Subjugating the Beast and the Angel: Suggestions of Dante's Inferno in "Altarwise by owl-light"

‘Altarwise by owl-light’ is one of Thomas’s most intransigent poems, an intricately woven text of images and symbols. It has generated, over the years, a great variety of interpretations ranging from the astrological, to the Freudian to the Surrealistic . The reading of this poem often involves a search for sources, the unravelling of references and allusions. For instance, in some of the sonnets’ most seemingly surreal lines , at the end of Sonnet V, an unexpected source has been discovered by Walford Davies and Ralph Maud. In - Cross-stroked salt Adam to the frozen angel Pin-legged on pole-hills with a black medusa By waste seas where the white bear quoted Virgil And sirens singing from our lady’s sea-straw. - the image of the ‘waste seas where the white bear quoted Virgil’ originates in an allegorical text by Anatole France entitled L’île des pingouins . There now remains the problem of finding out who the ‘frozen angel’ and the ‘black medusa’ are, and of piecing together the elements. This paper will offer suggestions regarding these and other images, by concentrating on allusions, in the poem, to Dante’s Inferno. In the process, it will raise a previously unrecognised possibility in the core interpretation of the poem

Building product suggestions for a BIM model based on rule sets and a semantic reasoning engine

The architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry today relies on different information systems and computational tools built to support and assist in the building design and construction. However, these systems and tools typically provide this support in isolation from each other. A good combination of these systems and tools is beneficial for a better coordination and information management. Semantic web technologies and a Linked Data approach can be used to fulfil this aim. In this paper, we indicate how these technologies can be applied for one particular objective, namely to check a building information model (BIM) and make suggestions for that model regarding the building elements. These suggestions are based on information obtained from different data sources, including a BIM model, regulations and catalogues of locally available building components. In this paper, we briefly discuss the results obtained in the application of this approach in a case study based on structural safety requirements

Bridging the gap between social tagging and semantic annotation: E.D. the Entity Describer

Semantic annotation enables the development of efficient computational methods for analyzing and interacting with information, thus maximizing its value. With the already substantial and constantly expanding data generation capacity of the life sciences as well as the concomitant increase in the knowledge distributed in scientific articles, new ways to produce semantic annotations of this information are crucial. While automated techniques certainly facilitate the process, manual annotation remains the gold standard in most domains. In this manuscript, we describe a prototype mass-collaborative semantic annotation system that, by distributing the annotation workload across the broad community of biomedical researchers, may help to produce the volume of meaningful annotations needed by modern biomedical science. We present E.D., the Entity Describer, a mashup of the Connotea social tagging system, an index of semantic web-accessible controlled vocabularies, and a new public RDF database for storing social semantic annotations

From Questions to Effective Answers: On the Utility of Knowledge-Driven Querying Systems for Life Sciences Data

We compare two distinct approaches for querying data in the context of the life sciences. The first approach utilizes conventional databases to store the data and intuitive form-based interfaces to facilitate easy querying of the data. These interfaces could be seen as implementing a set of "pre-canned" queries commonly used by the life science researchers that we study. The second approach is based on semantic Web technologies and is knowledge (model) driven. It utilizes a large OWL ontology and same datasets as before but associated as RDF instances of the ontology concepts. An intuitive interface is provided that allows the formulation of RDF triples-based queries. Both these approaches are being used in parallel by a team of cell biologists in their daily research activities, with the objective of gradually replacing the conventional approach with the knowledge-driven one. This provides us with a valuable opportunity to compare and qualitatively evaluate the two approaches. We describe several benefits of the knowledge-driven approach in comparison to the traditional way of accessing data, and highlight a few limitations as well. We believe that our analysis not only explicitly highlights the specific benefits and limitations of semantic Web technologies in our context but also contributes toward effective ways of translating a question in a researcher's mind into precise computational queries with the intent of obtaining effective answers from the data. While researchers often assume the benefits of semantic Web technologies, we explicitly illustrate these in practice

A Framework for Semi-automated Web Service Composition in Semantic Web

Number of web services available on Internet and its usage are increasing very fast. In many cases, one service is not enough to complete the business requirement; composition of web services is carried out. Autonomous composition of web services to achieve new functionality is generating considerable attention in semantic web domain. Development time and effort for new applications can be reduced with service composition. Various approaches to carry out automated composition of web services are discussed in literature. Web service composition using ontologies is one of the effective approaches. In this paper we demonstrate how the ontology based composition can be made faster for each customer. We propose a framework to provide precomposed web services to fulfil user requirements. We detail how ontology merging can be used for composition which expedites the whole process. We discuss how framework provides customer specific ontology merging and repository. We also elaborate on how merging of ontologies is carried out.Comment: 6 pages, 9 figures; CUBE 2013 International Conferenc

Aberdeen University Ontology Reuse Stack

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Collaborative recommendations with content-based filters for cultural activities via a scalable event distribution platform

Nowadays, most people have limited leisure time and the offer of (cultural) activities to spend this time is enormous. Consequently, picking the most appropriate events becomes increasingly difficult for end-users. This complexity of choice reinforces the necessity of filtering systems that assist users in finding and selecting relevant events. Whereas traditional filtering tools enable e.g. the use of keyword-based or filtered searches, innovative recommender systems draw on user ratings, preferences, and metadata describing the events. Existing collaborative recommendation techniques, developed for suggesting web-shop products or audio-visual content, have difficulties with sparse rating data and can not cope at all with event-specific restrictions like availability, time, and location. Moreover, aggregating, enriching, and distributing these events are additional requisites for an optimal communication channel. In this paper, we propose a highly-scalable event recommendation platform which considers event-specific characteristics. Personal suggestions are generated by an advanced collaborative filtering algorithm, which is more robust on sparse data by extending user profiles with presumable future consumptions. The events, which are described using an RDF/OWL representation of the EventsML-G2 standard, are categorized and enriched via smart indexing and open linked data sets. This metadata model enables additional content-based filters, which consider event-specific characteristics, on the recommendation list. The integration of these different functionalities is realized by a scalable and extendable bus architecture. Finally, focus group conversations were organized with external experts, cultural mediators, and potential end-users to evaluate the event distribution platform and investigate the possible added value of recommendations for cultural participation

Towards Knowledge-Intensive Software Engineering

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Showing the destination of hypertext links: a new approach for Guide

All hypertext systems have a kind of button which can be selected interactively by the user to obtain further information. This paper is concerned with how to show the user the further information when the button is selected. We comment how several hypertext systems show this information, describe in detail how the Guide system currently does it and propose two alternative new approaches