Semantic modeling of administrative procedures from a Spanish Regional Public Administration

Over the past few years, Public Administrations have been providing systems for procedures and files electronic processing to ensure compliance with regulations and provide public services to citizens. Although each administration provides similar services to their citizens, these systems usually differ from the internal information management point of view since they usually come from different products and manufacturers. The common framework that regulations demand, and that Public Administrations must respect when processing electronic files, provides a unique opportunity for the development of intelligent agents in the field of administrative processes. However, for this development to be truly effective and applicable to the public sector, it is necessary to have a common representation model for these administrative processes. Although a lot of work has already been done in the development of public information reuse initiatives and common vocabularies standardization, this has not been carried out at the processes level. In this paper, we propose a semantic representation model of both processes models and processes for Public Administrations: the procedures and administrative files. The goal is to improve public administration open data initiatives and help to develop their sustainability policies, such as improving decision-making procedures and administrative management sustainability. As a case study, we modelled public administrative processes and files in collaboration with a Regional Public Administration in Spain, the Principality of Asturias, which enabled access to its information systems, helping the evaluation of our approach

An ontology-based multi-domain model in social network analysis: Experimental validation and case study

Benítez-Andrades, J. A., García-Rodríguez, I., Benavides, C., Alaiz-Moretón, H., & Labra Gayo, J. E. (2020). An ontology-based multi-domain model in social network analysis: Experimental validation and case study. Information Sciences, 540, 390-413. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ins.2020.06.008[EN] The use of social network theory and methods of analysis have been applied to different domains in recent years, including public health. The complete procedure for carrying out a social network analysis (SNA) is a time-consuming task that entails a series of steps in which the expert in social network analysis could make mistakes. This research presents a multi-domain knowledge model capable of automatically gathering data and carrying out different social network analyses in different domains, without errors and obtaining the same conclusions that an expert in SNA would obtain. The model is represented in an ontology called OntoSNAQA, which is made up of classes, properties and rules representing the domains of People, Questionnaires and Social Network Analysis. Besides the ontology itself, different rules are represented by SWRL and SPARQL queries. A Knowledge Based System was created using OntoSNAQA and applied to a real case study in order to show the advantages of the approach. Finally, the results of an SNA analysis obtained through the model were compared to those obtained from some of the most widely used SNA applications: UCINET, Pajek, Cytoscape and Gephi, to test and confirm the validity of the model.SIJunta de Castilla y Leó

Using shape expressions (ShEx) to share rdf data models and to guide curation with rigorous validation

International Conference, European Semantic Web Conference, ESWC (16th. 2019. Portorož, Slovenia

SeDeLo: Using semantics and description logics to support aided clinical diagnosis.

Automated medical diagnosis systems based on knowledge-oriented descriptions have gained momentum with the emergence of semantic descriptions. The objective of this paper is to propose a normalized design that solves some of the problems which have been detected by authors in previous tools. The authors bring together two different technologies to develop a new clinical decision support system: description logics aimed at developing inference systems to improve decision support for the prevention, treatment and management of illness and semantic technologies. Because of its new design, the system is capable of obtaining improved diagnostics compared with previous efforts. However, this evaluation is more focused in the computational performance, giving as result that description logics is a good solution with small data sets. In this paper, we provide a well-structured ontology for automated diagnosis in the medical field and a three-fold formalization based on Description Logics with the use of Semantic Web technologiesThis work is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism, and Commerce under the project TRAZAMED (IPT 090000 2010 007).Publicad

Complexity and Expressiveness of ShEx for RDF

International audienceWe study the expressiveness and complexity of Shape Expression Schema (ShEx), a novel schema formalism for RDF currently under development by W3C. ShEx assigns types to the nodes of an RDF graph and allows to constrain the admissible neighborhoods of nodes of a given type with regular bag expressions (RBEs). We formalize and investigate two alternative semantics, multi-and single-type, depending on whether or not a node may have more than one type. We study the expressive power of ShEx and study the complexity of the validation problem. We show that the single-type semantics is strictly more expressive than the multi-type semantics, single-type validation is generally intractable and multi-type validation is feasible for a small (yet practical) subclass of RBEs. To curb the high computational complexity of validation, we propose a natural notion of determinism and show that multi-type validation for the class of deterministic schemas using single-occurrence regular bag expressions (SORBEs) is tractable

A Web-Based Tool for Automatic Data Collection, Curation, and Visualization of Complex Healthcare Survey Studies including Social Network Analysis

There is a great concern nowadays regarding alcohol consumption and drug abuse, especially in young people. Analyzing the social environment where these adolescents are immersed, as well as a series of measures determining the alcohol abuse risk or personal situation and perception using a number of questionnaires like AUDIT, FAS, KIDSCREEN, and others, it is possible to gain insight into the current situation of a given individual regarding his/her consumption behavior. But this analysis, in order to be achieved, requires the use of tools that can ease the process of questionnaire creation, data gathering, curation and representation, and later analysis and visualization to the user. This research presents the design and construction of a web-based platform able to facilitate each of the mentioned processes by integrating the different phases into an intuitive system with a graphical user interface that hides the complexity underlying each of the questionnaires and techniques used and presenting the results in a flexible and visual way, avoiding any manual handling of data during the process. Advantages of this approach are shown and compared to the previous situation where some of the tasks were accomplished by time consuming and error prone manipulations of data

Desarrollo modular de procesadores de lenguajes a partir de especificaciones semánticas reutilizables

En esta tesis se desarrolla un sistema de prototipado del lenguajes de programación mediante una integración de la semántica monádica modular y conceptos de programación genérica. El sistema se aplica a la especificación de lenguajes en los paradigmas de programación imperativa, funcional, lógica y orientada a objetos

Using Semantic Web Technology in Requirements Specifications

In this report, we investigate how the methods developed for using in Semantic Web technology could be used in capturing, modeling, developing, checking, and validating of requirements specifications. Requirements specification is a complex and time-consuming process. The goal is to describe exactly what the user wants and needs before the next phase of the software development cycle will be started. Any failure and mistake in requirements specification is very expensive because it causes the development of software parts that are not compatible with the real needs of the user and must be reworked later. When the analysis phase of a project starts, analysts have to discuss the problem to be solved with the customer (users, domain experts) and then write the requirements found in form of a textual description. This is a form the customer can understand. However, any textual description of requirements can be (and usually is) incorrect, incomplete, ambiguous, and inconsistent. Later on, the analyst specifies a UML model based on the requirements description written by himself before. However, users and domain experts cannot validate the UML model as most of them do not understand (semi-)formal languages such as UML. It is well-known that the most expensive failures in software projects have their roots in requirements specifications. Misunderstanding between analysts, experts, users, and customers (stakeholders) is very common and brings projects over budget. The goal of this investigation is to do some (at least partial) checking and validation of the UML model using a predefined domain-specific ontology in OWL, and to process some checking using the assertions in descriptive logic. As we described in our previous papers, we have implemented a tool obtaining a modul (a computer linguistic component) that can generate a text of requirements description using information from UML models, so that the stakeholders can read it and decide whether the analyst's understanding is right or how different it is from their own one. We argue that the feedback caused by the UML model checking (by ontologies and OWL DL reasoning) can have an important impact on the quality of the outgoing requirements. This report contains a description and explanation of methods developed and used in Semantic Web Technology and a proposed concept for their use in requirements specification. It has been written during my sabbatical in Oviedo and it should serve as a starting point for theses of our students who will implement ideas described here and run some experiments concerning the efficiency of the proposed method