An Ontology for Gendered Content Representation of Cultural Heritage Artefacts

The need for organising and digitally processing the vast amount of Cultural Heritage (CH) information has recently led to the development of formal knowledge representation models (ontologies) for the CH domain. Existing models, however, do not capture gender-related concepts. This article presents an effort to fill this gap by developing a new ontology for the representation of gendered concepts in CH resources.1 The new ontology, named ‘GenderedCHContents’ resulted from combined research in women’s studies, gender theory and computer science. Its primary aim is to draw attention to the presence of women within CH artefacts. The proposed ontology extends the Europeana Data Model (EDM) with twenty-two new classes, sixteen object properties and seven datatype properties. The article presents a demonstration of the ‘GenderedCHContents’ ontology’s use in five different representation tasks, which describe five resources related to Pandora’s myth. Lastly, the study stresses the benefits of reasoning support (i.e. enabling computers to infer further information from a set of asserted facts) in revealing different gender ideals and inferred relationships between metaphorical concepts, along with the benefits of the Semantic Web in making information about gendered contents more easily retrievable to the users

Preface: Semantic Web technologies for mobile and pervasive environments

Artificial Intelligence provides a rich set of methods and tools for implementing the Ambient Intelligence vision, i.e. to transform our environments into smart spaces assisting as with our everyday tasks in an intelligent, seamless and non-obtrusive way. Among them, Semantic Web technologies, such as RDF, ontology languages and others, can be used to address several of the challenges that come with this vision, mainly with respect to modelling, sharing and reasoning with context information. This thematic issue demonstrates their capabilities by presenting three different Semantic Web-based solutions for mobile and computing environments

A Multi-Aspect Evaluation Framework for Comments on the Social Web

Users' reviews, comments and votes on the Social Web form the modern version of word-of-mouth communication, which has a huge impact on people’s habits and businesses. Nonetheless, there are only few attempts to formally model and analyze them using Computational Models of Argument, which achieved a first significant step in bringing these two fields closer. In this paper, we attempt their further integration by formalizing standard features of the Social Web, such as commentary and social voting, and by proposing methods for the evaluation of the comments' quality and acceptance

Semantic Web Technologies for CrossCult

CrossCult (www.crosscult.eu) is a three-year H2020 research project, which started in March 2016. It consists of 11 European institutions and 14 associated partners, from Computer Science, History and Cultural Heritage. The goal of CrossCult is to spur a change in the way European citizens appraise History, fostering the re-interpretation of what they may have learnt in the light of crossborder interconnections among pieces of cultural heritage, other citizens viewpoints and physical venues. Its aim is to enable a unified, IT-facilitated history approach, which goes beyond the conventional siloed presentation of historical data, and focuses on aspects that are cross-cultural, cross-border, cross-gender and cross ethic, in order to trigger substantial reflection on history as we know it, as well as on grant societal challenges, such as population movements, access to health services, women’s place in society, power structures, etc

Introduction to the special issue on the International Web Rule Symposia 2012–2014

The annual International Web Rule Symposium (RuleML) is an international conference on research, applications, languages, and standards for rule technologies. It has evolved from an annual series of international workshops since 2002, international conferences in 2005 and 2006, and international symposia since 2007. It is the flagship event of the Rule Markup and Modeling Initiative (RuleML, http://ruleml.org), a nonprofit umbrella organization of several technical groups from academia, industry, and government working on rule technology and its applications. RuleML is the leading conference to build bridges between academia and industry in the field of rules and its applications, especially as part of the semantic technology stack. It is devoted to rule-based programming and rule-based systems including production rules systems, logic programming rule engines, and business rules engines/business rules management systems; Semantic Web rule languages and rule standards (e.g., RuleML, SWRL, RIF, PRR, SBVR, DMN, CL, Prolog); rule-based event processing languages and technologies; and research on inference rules, transformation rules, decision rules, production rules, and ECA rules

A Rule-Based Contextual Reasoning Platform for Ambient Intelligence Environments

The special characteristics and requirements of intelligent environments impose several challenges to the reasoning processes of Ambient Intelligence systems. Such systems must enable heterogeneous entities operating in open and dynamic environments to collectively reason with imperfect context information. Previously we introduced Contextual Defeasible Logic (CDL) as a contextual reasoning model that addresses most of these challenges using the concepts of context, mappings and contextual preferences. In this paper, we present a platform integrating CDL with Kevoree, a component-based software framework for Dynamically Adaptive Systems. We explain how the capabilities of Kevoree are exploited to overcome several technical issues, such as communication, information exchange and detection, and explain how the reasoning methods may be further extended. We illustrate our approach with a running example from Ambient Assisted Living. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

Preliminary notions of arguments from commonsense knowledge

The field of Computational Argumentation is well-tailored to approach commonsense reasoning, due to its ability to model contradictory information. In this paper, we present preliminary work on how an argumentation framework can explicitly model commonsense knowledge, both at a logically structured and at an abstract level. We discuss the correlation with current research and present interesting future directions

Evaluation of Semantic Web Ontologies for Privacy Modelling in Smart Home Environments

The proliferation of smart devices gives rise to a new world of Ambient Intelligence, a world of technologies embedded in the surrounding environments, such as the home environment. As the success of such systems often depends on the collection on personal data, privacy concerns threaten to hinder this new world from reaching its full potential. At the same time, accurately modelling the different types of contextual information proves to be of paramount importance in paving the way towards the maturity of Ambient Intelligence systems, with Semantic Web ontologies becoming a popular solution. This paper aims to explore the application of Semantic Web ontologies in modelling privacy-related information in the context of smart home environments. To this purpose, we have conducted a practical evaluation of three ontologies, in an attempt to determine their suitability within the stated domain. The paper concludes that the representation of privacy features within smart home environments is attainable through the use of ontologies; however, current models do not achieve sufficient coverage of the domain. Lastly, the paper provides insights into practical ways of enhancing future ontologies in order to reach the required capabilities

A Multi Attack Argumentation Framework

This paper presents a novel abstract argumentation framework, called Multi-Attack Argumentation Framework (MAAF), which supports different types of attacks. The introduction of types gives rise to a new family of non-standard semantics which can support applications that classical approaches cannot, while also allowing classical semantics as a special case. The main novelty of the proposed semantics is the discrimination among two different roles that attacks play, namely an attack as a generator of conflicts, and an attack as a means to defend an argument. These two roles have traditionally been considered together in the argumentation literature. Allowing some attack types to serve one of those roles only, gives rise to the different semantics presented here