Metamorphosis: an environment to achieve semantic interoperability with topic maps

Nowadays, data handled by an institution or company is spread out by more than one database and lots of documents of different types. To extract the information implicit in that data, it is necessary to pick parts from those various archives. To obtain a general overview, those information slices should be gather. Different approaches can be followed to achieve that integration, ranging from the merge of resources till the fusion of the extracted parts. In this paper, we introduce Metamorphosis – a Topic Maps oriented environment to generate conceptual navigators for heterogenous information systems – and we argue that Metamorphosis can be used to achieve the referred interoperability

A framework to specify, extract and manage topic maps driven by ontology

Nowadays, data handled by an institution or company is spread out by more than one database and lots of documents of different types. To extract the information implicit in that data, it is necessary to pick parts from those various archives. To obtain a general overview, those information slices should be gather. Different approaches can be followed to achieve that integration, ranging from the merge of resources till the fusion of the extracted parts. In this paper, we introduce Metamorphosis – a Topic Maps oriented environment to generate conceptual navigators for heterogenous information systems – and we argue that Metamorphosis can be used to achieve the referred interoperability.(undefined

Using web services to put metamorphosis on the web

This paper describes the exposure on the Web of Metamorphosis main functionalities. This exposure will be accom- plished through an XML Web Service. Metamorphosis is a Semantic Web tool aiming at the automatic creation of knowledge views for heterogeneous data sources or information systems. Each view is characterized by an ontology that corresponds to a semantic network composed of concepts and relations that are built with data extracted from several data sources. There are several formal notations for knowledge representation; Topic Maps were chosen due to their advantages like: having a frozen syntax which enables the creation of tools like extractors and navigators; and being abstract enough to specify anything (everything can be represented as a topic and these topics can relate to each other). The knowledge views are the final result of Metamorphosis but this tool has four different stages. We intend to expose each one of these stages. This way the desired XML Web Service will have four different modes, offering the following functionalities: f1: TM-Builder - the user provides a data source specification, and the Service will return an extractor for that data source. f2: TM - the user provides a data source specification together with the data source, and the Service will give the user the extracted Topic Map. f3: WebSite - the user provides a data source specification together with the data source, and the Service will send back the Website. f4: Remote WebSite - the user provides a data source specification together with the data source, and the Service will give the user an access point (URL) to the Website that will be hosted by the server. In the paper we will give enough information to understand Metamorphosis and all the layers developed so far. The four exposed functionalities of Metamorphosis will be discussed in detail

Survey over Existing Query and Transformation Languages

A widely acknowledged obstacle for realizing the vision of the Semantic Web is the inability of many current Semantic Web approaches to cope with data available in such diverging representation formalisms as XML, RDF, or Topic Maps. A common query language is the first step to allow transparent access to data in any of these formats. To further the understanding of the requirements and approaches proposed for query languages in the conventional as well as the Semantic Web, this report surveys a large number of query languages for accessing XML, RDF, or Topic Maps. This is the first systematic survey to consider query languages from all these areas. From the detailed survey of these query languages, a common classification scheme is derived that is useful for understanding and differentiating languages within and among all three areas

Oveia: expanding the topic maps frontier

Ontology based websites are one possible implementation of the Semantic Web. There are several languages for ontology specification: RDF, OWL, Topic Maps. Topic Maps follow a structure formally specified what makes them a good choice for semantic website specification. The process of ontology development based in topic maps is complex, time consuming, and it requires a lot of human and financial resources, because they can have a lot of topics and associations, and the number of information resources can be very large. To overcome this problem a new environment is proposed, Oveia. Oveia is composed by four components which have relevant contributions to the Semantic Web area. This paper describes these components in detail. Two components representing a metadata extractor: heterogeneous data integration (through XSDS specifications) and an homogeneous intermediate data representation for the extracted metadata (datasets). The Ontology builder who builds an ontology from metadata stored in a set of datasets (construction rules are specified in a new domain specific language: XS4TM). The Ontology builder stores the result in XTM files or in relational databases according to the Topic Map structure. Finally, Ulisses, the navigational component, generates web interfaces through which is possible to move inside the topic map and among information resources

Topic maps applied to PubMed

This paper presents a topic map approach to PubMed in order to create a knowledge representation for this information system. PubMed is a free search engine that gives very full coverage of the related biomedical sciences. With more than 17 millions of citations since 1865, PubMed users have several problems to find the papers desired. So, it is necessary to organize these concepts in a semantic network. To achieve this objective, we use the Metamorphosis system, choosing the keywords from MeSH ontology. This way, we obtain an ontological index for PubMed, making easier to find specific papers.(undefined

Metamorphosis – a topic maps based environment to handle heterogeneous information resources

"Lecture notes in computer science (LNCS). ISSN 0302-9743, vol. 3873"Nowadays, data handled by an institution or company is spread out by more than one database and lots of documents of different types. To extract the information implicit in that data, it is necessary to pick parts from those various archives. To obtain a general overview, those information slices should be integrated. Different approaches can be followed to achieve that integration, ranging from the merge of resources till the fusion of the extracted parts. In this paper, we introduce Metamorphosis – a Topic Maps oriented environment that enables a conceptual navigation among heterogenous information systems – and we argue that Metamorphosis can be used to achieve, via Topic Maps, the referred semantic integration.(undefined)info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Development of Use Cases, Part I

For determining requirements and constructs appropriate for a Web query language, or in fact any language, use cases are of essence. The W3C has published two sets of use cases for XML and RDF query languages. In this article, solutions for these use cases are presented using Xcerpt. a novel Web and Semantic Web query language that combines access to standard Web data such as XML documents with access to Semantic Web metadata such as RDF resource descriptions with reasoning abilities and rules familiar from logicprogramming. To the best knowledge of the authors, this is the first in depth study of how to solve use cases for accessing XML and RDF in a single language: Integrated access to data and metadata has been recognized by industry and academia as one of the key challenges in data processing for the next decade. This article is a contribution towards addressing this challenge by demonstrating along practical and recognized use cases the usefulness of reasoning abilities, rules, and semistructured query languages for accessing both data (XML) and metadata (RDF)

XML: aplicações e tecnologias associadas: 6th National Conference

This volume contains the papers presented at the Sixth Portuguese XML Conference, called XATA (XML, Aplicações e Tecnologias Associadas), held in Évora, Portugal, 14-15 February, 2008. The conference followed on from a successful series held throughout Portugal in the last years: XATA2003 was held in Braga, XATA2004 was held in Porto, XATA2005 was held in Braga, XATA2006 was held in Portalegre and XATA2007 was held in Lisboa. Dued to research evaluation criteria that are being used to evaluate researchers and research centers national conferences are becoming deserted. Many did not manage to gather enough submissions to proceed in this scenario. XATA made it through. However with a large decrease in the number of submissions. In this edition a special meeting will join the steering committee with some interested attendees to discuss XATA's future: internationalization, conference model, ... We think XATA is important in the national context. It has succeeded in gathering and identifying a comunity that shares the same research interests and has promoted some colaborations. We want to keep "the wheel spinning"... This edition has its program distributed by first day's afternoon and next day's morning. This way we are facilitating travel arrangements and we will have one night to meet

Model Checking Parse Trees

Parse trees are fundamental syntactic structures in both computational linguistics and compilers construction. We argue in this paper that, in both fields, there are good incentives for model-checking sets of parse trees for some word according to a context-free grammar. We put forward the adequacy of propositional dynamic logic (PDL) on trees in these applications, and study as a sanity check the complexity of the corresponding model-checking problem: although complete for exponential time in the general case, we find natural restrictions on grammars for our applications and establish complexities ranging from nondeterministic polynomial time to polynomial space in the relevant cases.Comment: 21 + x page