Opening up Magpie via semantic services

Magpie is a suite of tools supporting a ‘zero-cost’ approach to semantic web browsing: it avoids the need for manual annotation by automatically associating an ontology-based semantic layer to web resources. An important aspect of Magpie, which differentiates it from superficially similar hypermedia systems, is that the association between items on a web page and semantic concepts is not merely a mechanism for dynamic linking, but it is the enabling condition for locating services and making them available to a user. These services can be manually activated by a user (pull services), or opportunistically triggered when the appropriate web entities are encountered during a browsing session (push services). In this paper we analyze Magpie from the perspective of building semantic web applications and we note that earlier implementations did not fulfill the criterion of “open as to services”, which is a key aspect of the emerging semantic web. For this reason, in the past twelve months we have carried out a radical redesign of Magpie, resulting in a novel architecture, which is open both with respect to ontologies and semantic web services. This new architecture goes beyond the idea of merely providing support for semantic web browsing and can be seen as a software framework for designing and implementing semantic web applications

Bletchley Park text: using mobile and semantic web technologies to support the post-visit use of online museum resources

A number of technologies have been developed to support the museum visitor, with the aim of making their visit more educationally rewarding and/or entertaining. Examples include PDA-based personalized tour guides and virtual reality representations of cultural objects or scenes. Rather than supporting the actual visit, we decided to employ technology to support the post-visitor, that is, encourage follow-up activities among recent visitors to a museum. This allowed us to use the technology in a way that would not detract from the existing curated experience and allow the museum to provide access to additional heritage resources that cannot be presented during the physical visit. Within our application, called Bletchley Park Text, visitors express their interests by sending text (SMS) messages containing suggested keywords using their own mobile phone. The semantic description of the archive of resources is then used to retrieve and organize a collection of content into a personalized web site for use when they get home. Organization of the collection occurs both bottom-up from the semantic description of each item in the collection, and also top-down according to a formal representation of the overall museum story. In designing the interface we aimed to support exploration across the content archive rather than just the search and retrieval of specific resources. The service was developed for the Bletchley Park museum and has since been launched for use by all visitors

Towards improving web service repositories through semantic web techniques

The success of the Web services technology has brought topicsas software reuse and discovery once again on the agenda of software engineers. While there are several efforts towards automating Web service discovery and composition, many developers still search for services via online Web service repositories and then combine them manually. However, from our analysis of these repositories, it yields that, unlike traditional software libraries, they rely on little metadata to support service discovery. We believe that the major cause is the difficulty of automatically deriving metadata that would describe rapidly changing Web service collections. In this paper, we discuss the major shortcomings of state of the art Web service repositories and, as a solution, we report on ongoing work and ideas on how to use techniques developed in the context of the Semantic Web (ontology learning, mapping, metadata based presentation) to improve the current situation

Semantic multimedia remote display for mobile thin clients

Current remote display technologies for mobile thin clients convert practically all types of graphical content into sequences of images rendered by the client. Consequently, important information concerning the content semantics is lost. The present paper goes beyond this bottleneck by developing a semantic multimedia remote display. The principle consists of representing the graphical content as a real-time interactive multimedia scene graph. The underlying architecture features novel components for scene-graph creation and management, as well as for user interactivity handling. The experimental setup considers the Linux X windows system and BiFS/LASeR multimedia scene technologies on the server and client sides, respectively. The implemented solution was benchmarked against currently deployed solutions (VNC and Microsoft-RDP), by considering text editing and WWW browsing applications. The quantitative assessments demonstrate: (1) visual quality expressed by seven objective metrics, e.g., PSNR values between 30 and 42 dB or SSIM values larger than 0.9999; (2) downlink bandwidth gain factors ranging from 2 to 60; (3) real-time user event management expressed by network round-trip time reduction by factors of 4-6 and by uplink bandwidth gain factors from 3 to 10; (4) feasible CPU activity, larger than in the RDP case but reduced by a factor of 1.5 with respect to the VNC-HEXTILE

A review of user interface adaption in current semantic web browsers

The semantic web is an example of an innumerable corpus because it contains innumerable subjects expressed using innumerable ontologies. This paper reviews current semantic web browsers to see if they can adaptively show meaningful data presentations to users. The paper also seeks to discover if current semantic web browsers provide a rich enough set of capabilities for future user interface work to be built upon

Creating structure from disorder: using folksonomies to create semantic metadata

This paper reports on an on-going research project to create educational semantic metadata out of folksonomies. The paper describes a simple scenario for the usage of the generated semantic metadata in teaching, and describes the ‘FolksAnnotation’ tool which applies an organization scheme to tags in a specific domain of interest. The contribution of this paper is to describe an evaluation framework which will allow us to validate our claim that folksonomies are potentially a rich source of metadata

Perspectives for Electronic Books in the World Wide Web Age

While the World Wide Web (WWW or Web) is steadily expanding, electronic books (e-books) remain a niche market. In this article, it is first postulated that specialized contents and device independence can make Web-based e-books compete with paper prints; and that adaptive features that can be implemented by client-side computing are relevant for e-books, while more complex forms of adaptation requiring server-side computations are not. Then, enhancements of the WWW standards (specifically of XML, XHTML, of the style-sheet languages CSS and XSL, and of the linking language XLink) are proposed for a better support of client-side adaptation and device independent content modeling. Finally, advanced browsing functionalities desirable for e-books as well as their implementation in the WWW context are described

Analysis of equivalence mapping for terminology services

This paper assesses the range of equivalence or mapping types required to facilitate interoperability in the context of a distributed terminology server. A detailed set of mapping types were examined, with a view to determining their validity for characterizing relationships between mappings from selected terminologies (AAT, LCSH, MeSH, and UNESCO) to the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) scheme. It was hypothesized that the detailed set of 19 match types proposed by Chaplan in 1995 is unnecessary in this context and that they could be reduced to a less detailed conceptually-based set. Results from an extensive mapping exercise support the main hypothesis and a generic suite of match types are proposed, although doubt remains over the current adequacy of the developing Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) Core Mapping Vocabulary Specification (MVS) for inter-terminology mapping