verbreitetes Datenmodell zur semantischen Beschreibung der Datensätze. Semantische Annotation bietet ein gemeinsames Verständnis für die Verarbeitung und Analyse von Beobachtungsdaten. Durch das Hinzufügen von Semantik wird die Datengröße jedoch weiter erhöht, insbesondere wenn die Beobachtungswerte von mehreren Geräten redundant erfasst werden. So können beispielsweise mehrere Sensoren Beobachtungen erzeugen, die den gleichen Wert für die relative Luftfeuchtigkeit in einem bestimmten Zeitstempel und einer bestimmten Stadt anzeigen. Diese Situation kann in einem RDF-Diagramm mit vier RDF-Tripel dargestellt werden, wobei Beobachtungen als Tripel dargestellt werden, die das beobachtete Phänomen, die Maßeinheit, den Zeitstempel und die Koordinaten beschreiben. Die RDF-Tripel einer Beobachtung sind mit dem gleichen Thema verbunden. Solche Beobachtungen teilen sich die gleichen Objekte in einer bestimmten Gruppe von Eigenschaften, d.h. sie entsprechen einem Sternmuster, das sich aus diesen Eigenschaften und Objekten zusammensetzt. Wenn die Anzahl dieser Subjektentitäten oder Eigenschaften in diesen Sternmustern groß ist, wird die Größe des RDF-Diagramms und der Abfrageverarbeitung negativ beeinflusst; wir bezeichnen diese Sternmuster als häufige Sternmuster. Diese Arbeit befasst sich mit dem Problem der Identifizierung von häufigen Sternenmustern in RDF-Diagrammen und entwickelt Berechnungsmethoden, um häufige Sternmuster zu identifizieren und ein faktorisiertes RDF-Diagramm zu erzeugen, bei dem die Anzahl der häufigen Sternmuster minimiert wird. Darüber hinaus wenden wir diese faktorisierten RDF-Darstellungen über historische semantische Sensordaten an, die mit der SSN-Ontologie beschrieben werden, und präsentieren tabellarische Darstellungen von faktorisierten semantischen Sensordaten, um Big Data-Frameworks auszunutzen. Darüber hinaus entwickelt diese Arbeit einen wissensbasierten Ansatz namens DESERT, der in der Lage ist, bei Bedarf Streamdaten zu faktorisieren und semantisch anzureichern (on-Demand factorizE and Semantically Enrich stReam daTa). Wir bewerten die Leistung unserer vorgeschlagenen Techniken anhand mehrerer RDF-Diagramm-Benchmarks. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass unsere Techniken in der Lage sind, häufige Sternmuster effektiv und effizient zu erkennen, und die Größe der RDF-Diagramme kann um bis zu 66,56% reduziert werden, während die im ursprünglichen RDF-Diagramm dargestellten Daten erhalten bleiben. Darüber hinaus sind die kompakten Darstellungen in der Lage, die Anzahl der RDF-Tripel um mindestens 53,25% in historischen Beobachtungsdaten und bis zu 94,34% in Beobachtungsdatenströmen zu reduzieren. Darüber hinaus reduzieren die Ergebnisse der Anfrageauswertung über historische Daten die Ausführungszeit der Anfrage um bis zu drei Größenordnungen. In Beobachtungsdatenströmen wird die Größe der zur Beantwortung der Anfrage benötigten Daten um 92,53% reduziert, wodurch der Speicherplatzbedarf zur Beantwortung der Anfragen reduziert wird. Diese Ergebnisse belegen, dass IoT-Daten mit den vorgeschlagenen kompakten Darstellungen effizient dargestellt werden können, wodurch die negativen Auswirkungen semantischer Annotationen auf das IoT-Datenmanagement reduziert werden.The Internet of Things (IoT) concept has been widely adopted in several domains to enable devices to interact with each other and perform certain tasks. IoT devices encompass different concepts, e.g., sensors, programs, computers, and actuators. IoT devices observe their surroundings to collect information and communicate with each other in order to perform mutual tasks. These devices continuously generate observational data streams, which become historical data when these observations are stored. Due to an increase in the number of IoT devices, a large amount of streaming and historical observational data is being produced. Moreover, several ontologies, like the Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) Ontology, have been proposed for semantic annotation of observational data-either streams or historical. Resource Description Framework (RDF) is widely adopted data model to semantically describe the datasets. Semantic annotation provides a shared understanding for processing and analysis of observational data. However, adding semantics, further increases the data size especially when the observation values are redundantly sensed by several devices. For example, several sensors can generate observations indicating the same value for relative humidity in a given timestamp and city. This situation can be represented in an RDF graph using four RDF triples where observations are represented as triples that describe the observed phenomenon, the unit of measurement, the timestamp, and the coordinates. The RDF triples of an observation are associated with the same subject. Such observations share the same objects in a certain group of properties, i.e., they match star patterns composed of these properties and objects. In case the number of these subject entities or properties in these star patterns is large, the size of the RDF graph and query processing are negatively impacted; we refer these star patterns as frequent star patterns. This thesis addresses the problem of identifying frequent star patterns in RDF graphs and develop computational methods to identify frequent star patterns and generate a factorized RDF graph where the number of frequent star patterns is minimized. Furthermore, we apply these factorized RDF representations over historical semantic sensor data described using the SSN ontology and present tabular-based representations of factorized semantic sensor data in order to exploit Big Data frameworks. In addition, this thesis devises a knowledge-driven approach named DESERT that is able to on-Demand factorizE and Semantically Enrich stReam daTa. We evaluate the performance of our proposed techniques on several RDF graph benchmarks. The outcomes show that our techniques are able to effectively and efficiently detect frequent star patterns and RDF graph size can be reduced by up to 66.56% while data represented in the original RDF graph is preserved. Moreover, the compact representations are able to reduce the number of RDF triples by at least 53.25% in historical observational data and upto 94.34% in observational data streams. Additionally, query evaluation results over historical data reduce query execution time by up to three orders of magnitude. In observational data streams the size of the data required to answer the query is reduced by 92.53% reducing the memory space requirements to answer the queries. These results provide evidence that IoT data can be efficiently represented using the proposed compact representations, reducing thus, the negative impact that semantic annotations may have on IoT data management

The European Industrial Data Space (EIDS)

This research work has been performed in the framework of the Boost 4.0 Big Data lighthouse initiative, a project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement no. 780732. This datadriven digital transformation research is also endorsed by the Digital Factory Alliance (DFA)The path that the European Commission foresees to leverage data in the best possible way for the sake of European citizens and the digital single market clearly addresses the need for a European Data Space. This data space must follow the rules, derived from European values. The European Data Strategy rests on four pillars: (1) Governance framework for access and use; (2) Investments in Europe’s data capabilities and infrastructures; (3) Competences and skills of individuals and SMEs; (4) Common European Data Spaces in nine strategic areas such as industrial manufacturing, mobility, health, and energy. The project BOOST 4.0 developed a prototype for the industrial manufacturing sector, called European Industrial Data Space (EIDS), an endeavour of 53 companies. The publication will show the developed architectural pattern as well as the developed components and introduce the required infrastructure that was developed for the EIDS. Additionally, the population of such a data space with Big Data enabled services and platforms is described and will be enriched with the perspective of the pilots that have been build based on EIDS.publishersversionpublishe