Knowledge society arguments revisited in the semantic technologies era

In the light of high profile governmental and international efforts to realise the knowledge society, I review the arguments made for and against it from a technology standpoint. I focus on advanced knowledge technologies with applications on a large scale and in open- ended environments like the World Wide Web and its ambitious extension, the Semantic Web. I argue for a greater role of social networks in a knowledge society and I explore the recent developments in mechanised trust, knowledge certification, and speculate on their blending with traditional societal institutions. These form the basis of a sketched roadmap for enabling technologies for a knowledge society

The category of networks of ontologies

The semantic web has led to the deployment of ontologies on the web connected through various relations and, in particular, alignments of their vocabularies. There exists several semantics for alignments which make difficult interoperation between different interpretation of networks of ontologies. Here we present an abstraction of these semantics which allows for defining the notions of closure and consistency for networks of ontologies independently from the precise semantics. We also show that networks of ontologies with specific notions of morphisms define categories of networks of ontologies

Ontology alignment through argumentation

Currently, the majority of matchers are able to establish simple correspondences between entities, but are not able to provide complex alignments. Furthermore, the resulting alignments do not contain additional information on how they were extracted and formed. Not only it becomes hard to debug the alignment results, but it is also difficult to justify correspondences. We propose a method to generate complex ontology alignments that captures the semantics of matching algorithms and human-oriented ontology alignment definition processes. Through these semantics, arguments that provide an abstraction over the specificities of the alignment process are generated and used by agents to share, negotiate and combine correspondences. After the negotiation process, the resulting arguments and their relations can be visualized by humans in order to debug and understand the given correspondences.(undefined

Viewpoints on emergent semantics

Authors include:Philippe Cudr´e-Mauroux, and Karl Aberer (editors), Alia I. Abdelmoty, Tiziana Catarci, Ernesto Damiani, Arantxa Illaramendi, Robert Meersman, Erich J. Neuhold, Christine Parent, Kai-Uwe Sattler, Monica Scannapieco, Stefano Spaccapietra, Peter Spyns, and Guy De Tr´eWe introduce a novel view on how to deal with the problems of semantic interoperability in distributed systems. This view is based on the concept of emergent semantics, which sees both the representation of semantics and the discovery of the proper interpretation of symbols as the result of a self-organizing process performed by distributed agents exchanging symbols and having utilities dependent on the proper interpretation of the symbols. This is a complex systems perspective on the problem of dealing with semantics. We highlight some of the distinctive features of our vision and point out preliminary examples of its applicatio

The OBO Foundry: Coordinated Evolution of Ontologies to Support Biomedical Data Integration

The value of any kind of data is greatly enhanced when it exists in a form that allows it to be integrated with other data. One approach to integration is through the annotation of multiple bodies of data using common controlled vocabularies or ‘ontologies’. Unfortunately, the very success of this approach has led to a proliferation of ontologies, which itself creates obstacles to integration. The Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) consortium has set in train a strategy to overcome this problem. Existing OBO ontologies, including the Gene Ontology, are undergoing a process of coordinated reform, and new ontologies being created, on the basis of an evolving set of shared principles governing ontology development. The result is an expanding family of ontologies designed to be interoperable, logically well-formed, and to incorporate accurate representations of biological reality. We describe the OBO Foundry initiative, and provide guidelines for those who might wish to become involved in the future

Integrating building and urban semantics to empower smart water solutions

Current urban water research involves intelligent sensing, systems integration, proactive users and data-driven management through advanced analytics. The convergence of building information modeling with the smart water field provides an opportunity to transcend existing operational barriers. Such research would pave the way for demand-side management, active consumers, and demand-optimized networks, through interoperability and a system of systems approach. This paper presents a semantic knowledge management service and domain ontology which support a novel cloud-edge solution, by unifying domestic socio-technical water systems with clean and waste networks at an urban scale, to deliver value-added services for consumers and network operators. The web service integrates state of the art sensing, data analytics and middleware components. We propose an ontology for the domain which describes smart homes, smart metering, telemetry, and geographic information systems, alongside social concepts. This integrates previously isolated systems as well as supply and demand-side interventions, to improve system performance. A use case of demand-optimized management is introduced, and smart home application interoperability is demonstrated, before the performance of the semantic web service is presented and compared to alternatives. Our findings suggest that semantic web technologies and IoT can merge to bring together large data models with dynamic data streams, to support powerful applications in the operational phase of built environment systems

Alignment-Based Trust for Resource Finding in Semantic P2P Networks

Research Track: Policies and TrustInternational audienceIn a semantic P2P network, peers use separate ontologies and rely on alignments between their ontologies for translating queries. Nonetheless, alignments may be limited -unsound or incomplete- and generate flawed translations, leading to unsatisfactory answers. In this paper we present a trust mechanism that can assist peers to select those in the network that are better suited to answer their queries. The trust that a peer has towards another peer depends on a specific query and represents the probability that the latter peer will provide a satisfactory answer. In order to compute trust, we exploit both alignments and peers' direct experience, and perform Bayesian inference. We have implemented our technique and conducted an evaluation. Experimental results showed that trust values converge as more queries are sent and answers received. Furthermore, the use of trust improves both precision and recall

Enhancing Agent Mediated Electronic Markets with Ontology Matching Services and Social Network Support

Os Mercados Eletrónicos atingiram uma complexidade e nível de sofisticação tão elevados, que tornaram inadequados os modelos de software convencionais. Estes mercados são caracterizados por serem abertos, dinâmicos e competitivos, e constituídos por várias entidades independentes e heterogéneas. Tais entidades desempenham os seus papéis de forma autónoma, seguindo os seus objetivos, reagindo às ocorrências do ambiente em que se inserem e interagindo umas com as outras. Esta realidade levou a que existisse por parte da comunidade científica um especial interesse no estudo da negociação automática executada por agentes de software [Zhang et al., 2011]. No entanto, a diversidade dos atores envolvidos pode levar à existência de diferentes conceptualizações das suas necessidades e capacidades dando origem a incompatibilidades semânticas, que podem prejudicar a negociação e impedir a ocorrência de transações que satisfaçam as partes envolvidas. Os novos mercados devem, assim, possuir mecanismos que lhes permitam exibir novas capacidades, nomeadamente a capacidade de auxiliar na comunicação entre os diferentes agentes. Pelo que, é defendido neste trabalho que os mercados devem oferecer serviços de ontologias que permitam facilitar a interoperabilidade entre os agentes. No entanto, os humanos tendem a ser relutantes em aceitar a conceptualização de outros, a não ser que sejam convencidos de que poderão conseguir um bom negócio. Neste contexto, a aplicação e exploração de relações capturadas em redes sociais pode resultar no estabelecimento de relações de confiança entre vendedores e consumidores, e ao mesmo tempo, conduzir a um aumento da eficiência da negociação e consequentemente na satisfação das partes envolvidas. O sistema AEMOS é uma plataforma de comércio eletrónico baseada em agentes que inclui serviços de ontologias, mais especificamente, serviços de alinhamento de ontologias, incluindo a recomendação de possíveis alinhamentos entre as ontologias dos parceiros de negociação. Este sistema inclui também uma componente baseada numa rede social, que é construída aplicando técnicas de análise de redes socias sobre informação recolhida pelo mercado, e que permite melhorar a recomendação de alinhamentos e auxiliar os agentes na sua escolha. Neste trabalho são apresentados o desenvolvimento e implementação do sistema AEMOS, mais concretamente: • É proposto um novo modelo para comércio eletrónico baseado em agentes que disponibiliza serviços de ontologias; • Adicionalmente propõem-se o uso de redes sociais emergentes para captar e explorar informação sobre relações entre os diferentes parceiros de negócio; • É definida e implementada uma componente de serviços de ontologias que é capaz de: • o Sugerir alinhamentos entre ontologias para pares de agentes; • o Traduzir mensagens escritas de acordo com uma ontologia em mensagens escritas de acordo com outra, utilizando alinhamentos previamente aprovados; • o Melhorar os seus próprios serviços recorrendo às funcionalidades disponibilizadas pela componente de redes sociais; • É definida e implementada uma componente de redes sociais que: • o É capaz de construir e gerir um grafo de relações de proximidade entre agentes, e de relações de adequação de alinhamentos a agentes, tendo em conta os perfis, comportamento e interação dos agentes, bem como a cobertura e utilização dos alinhamentos; • o Explora e adapta técnicas e algoritmos de análise de redes sociais às várias fases dos processos do mercado eletrónico. A implementação e experimentação do modelo proposto demonstra como a colaboração entre os diferentes agentes pode ser vantajosa na melhoria do desempenho do sistema e como a inclusão e combinação de serviços de ontologias e redes sociais se reflete na eficiência da negociação de transações e na dinâmica do mercado como um todo.In electronic commerce, the diversity of the involved actors can lead to different conceptualizations of their needs and capabilities, giving rise to semantic incompatibilities that might hamper negotiations and the fulfilling of satisfactory transactions. In order to provide help in conversation among different actors, markets must offer ontology services to facilitate interoperability. However, humans tend to be reluctant to accept others’ conceptualizations, except if they become convinced that a good deal can be achieved. In this context, the application and exploitation of relationships captured by social networks can result in the establishment of more accurate trust relationships between businesses and customers, as well as the improvement of the negotiation efficiency and therefore the users’ satisfaction with the electronic commerce system. The AEMOS system is an agent-based electronic commerce platform that provides ontology matching services in order to facilitate the interoperability between agents that use different ontologies. AEMOS also includes a social network component that allows improving the ontology alignment recommendations and supporting the agents’ decisions about which alignments to select based on the information collected throughout the market and by exploring social network analysis techniques. This work presents the development and implementation of the AEMOS system, illustrating how the collaboration between the different agents can be helpful in improving the system’s performance, and how the inclusion and combination of ontology services and social networks reflects in the efficiency of the negotiation process