Bots, Seeds and People: Web Archives as Infrastructure

The field of web archiving provides a unique mix of human and automated agents collaborating to achieve the preservation of the web. Centuries old theories of archival appraisal are being transplanted into the sociotechnical environment of the World Wide Web with varying degrees of success. The work of the archivist and bots in contact with the material of the web present a distinctive and understudied CSCW shaped problem. To investigate this space we conducted semi-structured interviews with archivists and technologists who were directly involved in the selection of content from the web for archives. These semi-structured interviews identified thematic areas that inform the appraisal process in web archives, some of which are encoded in heuristics and algorithms. Making the infrastructure of web archives legible to the archivist, the automated agents and the future researcher is presented as a challenge to the CSCW and archival community

Semantic Heterogeneity Issues on the Web

The Semantic Web is an extension of the traditional Web in which meaning of information is well defined, thus allowing a better interaction between people and computers. To accomplish its goals, mechanisms are required to make explicit the semantics of Web resources, to be automatically processed by software agents (this semantics being described by means of online ontologies). Nevertheless, issues arise caused by the semantic heterogeneity that naturally happens on the Web, namely redundancy and ambiguity. For tackling these issues, we present an approach to discover and represent, in a non-redundant way, the intended meaning of words in Web applications, while taking into account the (often unstructured) context in which they appear. To that end, we have developed novel ontology matching, clustering, and disambiguation techniques. Our work is intended to help bridge the gap between syntax and semantics for the Semantic Web construction

On the emergent Semantic Web and overlooked issues

The emergent Semantic Web, despite being in its infancy, has already received a lotof attention from academia and industry. This resulted in an abundance of prototype systems and discussion most of which are centred around the underlying infrastructure. However, when we critically review the work done to date we realise that there is little discussion with respect to the vision of the Semantic Web. In particular, there is an observed dearth of discussion on how to deliver knowledge sharing in an environment such as the Semantic Web in effective and efficient manners. There are a lot of overlooked issues, associated with agents and trust to hidden assumptions made with respect to knowledge representation and robust reasoning in a distributed environment. These issues could potentially hinder further development if not considered at the early stages of designing Semantic Web systems. In this perspectives paper, we aim to help engineers and practitioners of the Semantic Web by raising awareness of these issues

Common vocabularies for collective intelligence - work in progress

Web based applications and tools offer a great potential to increase the efficiency of information flow and communication among different agents during emergencies. Among the different factors, technical and non technical, that hinder the integration of an information model in emergency management sector, is a lack of a common, shared vocabulary. This paper furthers previous work in the area of ontology development, and presents a summary and overview of the goal, process and methodology to construct a shared set of metadata that can be used to map existing vocabulary. This paper is a work in progress report

Concepts and operations of two research projects on Web services and context at Zayed University

This chapter presents two research projects applying context in Web services. A Web service is an accessible application that other applications and humans can discover and invoke to satisfy multiple needs. While much of the work on Web services has up to now focused on low-level standards for publishing, discovering, and triggering Web services, several arguments back the importance of making Web services aware of their context. In the ConCWS project, the focus is on using context during Web-services composition, and in the ConPWS project, the focus is on using context during Web-services personalization. In both projects, various concepts are used such as software agents, conversations, and policies. For instance, software agents engage in conversations with their peers to agree on the Web services that participate in a composition. Agents\u27 engagements are regulated using policies. © 2007, Idea Group Inc

Soft Concurrent Constraint Programming

Soft constraints extend classical constraints to represent multiple consistency levels, and thus provide a way to express preferences, fuzziness, and uncertainty. While there are many soft constraint solving formalisms, even distributed ones, by now there seems to be no concurrent programming framework where soft constraints can be handled. In this paper we show how the classical concurrent constraint (cc) programming framework can work with soft constraints, and we also propose an extension of cc languages which can use soft constraints to prune and direct the search for a solution. We believe that this new programming paradigm, called soft cc (scc), can be also very useful in many web-related scenarios. In fact, the language level allows web agents to express their interaction and negotiation protocols, and also to post their requests in terms of preferences, and the underlying soft constraint solver can find an agreement among the agents even if their requests are incompatible.Comment: 25 pages, 4 figures, submitted to the ACM Transactions on Computational Logic (TOCL), zipped file

State-of-the-art on evolution and reactivity

This report starts by, in Chapter 1, outlining aspects of querying and updating resources on the Web and on the Semantic Web, including the development of query and update languages to be carried out within the Rewerse project. From this outline, it becomes clear that several existing research areas and topics are of interest for this work in Rewerse. In the remainder of this report we further present state of the art surveys in a selection of such areas and topics. More precisely: in Chapter 2 we give an overview of logics for reasoning about state change and updates; Chapter 3 is devoted to briefly describing existing update languages for the Web, and also for updating logic programs; in Chapter 4 event-condition-action rules, both in the context of active database systems and in the context of semistructured data, are surveyed; in Chapter 5 we give an overview of some relevant rule-based agents frameworks

From the web of data to a world of action

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web 8.4 (2010): 10.1016/j.websem.2010.04.007This paper takes as its premise that the web is a place of action, not just information, and that the purpose of global data is to serve human needs. The paper presents several component technologies, which together work towards a vision where many small micro-applications can be threaded together using automated assistance to enable a unified and rich interaction. These technologies include data detector technology to enable any text to become a start point of semantic interaction; annotations for web-based services so that they can link data to potential actions; spreading activation over personal ontologies, to allow modelling of context; algorithms for automatically inferring 'typing' of web-form input data based on previous user inputs; and early work on inferring task structures from action traces. Some of these have already been integrated within an experimental web-based (extended) bookmarking tool, Snip!t, and a prototype desktop application On Time, and the paper discusses how the components could be more fully, yet more openly, linked in terms of both architecture and interaction. As well as contributing to the goal of an action and activity-focused web, the work also exposes a number of broader issues, theoretical, practical, social and economic, for the Semantic Web.Parts of this work were supported by the Information Society Technologies (IST) Program of the European Commission as part of the DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries (Contract G038- 507618). Thanks also to Emanuele Tracanna, Marco Piva, and Raffaele Giuliano for their work on On Time