Rationale Management Challenges in Requirements Engineering

Rationale and rationale management have been playing an increasingly prominent role in software system development mainly due to the knowledge demand during system evaluation, maintenance, and evolution, especially for large and complex systems. The rationale management for requirements engineering, as a commencing and critical phase in software development life cycle, is still under-exploited. In this paper, we first survey briefly the state-of-the-art on rationale employment and applications in requirements engineering. Secondly, we identify the challenges in integrating rationale management in requirements engineering activities in order to promote further investigations and define a research agenda on rationale management in requirements engineering.

Agile elicitation of semantic goals by wiki

Formal goal and service descriptions are the shibboleth of the semantic web services approach, yet the people responsible for creating them are neither machines nor logicians, and rarely even knowledge engineers: the people who need and specify functionality are not those who provide it, and both may be distinct from the semantic annotators. The gap between users' informal conceptualisations of problems and formal descriptions is one which must be effectively bridged for semantic web services to be widely adopted. We show how a simple technique–using a wiki to collect user requirements and mediate a progressive, iterative refinement and formalisation of user goals by domain experts and their knowledge engineer colleagues–can achieve this. Further, we suggest how the process could be extended, so as to itself benefit from semantic technologies

Utilising Provenance to Enhance Social Computation

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Collaborative editing of knowledge resources for cross-lingual text mining

The need to smoothly deal with textual documents expressed in different languages is increasingly becoming a relevant issue in modern text mining environments. Recently the research on this field has been considerably fostered by the necessity for Web users to easily search and browse the growing amount of heterogeneous multilingual contents available on-line as well as by the related spread of the Semantic Web. A common approach to cross-lingual text mining relies on the exploitation of sets of properly structured multilingual knowledge resources. The involvement of huge communities of users spread over different locations represents a valuable aid to create, enrich, and refine these knowledge resources. Collaborative editing Web environments are usually exploited to this purpose. This thesis analyzes the features of several knowledge editing tools, both semantic wikis and ontology editors, and discusses the main challenges related to the design and development of this kind of tools. Subsequently, it presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of the Wikyoto Knowledge Editor, called also Wikyoto. Wikyoto is the collaborative editing Web environment that enables Web users lacking any knowledge engineering background to edit the multilingual network of knowledge resources exploited by KYOTO, a cross-lingual text mining system developed in the context of the KYOTO European Project. To experiment real benefits from social editing of knowledge resources, it is important to provide common Web users with simplified and intuitive interfaces and interaction patterns. Users need to be motivated and properly driven so as to supply information useful for cross-lingual text mining. In addition, the management and coordination of their concurrent editing actions involve relevant technical issues. In the design of Wikyoto, all these requirements have been considered together with the structure and the set of knowledge resources exploited by KYOTO. Wikyoto aims at enabling common Web users to formalize cross-lingual knowledge by exploiting simplified language-driven interactions. At the same time, Wikyoto generates the set of complex knowledge structures needed by computers to mine information from textual contents. The learning curve of Wikyoto has been kept as shallow as possible by hiding the complexity of the knowledge structures to the users. This goal has been pursued by both enhancing the simplicity and interactivity of knowledge editing patterns and by using natural language interviews to carry out the most complex knowledge editing tasks. In this context, TMEKO, a methodology useful to support users to easily formalize cross-lingual information by natural language interviews has been defined. The collaborative creation of knowledge resources has been evaluated in Wikyoto

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

A framework for feeding Linked Data to Complex Event Processing engines

A huge volume of Linked Data has been published on the Web, yet is not processable by Complex Event Processing (CEP) or Event Stream Processing (ESP) engines. This paper presents a frame-work to bridge this gap, under which Linked Data are first translated into events conforming to a lightweight ontology, and then fed to CEP engines. The event processing results will also be published back onto the Web of Data. In this way, CEP engines are connected to the Web of Data, and the ontological reasoning is integrated with event processing. Finally, the implementation method and a case study of the framework are presented