Editorial of Special Issue on Cultural Heritage and Semantic Web Technology

Non peer reviewe

Special issue: Development of service-based and agent-based computing systems

This special issue presents the best papers from theworkshops onService-OrientedComputing: Agents, Semantics and Engineering (SOCASE 2010) held in May 2010 in Toronto, Canada and the IEEE 2010 First International Workshop on Service-Oriented Computing and Multi-Agent Systems (SOCMAS 2010) held in July 2010 in Miami, Florida, USA. The goal of the workshops was to present the recent significant developments at the intersections of multi-agent systems, semantic technology, and service-oriented computing, and to promote crossfertilization of techniques. In particular, the workshops attempted to identify techniques from research on multi-agent systems and semantic technology that will have the greatest impact on automating serviceoriented application construction and management, focusing on critical challenges such as service quality assurance, reliability, and adaptability. The areas of service-oriented computing and Semantic Web services offer much of real interest to the multi-agent system community, including similarities in system architectures and provision processes, powerful tools, and the focus on many related issues including quality of service, security, and reliability. In addition, service-oriented computing and Semantic Web services offer various diverse application fields for both the concepts and methodologies of intelligent agent and multi-agent systems. Similarly, techniques developed in the multi-agent systems research community promise to have a strong impact on this fast growing technology. In particular, they enable services to be discovered and enacted across enterprise boundaries. If an organisation bases its success on services provided by others, then it must be able to trust that the services will perform as promised, whenever needed. Researchers in multi-agent systems have investigated such trust mechanisms

Geospatial Narratives and their Spatio-Temporal Dynamics: Commonsense Reasoning for High-level Analyses in Geographic Information Systems

The modelling, analysis, and visualisation of dynamic geospatial phenomena has been identified as a key developmental challenge for next-generation Geographic Information Systems (GIS). In this context, the envisaged paradigmatic extensions to contemporary foundational GIS technology raises fundamental questions concerning the ontological, formal representational, and (analytical) computational methods that would underlie their spatial information theoretic underpinnings. We present the conceptual overview and architecture for the development of high-level semantic and qualitative analytical capabilities for dynamic geospatial domains. Building on formal methods in the areas of commonsense reasoning, qualitative reasoning, spatial and temporal representation and reasoning, reasoning about actions and change, and computational models of narrative, we identify concrete theoretical and practical challenges that accrue in the context of formal reasoning about `space, events, actions, and change'. With this as a basis, and within the backdrop of an illustrated scenario involving the spatio-temporal dynamics of urban narratives, we address specific problems and solutions techniques chiefly involving `qualitative abstraction', `data integration and spatial consistency', and `practical geospatial abduction'. From a broad topical viewpoint, we propose that next-generation dynamic GIS technology demands a transdisciplinary scientific perspective that brings together Geography, Artificial Intelligence, and Cognitive Science. Keywords: artificial intelligence; cognitive systems; human-computer interaction; geographic information systems; spatio-temporal dynamics; computational models of narrative; geospatial analysis; geospatial modelling; ontology; qualitative spatial modelling and reasoning; spatial assistance systemsComment: ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information (ISSN 2220-9964); Special Issue on: Geospatial Monitoring and Modelling of Environmental Change}. IJGI. Editor: Duccio Rocchini. (pre-print of article in press

Challenges and potential of the Semantic Web for tourism

The paper explores tourism challenges and potential of the Semantic Web from a theoretical and industry perspective. It first examines tourism business networks and explores a main theme of network interoperability - data standards- followed by technology deficiencies of Web 1.0 and 2.0 and Semantic Web solutions. It then explicates Semantic opportunities and challenges for tourism, including an industry perspective through a qualitative approach. Industry leaders considered that the new Web era was imminent and heralded benefits for supply and demand side interoperability, although management and technical challenges could impede progress and delay realisation

Efficient deep processing of japanese

We present a broad coverage Japanese grammar written in the HPSG formalism with MRS semantics. The grammar is created for use in real world applications, such that robustness and performance issues play an important role. It is connected to a POS tagging and word segmentation tool. This grammar is being developed in a multilingual context, requiring MRS structures that are easily comparable across languages

A semantic web services-based infrastructure for context-adaptive process support

Current technologies aimed at supporting processes whether it is a business or learning process - primarily follow a metadata- and data-centric paradigm. Whereas process metadata is usually based on a specific standard specification - such as the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) or the IMS Learning Design Standard - the allocation of resources is done manually at design-time, and the used data is often specific to one process context only. These facts limit the reusability of process models across different standards and contexts. To overcome these issues, we introduce an innovative Semantic Web Service-based framework aimed at changing the current paradigm to a context-adaptive service-oriented approach. Following the idea of layered semantic abstractions, our approach supports the development of abstract semantic process model - reusable across different contexts and standards - that enables a dynamic adaptation to specific actor needs and objectives. To illustrate the application of our framework and establish its feasibility, we describe a prototypical application in the E-Learning domain