Sketching the vision of the Web of Debates

The exchange of comments, opinions, and arguments in blogs, forums, social media, wikis, and review websites has transformed the Web into a modern agora, a virtual place where all types of debates take place. This wealth of information remains mostly unexploited: due to its textual form, such information is difficult to automatically process and analyse in order to validate, evaluate, compare, combine with other types of information and make it actionable. Recent research in Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Computational Argumentation has provided some solutions, which still cannot fully capture important aspects of online debates, such as various forms of unsound reasoning, arguments that do not follow a standard structure, information that is not explicitly expressed, and non-logical argumentation methods. Tackling these challenges would give immense added-value, as it would allow searching for, navigating through and analyzing online opinions and arguments, obtaining a better picture of the various debates for a well-intentioned user. Ultimately, it may lead to increased participation of Web users in democratic, dialogical interchange of arguments, more informed decisions by professionals and decision-makers, as well as to an easier identification of biased, misleading, or deceptive arguments. This paper presents the vision of the Web of Debates, a more human-centered version of the Web, which aims to unlock the potential of the abundance of argumentative information that currently exists online, offering its users a new generation of argument-based web services and tools that are tailored to their real needs

A Cross-layer Monitoring Solution based on Quality Models

In order to implement cross-organizational workflows and to realize collaborations between small and medium enterprises (SMEs), the use ofWeb service technology, Service-Oriented Architecture and Infrastructure-as-a- Service (IaaS) has become a necessity. Based on these technologies, the need for monitoring the quality of (a) the acquired resources, (b) the services offered to the final users and (c) the workflow-based procedures used by SMEs in order to use services, has come to the fore. To tackle this need, we propose four metric Quality Models that cover quality terms for the Workflow, Service and Infrastructure layers and an additional one for expressing the equality and inter-dependency relations between the previous ones. To support these models we have implemented a cross-layer monitoring system, whose main advantages are the layer-specific metric aggregators and an event pattern discoverer for processing the monitoring log. Our evaluation is based on the performance and accuracy aspects of the proposed cross-layer monitoring system

Theoretical Analysis and Implementation of Abstract Argumentation Frameworks with Domain Assignments

A representational limitation of current argumentation frameworks is their inability to deal with sets of entities and their properties, for example to express that an argument is applicable for a specific set of entities that have a certain property and not applicable for all the others. In order to address this limitation, we recently introduced Abstract Argumentation Frameworks with Domain Assignments (AAFDs), which extend Abstract Argumentation Frameworks (AAFs) by assigning to each argument a domain of application, i.e., a set of entities for which the argument is believed to apply. We provided formal definitions of AAFDs and their semantics, showed with examples how this model can support various features of commonsense and non-monotonic reasoning, and studied its relation to AAFs. In this paper, aiming to provide a deeper insight into this new model, we present more results on the relation between AAFDs and AAFs and the properties of the AAFD semantics, and we introduce an alternative, more expressive way to define the domains of arguments using logical predicates. We also offer an implementation of AAFDs based on Answer Set Programming (ASP) and evaluate it using a range of experiments with synthetic datasets

RDF Digest: Ontology Exploration Using Summaries

Abstract. Ontology summarization aspires to produce an abridged version of the original ontology that highlights its most representative concepts. In this paper, we present RDF Digest, a novel platform that automatically produces and visualizes summaries of RDF/S Knowledge Bases (KBs). A summary is a valid RDFS document/graph that includes the most representative concepts of the schema, adapted to the corresponding instances. To construct this graph our algorithm exploits the semantics and the structure of the schema and the distribution of the corresponding data/instances. A novel feature of our platform is that it allows summary exploration through extensible summaries. The aim of this demonstration is to dive in the exploration of the sources using summaries and to enhance the understanding of the various algorithms used. Introduction Given the explosive growth in both data size and schema complexity, data sources are becoming increasingly difficult to understand and use. Ontologies often have extremely complex schemas which are difficult to comprehend, limiting the exploration and the exploitation potential of the information they contain. Besides schema, the large amount of data in those sources increase the effort required for exploring them. Over the latest years, various techniques have been provided on constructing overviews on ontologies [1-4], maintaining however the more important ontology elements. These overviews are provided by means of an ontology summary. Ontology summarization [4] is defined as the process of distilling knowledge from an ontology in order to produce an abridged version. While summaries are useful, creating a "good" summary is a non-trivial task. A summary should be concise, yet it needs to convey enough information in order to enable a decent understanding of the original schema. Moreover, the summarization should be coherent and should provide an extensive coverage of the entire ontology. So far, although a reasonable number of research works tried to address the problem of summarization from different angles, a solution that simultaneously exploits the semantics of the schemas and the data instances is still missing. In this demonstration, we focus on RDF/S KBs and demonstrate for the first time the implementation of the algorithms introduced i

A specification-based QoS-aware design framework for service-based applications

Effective and accurate service discovery and composition rely on complete specifications of service behaviour, containing inputs and preconditions that are required before service execution, outputs, effects and ramifications of a successful execution and explanations for unsuccessful executions. The previously defined Web Service Specification Language (WSSL) relies on the fluent calculus formalism to produce such rich specifications for atomic and composite services. In this work, we propose further extensions that focus on the specification of QoS profiles, as well as partially observable service states. Additionally, a design framework for service-based applications is implemented based on WSSL, advancing state of the art by being the first service framework to simultaneously provide several desirable capabilities, such as supporting ramifications and partial observability, as well as non-determinism in composition schemas using heuristic encodings; providing explanations for unexpected behaviour; and QoS-awareness through goal-based techniques. These capabilities are illustrated through a comparative evaluation against prominent state-of-the-art approaches based on a typical SBA design scenario