SmartWeb: Mobile Access to the Semantic Web

Ankolekar A, Cimiano P, Hitzler P, et al. SmartWeb: Mobile Access to the Semantic Web. In: Wache H, ed. Proceedings of the ESWC2006 poster and demo session. 2006: 3-4

Interoperability and Information Brokers in Public Safety: An Approach toward Seamless Emergency Communications

When a disaster occurs, the rapid gathering and sharing of crucial information among public safety agencies, emergency response units, and the public can save lives and reduce the scope of the problem; yet, this is seldom achieved. The lack of interoperability hinders effective collaboration across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries. In this article, we propose a general architecture for emergency communications that incorporates (1) an information broker, (2) events and event-driven processes, and (3) interoperability. This general architecture addresses the question of how an information broker can overcome obstacles, breach boundaries for seamless communication, and empower the public to become active participants in emergency communications. Our research is based on qualitative case studies on emergency communications, workshops with public safety agencies, and a comparative analysis of interoperability issues in the European public sector. This article features a conceptual approach toward proposing a way in which public safety agencies can achieve optimal interoperability and thereby enable seamless communication and crowdsourcing in emergency prevention and response

Personalized City Tours - An Extension of the OGC OpenLocation Specification

A business trip to London last month , a day visit in Cologne next saturday and romantic weekend in Paris in autumn – this example exhibits one of the central characteristics of today’s tourism. People in the western hemisphere take much pleasure in frequent and repeated short term visits of cities. Every city visitor faces the general problems of where to go and what to see in the diverse microcosm of a metropolis. This thesis presents a framework for the generation of personalized city tours - as extension of the Open Location Specification of the Open Geospatial Consortium. It is founded on context-awareness and personalization while at the same time proposing a combined approach to allow for adaption to the user. This framework considers TimeGeography and its algorithmic implementations to be able to cope with spatio-temporal constraints of a city tour. Traveling salesmen problems - for which a heuristic approache is proposed – are subjacent to the tour generation. To meet the requirements of today’s distributed and heterogeneous computing environments, the tour framework comprises individual services that expose standard-compliant interfaces and allow for integration in service oriented architectures

Towards intelligent transport systems: geospatial ontological framework and agent simulation

In an Intelligent Transport System (ITS) environment, the communication component is of high significance as it supports interactions between vehicles and the roadside infrastructure. Existing studies focus on the physical capability and capacity of the communication technologies, but the equally important development of suitable and efficient semantic content for transmission has received notably less attention. Using an ontology is one promising approach for context modelling in ubiquitous computing environments. In the transport domain, an ontology can be used both for context modelling and semantic contents for vehicular communications. This research explores the development of an ontological framework implementing a geosemantic messaging model to support vehicle-to-vehicle communications. To develop an ontology model, two scenarios (an ambulance situation and a breakdown on the motorway) are constructed to describe specific situations using short-range communication in an ITS environment. In the scenarios, spatiotemporal relations and semantic relations among vehicles and road facilities are extracted and defined as classes, objects, and properties/relations in the ontology model. For the ontology model, some functions and query templates are also developed to update vehicles’ movements and to provide some logical procedures that vehicles need to follow in emergency situations. To measure the effects of the vehicular communication based on the ontology model, an agent-based approach is adopted to dynamically simulate the moving vehicles and their communications following the scenarios. The simulation results demonstrate that the ontology model can support vehicular communications to update each vehicle’s context model and assist its decision-making process to resolve the emergency situations. The results also show the effect of vehicular communications on the efficiency trends of traffic in emergency situations, where some vehicles have a communication device, and others do not. The efficiency trends, based on the percentage of vehicles having a communication device, can be useful to set a transition period plan for implanting communication devices onto vehicles and the infrastructure. The geospatial ontological framework and agent simulation may contribute to increase the intelligence of ITS by supporting data-level and application-level implementation of autonomous vehicle agents to share knowledge in local contexts. This work can be easily extended to support more complex interactions amongst vehicles and the infrastructure

Modelo de acesso a fontes em linguagem natural no governo electrónico

Doutoramento em Engenharia InformáticaFor the actual existence of e-government it is necessary and crucial to provide public information and documentation, making its access simple to citizens. A portion, not necessarily small, of these documents is in an unstructured form and in natural language, and consequently outside of which the current search systems are generally able to cope and effectively handle. Thus, in thesis, it is possible to improve access to these contents using systems that process natural language and create structured information, particularly if supported in semantics. In order to put this thesis to test, this work was developed in three major phases: (1) design of a conceptual model integrating the creation of structured information and making it available to various actors, in line with the vision of e-government 2.0; (2) definition and development of a prototype instantiating the key modules of this conceptual model, including ontology based information extraction supported by examples of relevant information, knowledge management and access based on natural language; (3) assessment of the usability and acceptability of querying information as made possible by the prototype - and in consequence of the conceptual model - by users in a realistic scenario, that included comparison with existing forms of access. In addition to this evaluation, at another level more related to technology assessment and not to the model, evaluations were made on the performance of the subsystem responsible for information extraction. The evaluation results show that the proposed model was perceived as more effective and useful than the alternatives. Associated with the performance of the prototype to extract information from documents, comparable to the state of the art, results demonstrate the feasibility and advantages, with current technology, of using natural language processing and integration of semantic information to improve access to unstructured contents in natural language. The conceptual model and the prototype demonstrator intend to contribute to the future existence of more sophisticated search systems that are also more suitable for e-government. To have transparency in governance, active citizenship, greater agility in the interaction with the public administration, among others, it is necessary that citizens and businesses have quick and easy access to official information, even if it was originally created in natural language.Para a efectiva existência de governo electrónico é necessário e crucial a disponibilização de informação e documentação pública e tornar simples o acesso a esta pelos cidadãos. Uma parte, não necessariamente pequena, destes documentos encontra-se sob uma forma não estruturada e em linguagem natural e, consequentemente, fora do que os sistemas de pesquisa actuais conseguem em geral suportar e disponibilizar eficazmente. Assim, em tese, é possível melhorar o acesso a estes conteúdos com recurso a sistemas que processem linguagem natural e que sejam capazes de criar informação estruturada, em especial se suportados numa semântica. Com o objectivo de colocar esta tese à prova, o desenvolvimento deste trabalho integrou três grandes fases ou vertentes: (1) Criação de um modelo conceptual integrando a criação de informação estruturada e a sua disponibilização para vários actores, alinhado com a visão do governo electrónico 2.0; (2) Definição e desenvolvimento de um protótipo instanciando os módulos essenciais deste modelo conceptual, nomeadamente a extracção de informação suportada em ontologias e exemplos de informação relevante, gestão de conhecimento e acesso baseado em linguagem natural; (3) Uma avaliação de usabilidade e aceitabilidade da consulta à informação tornada possível pelo protótipo – e em consequência do modelo conceptual - por utilizadores num cenário realista e que incluiu comparação com formas de acesso existentes. Além desta avaliação, a outro nível, mais relacionado com avaliação de tecnologias e não do modelo, foram efectuadas avaliações do desempenho do subsistema responsável pela extracção de informação. Os resultados da avaliação mostram que o modelo proposto foi percepcionado como mais eficaz e mais útil que as alternativas. Associado ao desempenho do protótipo a extrair informação dos documentos, comparável com o estado da arte, os resultados obtidos mostram a viabilidade e as vantagens, com a tecnologia actual, de utilizar processamento de linguagem natural e integração de informação semântica para melhorar acesso a conteúdos em linguagem natural e não estruturados. O modelo conceptual e o protótipo demonstrador pretendem contribuir para a existência futura de sistemas de pesquisa mais sofisticados e adequados ao governo electrónico. Para existir transparência na governação, cidadania activa, maior agilidade na interacção com a administração pública, entre outros, é necessário que cidadãos e empresas tenham acesso rápido e fácil a informação oficial, mesmo que ela tenha sido originalmente criada em linguagem natural