Generating Data Wrapping Ontologies from Sensor Networks: a case study

Information coming from sensor networks is being increasingly used in a variety of systems (decision support systems, information portals, etc), normally combined with information coming from more traditional sources (e.g., relational databases, web documents, etc). However, existing ontology based information integration approaches cannot be easily used for this combination task since they are mainly focused on the integration of information coming from these traditional sources, and do not support sensor network data. In this paper we make a first step towards enabling the inclusion of sensor network data into these integration approaches, with the automatic generation of data wrapping ontologies for sensor networks. Our approach extends existing ones used for extracting data wrapping ontologies from relational databases, using the schema of sensor network queries and external ontology search and relation discovery services

Towards Cleaning-up Open Data Portals: A Metadata Reconciliation Approach

This paper presents an approach for metadata reconciliation, curation and linking for Open Governamental Data Portals (ODPs). ODPs have been lately the standard solution for governments willing to put their public data available for the society. Portal managers use several types of metadata to organize the datasets, one of the most important ones being the tags. However, the tagging process is subject to many problems, such as synonyms, ambiguity or incoherence, among others. As our empiric analysis of ODPs shows, these issues are currently prevalent in most ODPs and effectively hinders the reuse of Open Data. In order to address these problems, we develop and implement an approach for tag reconciliation in Open Data Portals, encompassing local actions related to individual portals, and global actions for adding a semantic metadata layer above individual portals. The local part aims to enhance the quality of tags in a single portal, and the global part is meant to interlink ODPs by establishing relations between tags.Comment: 8 pages,10 Figures - Under Revision for ICSC201

Library systems: the trends, the developments, the future

This article introduces some of the latest developments and trends taking place with respect to library systems, and makes some informed judgements on what the future holds

Integration via Meaning: Using the Semantic Web to deliver Web Services

Presented at the CRIS2002 Conference in Kassel.-- 9 pages.-- Contains: Conference paper (PDF) + PPT presentation.The major developments of the World Wide Web (WWW) in the last two years have been Web Services and the Semantic Web. The former allows the construction of distributed systems across the WWW by providing a lightweight middleware architecture. The latter provides an infrastructure for accessing resources on the WWW via their relationships with respect to conceptual descriptions. In this paper, I shall review the progress undertaken in each of these two areas. Further, I shall argue that in order for the aims of both the Semantic Web and the Web Services activities to be successful, then the Web Service architecture needs to be augmented by concepts and tools of the Semantic Web. This infrastructure will allow resource discovery, brokering and access to be enabled in a standardised, integrated and interoperable manner. Finally, I survey the CLRC Information Technology R&D programme to show how it is contributing to the development of this future infrastructure

Global integration of public sector information

This paper deals with technological methods for consolidating assets lists of available public sector information (PSI) for re-use. In this direction, the effort is to review the state of the art in delivering access to PSI throughout the world and to prioritize the necessary engagements for joining available PSI catalogues. We propose an architectural framework grounded on Semantic Web technologies to deliver a global platform for federated searching. A speculative survey of available PSI portals is presented, and the initial implementation, results, and analysis of the proposed architecture are covered in detail

The Hierarchic treatment of marine ecological information from spatial networks of benthic platforms

Measuring biodiversity simultaneously in different locations, at different temporal scales, and over wide spatial scales is of strategic importance for the improvement of our understanding of the functioning of marine ecosystems and for the conservation of their biodiversity. Monitoring networks of cabled observatories, along with other docked autonomous systems (e.g., Remotely Operated Vehicles [ROVs], Autonomous Underwater Vehicles [AUVs], and crawlers), are being conceived and established at a spatial scale capable of tracking energy fluxes across benthic and pelagic compartments, as well as across geographic ecotones. At the same time, optoacoustic imaging is sustaining an unprecedented expansion in marine ecological monitoring, enabling the acquisition of new biological and environmental data at an appropriate spatiotemporal scale. At this stage, one of the main problems for an effective application of these technologies is the processing, storage, and treatment of the acquired complex ecological information. Here, we provide a conceptual overview on the technological developments in the multiparametric generation, storage, and automated hierarchic treatment of biological and environmental information required to capture the spatiotemporal complexity of a marine ecosystem. In doing so, we present a pipeline of ecological data acquisition and processing in different steps and prone to automation. We also give an example of population biomass, community richness and biodiversity data computation (as indicators for ecosystem functionality) with an Internet Operated Vehicle (a mobile crawler). Finally, we discuss the software requirements for that automated data processing at the level of cyber-infrastructures with sensor calibration and control, data banking, and ingestion into large data portals.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Toward Self-Organising Service Communities

This paper discusses a framework in which catalog service communities are built, linked for interaction, and constantly monitored and adapted over time. A catalog service community (represented as a peer node in a peer-to-peer network) in our system can be viewed as domain specific data integration mediators representing the domain knowledge and the registry information. The query routing among communities is performed to identify a set of data sources that are relevant to answering a given query. The system monitors the interactions between the communities to discover patterns that may lead to restructuring of the network (e.g., irrelevant peers removed, new relationships created, etc.)