Exploring manuscripts: sharing ancient wisdoms across the semantic web

Recent work in digital humanities has seen researchers in-creasingly producing online editions of texts and manuscripts, particularly in adoption of the TEI XML format for online publishing. The benefits of semantic web techniques are un-derexplored in such research, however, with a lack of sharing and communication of research information. The Sharing Ancient Wisdoms (SAWS) project applies linked data prac-tices to enhance and expand on what is possible with these digital text editions. Focussing on Greek and Arabic col-lections of ancient wise sayings, which are often related to each other, we use RDF to annotate and extract seman-tic information from the TEI documents as RDF triples. This allows researchers to explore the conceptual networks that arise from these interconnected sayings. The SAWS project advocates a semantic-web-based methodology, en-hancing rather than replacing current workflow processes, for digital humanities researchers to share their findings and collectively benefit from each other’s work

Semantic annotation of Web APIs with SWEET

Recently technology developments in the area of services on the Web are marked by the proliferation of Web applications and APIs. The development and evolution of applications based on Web APIs is, however, hampered by the lack of automation that can be achieved with current technologies. In this paper we present SWEET - Semantic Web sErvices Editing Tool - a lightweight Web application for creating semantic descriptions of Web APIs. SWEET directly supports the creation of mashups by enabling the semantic annotation of Web APIs, thus contributing to the automation of the discovery, composition and invocation service tasks. Furthermore, it enables the development of composite SWS based applications on top of Linked Data

Establishing a distributed system for the simple representation and integration of diverse scientific assertions

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Information technology has the potential to increase the pace of scientific progress by helping researchers in formulating, publishing and finding information. There are numerous projects that employ ontologies and Semantic Web technologies towards this goal. However, the number of applications that have found widespread use among biomedical researchers is still surprisingly small. In this paper we present the aTag (‘associative tags’) convention, which aims to drastically lower the entry barriers to the biomedical Semantic Web. aTags are short snippets of HTML+RDFa with embedded RDF/OWL based on the Semantically Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC) vocabulary and domain ontologies and taxonomies, such as the Open Biomedical Ontologies and DBpedia. The structure of aTags is very simple: a short piece of human-readable text that is ‘tagged’ with relevant ontological entities. This paper describes our efforts for seeding the creation of a viable ecosystem of datasets, tools and services around aTags.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Numerous biomedical datasets in aTag format and systems for the creation of aTags have been set-up and are described in this paper. Prototypes of some of these systems are accessible at <url>http://hcls.deri.org/atag</url></p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The aTags convention enables the rapid development of diverse, integrated datasets and semantically interoperable applications. More work needs to be done to study the practicability of this approach in different use-case scenarios, and to encourage uptake of the convention by other groups.</p

Adaptation of NLP Techniques to Cultural Heritage Research and Documentation

The WissKI system provides a framework for ontology based science communication and cultural heritage documentation. In many cases, the documentation consists of semi-structured data records with free text fields. Most references in the texts comprise of person and place names, as well as time specifications. We present the WissKI tools for semantic annotation using controlled vocabularies and formal ontologies derived from CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM). Current research deals with the annotations as building blocks for event recognition. Finally, we outline how the CRM helps to build bridges between documentation in different scientific disciplines

Where are your Manners? Sharing Best Community Practices in the Web 2.0

The Web 2.0 fosters the creation of communities by offering users a wide array of social software tools. While the success of these tools is based on their ability to support different interaction patterns among users by imposing as few limitations as possible, the communities they support are not free of rules (just think about the posting rules in a community forum or the editing rules in a thematic wiki). In this paper we propose a framework for the sharing of best community practices in the form of a (potentially rule-based) annotation layer that can be integrated with existing Web 2.0 community tools (with specific focus on wikis). This solution is characterized by minimal intrusiveness and plays nicely within the open spirit of the Web 2.0 by providing users with behavioral hints rather than by enforcing the strict adherence to a set of rules.Comment: ACM symposium on Applied Computing, Honolulu : \'Etats-Unis d'Am\'erique (2009

Supporting the creation of semantic RESTful service descriptions

Research on semantic Web services (SWS) has been devoted to reduce the extensive manual eort required for manipulating Web services by enhancing them with semantic information. Recently, the world around services on the Web, thus far limited to "classical" Web services based on SOAP and WSDL, has significantly evolved with the proliferation of Web applications and APIs, often referred to as RESTful Web services. However, despite their success, RESTful services are currently facing similar limitations to those identified for traditional Web service technologies and present even further difficulties, such as the lack of machine-processable service descriptions. In order to address these challenges and to enable the wider adoption of RESTful service technologies, we advocate an integrated lightweight approach for formally describing semantic RESTful services. The approach is based on the use of the hRESTS (HTML for RESTful Services) and MicroWSMO microformats, which enable the creation of machine-readable service descriptions and the addition of semantic annotations, correspondingly. Finally, we present SWEET - Semantic Web sErvices Editing Tool - which effectively supports users in creating semantic descriptions of RESTful services based on the aforementioned technologies