Integrating semantic web technologies for Norwegian Records Management Standard Noark5 : an exploratory case study

Digital archives, Electronic records management (ERM), and digital libraries are organizations that entitle themselves as information providers. Their primary function is often constrained to selecting, organizing, storing, maintaining, and updating information with the support of various application software and systems and often interacting with web-based data. These software applications, systems, and programs are chosen in order to provide better and seamless services to end users as well as to satisfy user needs and expectations for digital archives or digital libraries. For that reason, these information providers are now have to familiarize themselves with various information and communication technology (ICT) mediums in order to distribute and share data over the web. In this century, the information professional, or information supplier, and knowledge society is acknowledging the importance of technology. Therefore, at present everyone is seeking valuable information and knowledge on how to use also the current technological advancements in an environmental that is rapidly and constantly changing. As a result, users’ interest, wants, and needs to access, share, retrieve, and in general to manage information and data goes beyond expectation and capacity of the current ERMS, and/or digital archives. The emerging semantic web technology is in position to help these organizations to catch up with the current revolutionary technological changes through the introduction new ways of organizing, sharing, defining, and providing relevant and meaningful information. On the other hand, the importance of the semantic web is not only limited to defining, organizing, creating, and representing data/ Knowledge, but also able to facilitate, gather, and provide detailed information from various applications and databases on behalf of the human. Doing so makes life easier for humans through saving time, and minimizing efforts when searching and retrieving required information. There are many more benefits of the semantic web and this study takes the first step to introduce and explore the benefits of semantic web for ERM, and archive institutions. The researcher argues that an organization can make cultural and technological, as well as contextual change such as going from a system centric view into more data and user-oriented view by means of semantic web technology. The study adapts technical, logical, and methodological approaches to integrate semantic web technology for the ERM and uses an appropriate framework and prototype throughout the implementation. Therefore, the overall result of this research work verifies the importance of the semantic web technology for ERMS using the semantic RDF language. In addition, the present results would enable both the ERM and archive organizations to make use of semantic-based data sources, and respectively it opens an opportunity for incorporating external semantic sources into a Noark5 system (A Norwegian Records Management Standard). In addition, semantic web technologies able to expose nested data from a Noark5 system by serializing and parsing the Noark5 extracted data, while at the same time it creates new opportunities of creating semantic relationships in between what we call from an archive perspective, objects of interest (people), the resources, and places. Moreover, the current RDF data model results are able to establish a basis for creating semantic Noark5 records and for creating semantic interoperability between various applications and databases without any interruption.Joint Master Degree in Digital Library Learning (DILL

Semantic business process management: a vision towards using semantic web services for business process management

Business process management (BPM) is the approach to manage the execution of IT-supported business operations from a business expert's view rather than from a technical perspective. However, the degree of mechanization in BPM is still very limited, creating inertia in the necessary evolution and dynamics of business processes, and BPM does not provide a truly unified view on the process space of an organization. We trace back the problem of mechanization of BPM to an ontological one, i.e. the lack of machine-accessible semantics, and argue that the modeling constructs of semantic Web services frameworks, especially WSMO, are a natural fit to creating such a representation. As a consequence, we propose to combine SWS and BPM and create one consolidated technology, which we call semantic business process management (SBPM

Open semantic service networks

Online service marketplaces will soon be part of the economy to scale the provision of specialized multi-party services through automation and standardization. Current research, such as the *-USDL service description language family, is already defining the basic building blocks to model the next generation of business services. Nonetheless, the developments being made do not target to interconnect services via service relationships. Without the concept of relationship, marketplaces will be seen as mere functional silos containing service descriptions. Yet, in real economies, all services are related and connected. Therefore, to address this gap we introduce the concept of open semantic service network (OSSN), concerned with the establishment of rich relationships between services. These networks will provide valuable knowledge on the global service economy, which can be exploited for many socio-economic and scientific purposes such as service network analysis, management, and control

Towards an ontology for process monitoring and mining

Business Process Analysis (BPA) aims at monitoring, diagnosing, simulating and mining enacted processes in order to support the analysis and enhancement of process models. An effective BPA solution must provide the means for analysing existing e-businesses at three levels of abstraction: the Business Level, the Process Level and the IT Level. BPA requires semantic information that spans these layers of abstraction and which should be easily retrieved from audit trails. To cater for this, we describe the Process Mining Ontology and the Events Ontology which aim to support the analysis of enacted processes at different levels of abstraction spanning from fine grain technical details to coarse grain aspects at the Business Level

Expressing the tacit knowledge of a digital library system as linked data

Library organizations have enthusiastically undertaken semantic web initiatives and in particular the data publishing as linked data. Nevertheless, different surveys report the experimental nature of initiatives and the consumer difficulty in re-using data. These barriers are a hindrance for using linked datasets, as an infrastructure that enhances the library and related information services. This paper presents an approach for encoding, as a Linked Vocabulary, the "tacit" knowledge of the information system that manages the data source. The objective is the improvement of the interpretation process of the linked data meaning of published datasets. We analyzed a digital library system, as a case study, for prototyping the "semantic data management" method, where data and its knowledge are natively managed, taking into account the linked data pillars. The ultimate objective of the semantic data management is to curate the correct consumers' interpretation of data, and to facilitate the proper re-use. The prototype defines the ontological entities representing the knowledge, of the digital library system, that is not stored in the data source, nor in the existing ontologies related to the system's semantics. Thus we present the local ontology and its matching with existing ontologies, Preservation Metadata Implementation Strategies (PREMIS) and Metadata Objects Description Schema (MODS), and we discuss linked data triples prototyped from the legacy relational database, by using the local ontology. We show how the semantic data management, can deal with the inconsistency of system data, and we conclude that a specific change in the system developer mindset, it is necessary for extracting and "codifying" the tacit knowledge, which is necessary to improve the data interpretation process

BIM semantic-enrichment for built heritage representation

In the built heritage context, BIM has shown difficulties in representing and managing the large and complex knowledge related to non-geometrical aspects of the heritage. Within this scope, this paper focuses on a domain-specific semantic-enrichment of BIM methodology, aimed at fulfilling semantic representation requirements of built heritage through Semantic Web technologies. To develop this semantic-enriched BIM approach, this research relies on the integration of a BIM environment with a knowledge base created through information ontologies. The result is knowledge base system - and a prototypal platform - that enhances semantic representation capabilities of BIM application to architectural heritage processes. It solves the issue of knowledge formalization in cultural heritage informative models, favouring a deeper comprehension and interpretation of all the building aspects. Its open structure allows future research to customize, scale and adapt the knowledge base different typologies of artefacts and heritage activities

A Process Framework for Semantics-aware Tourism Information Systems

The growing sophistication of user requirements in tourism due to the advent of new technologies such as the Semantic Web and mobile computing has imposed new possibilities for improved intelligence in Tourism Information Systems (TIS). Traditional software engineering and web engineering approaches cannot suffice, hence the need to find new product development approaches that would sufficiently enable the next generation of TIS. The next generation of TIS are expected among other things to: enable semantics-based information processing, exhibit natural language capabilities, facilitate inter-organization exchange of information in a seamless way, and evolve proactively in tandem with dynamic user requirements. In this paper, a product development approach called Product Line for Ontology-based Semantics-Aware Tourism Information Systems (PLOSATIS) which is a novel hybridization of software product line engineering, and Semantic Web engineering concepts is proposed. PLOSATIS is presented as potentially effective, predictable and amenable to software process improvement initiatives