An Analysis of Service Ontologies

Services are increasingly shaping the world’s economic activity. Service provision and consumption have been profiting from advances in ICT, but the decentralization and heterogeneity of the involved service entities still pose engineering challenges. One of these challenges is to achieve semantic interoperability among these autonomous entities. Semantic web technology aims at addressing this challenge on a large scale, and has matured over the last years. This is evident from the various efforts reported in the literature in which service knowledge is represented in terms of ontologies developed either in individual research projects or in standardization bodies. This paper aims at analyzing the most relevant service ontologies available today for their suitability to cope with the service semantic interoperability challenge. We take the vision of the Internet of Services (IoS) as our motivation to identify the requirements for service ontologies. We adopt a formal approach to ontology design and evaluation in our analysis. We start by defining informal competency questions derived from a motivating scenario, and we identify relevant concepts and properties in service ontologies that match the formal ontological representation of these questions. We analyze the service ontologies with our concepts and questions, so that each ontology is positioned and evaluated according to its utility. The gaps we identify as the result of our analysis provide an indication of open challenges and future work

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Modeling social information skills

In a modern economy, the most important resource consists in\ud human talent: competent, knowledgeable people. Locating the right person for\ud the task is often a prerequisite to complex problem-solving, and experienced\ud professionals possess the social skills required to find appropriate human\ud expertise. These skills can be reproduced more and more with specific\ud computer software, an approach defining the new field of social information\ud retrieval. We will analyze the social skills involved and show how to model\ud them on computer. Current methods will be described, notably information\ud retrieval techniques and social network theory. A generic architecture and its\ud functions will be outlined and compared with recent work. We will try in this\ud way to estimate the perspectives of this recent domain

A semantic web approach for built heritage representation

In a built heritage process, meant as a structured system of activities aimed at the investigation, preservation, and management of architectural heritage, any task accomplished by the several actors involved in it is deeply influenced by the way the knowledge is represented and shared. In the current heritage practice, knowledge representation and management have shown several limitations due to the difficulty of dealing with large amount of extremely heterogeneous data. On this basis, this research aims at extending semantic web approaches and technologies to architectural heritage knowledge management in order to provide an integrated and multidisciplinary representation of the artifact and of the knowledge necessary to support any decision or any intervention and management activity. To this purpose, an ontology-based system, representing the knowledge related to the artifact and its contexts, has been developed through the formalization of domain-specific entities and relationships between them