Scalable integration of uncertainty reasoning and semantic web technologies

In recent years formal logical standards for knowledge representation to model real world knowledge and domains and make them accessible for computers gained a lot of trac- tion. They provide an expressive logical framework for modeling, consistency checking, reasoning, and query answering, and have proven to be versatile methods to capture knowledge of various fields. Those formalisms and methods focus on specifying knowl- edge as precisely as possible. At the same time, many applications in particular on the Semantic Web have to deal with uncertainty in their data; and handling uncertain knowledge is crucial in many real- world domains. However, regular logic is unable to capture the real-world properly due to its inherent complexity and uncertainty, all the while handling uncertain or incomplete information is getting more and more important in applications like expert system, data integration or information extraction. The overall objective of this dissertation is to identify scenarios and datasets where methods that incorporate their inherent uncertainty improve results, and investigate approaches and tools that are suitable for the respective task. In summary, this work is set out to tackle the following objectives: 1. debugging uncertain knowledge bases in order to generate consistent knowledge graphs to make them accessible for logical reasoning, 2. combining probabilistic query answering and logical reasoning which in turn uses these consistent knowledge graphs to answer user queries, and 3. employing the aforementioned techniques to the problem of risk management in IT infrastructures, as a concrete real-world application. We show that in all those scenarios, users can benefit from incorporating uncertainty in the knowledge base. Furthermore, we conduct experiments that demonstrate the real- world scalability of the demonstrated approaches. Overall, we argue that integrating uncertainty and logical reasoning, despite being theoretically intractable, is feasible in real-world application and warrants further research

Context Aware Computing for The Internet of Things: A Survey

As we are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of sensors deployed around the world is growing at a rapid pace. Market research has shown a significant growth of sensor deployments over the past decade and has predicted a significant increment of the growth rate in the future. These sensors continuously generate enormous amounts of data. However, in order to add value to raw sensor data we need to understand it. Collection, modelling, reasoning, and distribution of context in relation to sensor data plays critical role in this challenge. Context-aware computing has proven to be successful in understanding sensor data. In this paper, we survey context awareness from an IoT perspective. We present the necessary background by introducing the IoT paradigm and context-aware fundamentals at the beginning. Then we provide an in-depth analysis of context life cycle. We evaluate a subset of projects (50) which represent the majority of research and commercial solutions proposed in the field of context-aware computing conducted over the last decade (2001-2011) based on our own taxonomy. Finally, based on our evaluation, we highlight the lessons to be learnt from the past and some possible directions for future research. The survey addresses a broad range of techniques, methods, models, functionalities, systems, applications, and middleware solutions related to context awareness and IoT. Our goal is not only to analyse, compare and consolidate past research work but also to appreciate their findings and discuss their applicability towards the IoT.Comment: IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials Journal, 201

Streaming the Web: Reasoning over dynamic data.

In the last few years a new research area, called stream reasoning, emerged to bridge the gap between reasoning and stream processing. While current reasoning approaches are designed to work on mainly static data, the Web is, on the other hand, extremely dynamic: information is frequently changed and updated, and new data is continuously generated from a huge number of sources, often at high rate. In other words, fresh information is constantly made available in the form of streams of new data and updates. Despite some promising investigations in the area, stream reasoning is still in its infancy, both from the perspective of models and theories development, and from the perspective of systems and tools design and implementation. The aim of this paper is threefold: (i) we identify the requirements coming from different application scenarios, and we isolate the problems they pose; (ii) we survey existing approaches and proposals in the area of stream reasoning, highlighting their strengths and limitations; (iii) we draw a research agenda to guide the future research and development of stream reasoning. In doing so, we also analyze related research fields to extract algorithms, models, techniques, and solutions that could be useful in the area of stream reasoning. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Features for Killer Apps from a Semantic Web Perspective

There are certain features that that distinguish killer apps from other ordinary applications. This chapter examines those features in the context of the semantic web, in the hope that a better understanding of the characteristics of killer apps might encourage their consideration when developing semantic web applications. Killer apps are highly tranformative technologies that create new e-commerce venues and widespread patterns of behaviour. Information technology, generally, and the Web, in particular, have benefited from killer apps to create new networks of users and increase its value. The semantic web community on the other hand is still awaiting a killer app that proves the superiority of its technologies. The authors hope that this chapter will help to highlight some of the common ingredients of killer apps in e-commerce, and discuss how such applications might emerge in the semantic web

Integration of decision support systems to improve decision support performance

Decision support system (DSS) is a well-established research and development area. Traditional isolated, stand-alone DSS has been recently facing new challenges. In order to improve the performance of DSS to meet the challenges, research has been actively carried out to develop integrated decision support systems (IDSS). This paper reviews the current research efforts with regard to the development of IDSS. The focus of the paper is on the integration aspect for IDSS through multiple perspectives, and the technologies that support this integration. More than 100 papers and software systems are discussed. Current research efforts and the development status of IDSS are explained, compared and classified. In addition, future trends and challenges in integration are outlined. The paper concludes that by addressing integration, better support will be provided to decision makers, with the expectation of both better decisions and improved decision making processes

Grid service discovery with rough sets

Copyright [2008] IEEE. This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Such permission of the IEEE does not in any way imply IEEE endorsement of any of Brunel University's products or services. Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by writing to [email protected]. By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it.The computational grid is evolving as a service-oriented computing infrastructure that facilitates resource sharing and large-scale problem solving over the Internet. Service discovery becomes an issue of vital importance in utilising grid facilities. This paper presents ROSSE, a Rough sets based search engine for grid service discovery. Building on Rough sets theory, ROSSE is novel in its capability to deal with uncertainty of properties when matching services. In this way, ROSSE can discover the services that are most relevant to a service query from a functional point of view. Since functionally matched services may have distinct non-functional properties related to Quality of Service (QoS), ROSSE introduces a QoS model to further filter matched services with their QoS values to maximise user satisfaction in service discovery. ROSSE is evaluated in terms of its accuracy and efficiency in discovery of computing services

Neurons and symbols: a manifesto

We discuss the purpose of neural-symbolic integration including its principles, mechanisms and applications. We outline a cognitive computational model for neural-symbolic integration, position the model in the broader context of multi-agent systems, machine learning and automated reasoning, and list some of the challenges for the area of neural-symbolic computation to achieve the promise of effective integration of robust learning and expressive reasoning under uncertainty