ImageSpace: An Environment for Image Ontology Management

More and more researchers have realized that ontologies will play a critical role in the development of the Semantic Web, the next generation Web in which content is not only consumable by humans, but also by software agents. The development of tools to support ontology management including creation, visualization, annotation, database storage, and retrieval is thus extremely important. We have developed ImageSpace, an image ontology creation and annotation tool that features (1) full support for the standard web ontology language DAML+OIL; (2) image ontology creation, visualization, image annotation and display in one integrated framework; (3) ontology consistency assurance; and (4) storing ontologies and annotations in relational databases. It is expected that the availability of such a tool will greatly facilitate the creation of image repositories as islands of the Semantic Web

Distributed Semantic Web Data Management in HBase and MySQL Cluster

Various computing and data resources on the Web are being enhanced with machine-interpretable semantic descriptions to facilitate better search, discovery and integration. This interconnected metadata constitutes the Semantic Web, whose volume can potentially grow the scale of the Web. Efficient management of Semantic Web data, expressed using the W3C's Resource Description Framework (RDF), is crucial for supporting new data-intensive, semantics-enabled applications. In this work, we study and compare two approaches to distributed RDF data management based on emerging cloud computing technologies and traditional relational database clustering technologies. In particular, we design distributed RDF data storage and querying schemes for HBase and MySQL Cluster and conduct an empirical comparison of these approaches on a cluster of commodity machines using datasets and queries from the Third Provenance Challenge and Lehigh University Benchmark. Our study reveals interesting patterns in query evaluation, shows that our algorithms are promising, and suggests that cloud computing has a great potential for scalable Semantic Web data management.Comment: In Proc. of the 4th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD'11

Service-Oriented Architecture for VIEW: A Visual Scientific Workflow Management System

Scientific workflows have recently emerged as a new paradigm for scientists to formalize and structure complex and distributed scientific processes to enable and accelerate many scientific discoveries. In contrast to business workflows, which are typically controlflow oriented, scientific workflows tend to be dataflow oriented, introducing a new set of requirements for system development. These requirements demand a new architectural design for scientific workflow management systems (SWFMSs). Although several SWFMSs have been developed that provide much experience for future research and development, a study from an architectural perspective is still missing. The main contributions of this paper are: i) based on a comprehensive survey of the literature and identification of key requirements for SWFMSs, we propose the first reference architecture for SWFMSs, ii) in compliance with the reference architecture, we further propose a service-oriented architecture for VIEW (a VIsual sciEntific Workflow management system), iii) we implement VIEW to validate the feasibility of the proposed architectures, and iv) we present two case studies to showcase the applications of our VIEW system

Improving STEM Education in Research: Preliminary Report on the Development of a Computer-Assisted Student-Mentor Research Community

Research education in STEM disciplines currently suffers from 1) The inability to feasibly collect highly detailed data on both the student’s and mentor’s activities; 2) The lack of tools to assist students and mentors in organizing and managing their research activities and environments; and 3) The inability to correlate a student’s assessment results with their actual research activities. Together these three problems act to impede both the improvement and educational quality of student research experiences. We propose a computer-assisted student-mentor research community as a solution to these problems. Within this community setting, students and their mentors are provided tools to make their work easier, much like a word processor makes writing a letter easier. Through their use of these tools, details of student-mentor activities are automatically recorded in a relational database, without burdening users with the responsibility of archiving data. Equally important, student assessments of outcome can be directly related to student activity, allowing educators to identify practices resulting in successful research experiences. Community tools also facilitate the use of labor-intensive teaching laboratories involving real inquiry-based research. The community structure has the added benefit of allowing students to see, communicate and interact more freely with other students and their projects, thus enriching the student’s research experience. We provide herein a preliminary report on the development and testing of a prototype, student-mentor research community, and present its tools, an assessment of student interest in participating in the community, and discuss its further development into a nationally-available student-mentor research community

An Ontology-Based Multimedia Annotator for the Semantic Web of Language Engineering

The development of the Semantic Web, the next-generation Web, greatly relies on the availability of ontologies and powerful annotation tools. However, there is a lack of ontology-based annotation tools for linguistic multimedia data. Existing tools either lack ontology support or provide limited support for multimedia. To fill the gap, we present an ontology-based linguistic multimedia annotation tool, OntoELAN, which features: (1) the support for OWL ontologies; (2) the management of language profiles, which allow the user to choose a subset of ontological terms for annotation; (3) the management of ontological tiers, which can be annotated with language profile terms and, therefore, corresponding ontological terms; and (4) storing OntoELAN annotation documents in XML format based on multimedia and domain ontologies. To our best knowledge, OntoELAN is the first audio/video annotation tool in the linguistic domain that provides support for ontology-based annotation. It is expected that the availability of such a tool will greatly facilitate the creation of linguistic multimedia repositories as islands of the Semantic Web of language engineering