Supporting public decision making in policy deliberations: An ontological approach

This is the post-print version of the Paper. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 SpringerSupporting public decision making in policy deliberations has been a key objective of eParticipation which is an emerging area of eGovernment. EParticipation aims to enhance citizen involvement in public governance activities through the use of information and communication technologies. An innovative approach towards this objective is exploiting the potentials of semantic web technologies centred on conceptual knowledge models in the form of ontologies. Ontologies are generally defined as explicit human and computer shared views on the world of particular domains. In this paper, the potentials and benefits of using ontologies for policy deliberation processes are discussed. Previous work is then extended and synthesised to develop a deliberation ontology. The ontology aims to define the necessary semantics in order to structure and interrelate the stages and various activities of deliberation processes with legal information, participant stakeholders and their associated arguments. The practical implications of the proposed framework are illustrated.This work is funded by the European Commission under the 2006/1 eParticipation call

RROVT: A Proposed Visualization Tool for Semantic Web Technologies

Visualization is the graphical or semi-graphical representation of information that aids human comprehension of and reasoning about that information. Visualization tools are critically important for creating, querying, visualizing and validating Semantic Web Data. Semantic Web, an efficient infrastructure that enhances visibility of knowledge on the web, is often used more specifically to refer to the formats and technologies that enable it. These technologies include RDF, RDFS and OWL. However, lack of robust and efficient tools to visualize, analyze and represent these technologies within time and space constraint remains a big challenge. In this study, semantic web technologies and their visualization tools were reviewed. RROVT (RDF, RDFS, OWL Visualization Tool), a tool to evaluate and represent formal description of concepts, terms and relationships of data models within a given knowledge domain as well as manage time and space complexities for publishing contents of the semantic web more efficiently is developed and proposed. Performance of RROVT was investigated on samples of semantic web documents implementing RDF, RDFS and OWL technologies. The proposed tool showed remarkable improvement over the existing tools as it aids a better comprehension of the syntax and semantics of semantic web technologies investigated in this study. Keywords: Semantic Web, Visualization Tool, Semantic Web Technologie

Implementing probabilistic description logics: An application to image interpretation

This paper presents an application of an optimized implementation of a probabilistic description logic defined by Giugno and Lukasiewicz [9] to the domain of image interpretation. This approach extends a description logic with so-called probabilistic constraints to allow for automated reasoning over formal ontologies in combination with probabilistic knowledge. We analyze the performance of current algorithms and investigate new optimization techniques

Description Logic for Scene Understanding at the Example of Urban Road Intersections

Understanding a natural scene on the basis of external sensors is a task yet to be solved by computer algorithms. The present thesis investigates the suitability of a particular family of explicit, formal representation and reasoning formalisms for this task, which are subsumed under the term Description Logic

Some Classical Problems of Inheritance Networks in the Light of Defeasible Ontology Reasoning

Reasoning with possibly inconsistent ontologies is an important reasearch topic for the implementation of the Semantic Web as they pose a problem for performing instance checking. We contend that Defeasible Logic Programming (DeLP) is a reliable tool for doing ontology reasoning when Description Logic ontologies can be interpreted as DeLP programs. In this work we present some classical problems of the eld of inheritance networks and show how they are modeled as inconsistent ontologies and thus how the problem of instance checking is solved; we also show how issues in reasoning with argumentation frameworks based on Dung's grounded semantics are also solved when applied to ontology reasoning, and we revise the main algorithm for instance checking when using DeLP with inconsistent ontologies.Eje: XV Workshop de Agentes y Sistemas InteligentesRed de Universidades con Carreras de Informática (RedUNCI

A framework for semantic checking of information systems

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresIn this day and age, enterprises often find that their business benefits greatly if they collaborate with others in order to be more competitive and productive. However these collaborations often come with some costs since the worldwide diversity of communities has led to the development of various knowledge representation elements, namely ontologies that, in most cases, are not semantically equivalent. Consequently, even though some enterprises may operate in the same domain, they can have different representations of that same knowledge. However, even after solving this issue and establishing a semantic alignment with other systems, they do not remain unchanged. Subsequently, a regular check of its semantic alignment is needed. To aid in the resolution of this semantic interoperability problem, the author proposes a framework that intends to provide generic solutions and a mean to validate the semantic consistency of ontologies in various scenarios, thus maintaining the interoperability state between the enrolled systems