Knowledge web: realising the semantic web... all the way to knowledge-enhanced multimedia documents

The semantic web and semantic web services are major efforts in order to spread and to integrate knowledge technology to the whole web. The Knowledge Web network of excellence aims at supporting their developments at the best and largest European level and supporting industry in adopting them. It especially investigates the solution of scalability, heterogeneity and dynamics obstacles to the full development of the semantic web. We explain how Knowledge Web results should benefit knowledge-enhanced multimedia applications

Structured development of problem solving methods

This paper, published in one of the top journals in Computer Science, describes the UPML framework for modelling knowledge-based applications, which can be seen as the culmination of over twenty years of research in this area. UPML has shaped the field, providing the intellectual and formal basis for the WSMO framework, which is the cornerstone of current standardization efforts in semantic web services and has attracted over E100M in funding from EU. Since 2001, the Open University itself has received over £3.5M in funding from EU/EPSRC to carry out further research in models of problem solving and semantic web services

A comparison of languages which operationalise and formalise {KADS} models of expertise

In the field of Knowledge Engineering, dissatisfaction with the rapid-prototyping approach has led to a number of more principled methodologies for the construction of knowledge-based systems. Instead of immediately implementing the gathered and interpreted knowledge in a given implementation formalism according to the rapid-prototyping approach, many such methodologies centre around the notion of a conceptual model: an abstract, implementation independent description of the relevant problem solving expertise. A conceptual model should describe the task which is solved by the system and the knowledge which is required by it. Although such conceptual models have often been formulated in an informal way, recent years have seen the advent of formal and operational languages to describe such conceptual models more precisely, and operationally as a means for model evaluation. In this paper, we study a number of such formal and operational languages for specifying conceptual models. In order to enable a meaningful comparison of such languages, we focus on languages which are all aimed at the same underlying conceptual model, namely that from the KADS method for building KBS. We describe eight formal languages for KADS models of expertise, and compare these languages with respect to their modelling primitives, their semantics, their implementations and their applications. Future research issues in the area of formal and operational specification languages for KBS are identified as the result of studying these languages. The paper also contains an extensive bibliography of research in this area

Knowledge Management through Ontologies

Most enterprises agree that knowledge is an essential asset for success and survival on a increasingly competitive and global market. This awareness is one of the main reasons for the exponential growth of knowledge management in the past decade. Our approach to knowledge management is based on ontologies, and makes knowledge assets intelligently accessible to people in organizations. Most company-vital knowledge resides in the heads of people, and thus successful knowledge management does not only consider technical aspects but also social ones. In this paper, we describe an approach to intelligent knowledge management that explicitly takes into account the social issues involved. The proof of concept is given by a large-scale initiative involving knowledge management of a virtual organization

Semantic Transformation of Web Services

Web services have become the predominant paradigm for the development of distributed software systems. Web services provide the means to modularize software in a way that functionality can be described, discovered and deployed in a platform independent manner over a network (e.g., intranets, extranets and the Internet). The representation of web services by current industrial practice is predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinnings required to fulfill the goals of the emerging Semantic Web. This paper proposes a framework aimed at (1) modeling the semantics of syntactically defined web services through a process of interpretation, (2) scop-ing the derived concepts within domain ontologies, and (3) harmonizing the semantic web services with the domain ontologies. The framework was vali-dated through its application to web services developed for a large financial system. The worked example presented in this paper is extracted from the se-mantic modeling of these financial web services

Towards a killer app for the Semantic Web

Killer apps are highly transformative technologies that create new markets and widespread patterns of behaviour. IT generally, and the Web in particular, has benefited from killer apps to create new networks of users and increase its value. The Semantic Web community on the other hand is still awaiting a killer app that proves the superiority of its technologies. There are certain features that distinguish killer apps from other ordinary applications. This paper examines those features in the context of the Semantic Web, in the hope that a better understanding of the characteristics of killer apps might encourage their consideration when developing Semantic Web applications

Formal Identification of Right-Grained Services for Service-Oriented Modeling

Abstract. Identifying the right-grained services is important to lead the successful service orientation because it has a direct impact on two major goals: the composability of loosely-coupled services, and the reusability of individual services in different contexts. Although the concept of service orientation has been intensively debated in recent years, a unified methodic approach for identifying services has not yet been reached. In this paper, we suggest a formal approach to identify services at the right level of granularity from the business process model. Our approach uses the concept of graph clustering and provides a systematical approach by defining the cost metric as a measure of the interaction costs. To effectively extract service information from the business model, we take activities as the smallest units in service identification and cluster activities with high interaction cost into a task through hierarchical clustering algorithm, so as to reduce the coupling of remote tasks and to increase local task cohesion

A framework for deriving semantic web services

Web service-based development represents an emerging approach for the development of distributed information systems. Web services have been mainly applied by software practitioners as a means to modularize system functionality that can be offered across a network (e.g., intranet and/or the Internet). Although web services have been predominantly developed as a technical solution for integrating software systems, there is a more business-oriented aspect that developers and enterprises need to deal with in order to benefit from the full potential of web services in an electronic market. This ‘ignored’ aspect is the representation of the semantics underlying the services themselves as well as the ‘things’ that the services manage. Currently languages like the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) provide the syntactic means to describe web services, but lack in providing a semantic underpinning. In order to harvest all the benefits of web services technology, a framework has been developed for deriving business semantics from syntactic descriptions of web services. The benefits of such a framework are two-fold. Firstly, the framework provides a way to gradually construct domain ontologies from previously defined technical services. Secondly, the framework enables the migration of syntactically defined web services toward semantic web services. The study follows a design research approach which (1) identifies the problem area and its relevance from an industrial case study and previous research, (2) develops the framework as a design artifact and (3) evaluates the application of the framework through a relevant scenario