Artificial Intelligence: A Promised Land for Web Services

6 page(s

Spectroscopic on-line monitoring and stopped-flow kinetic analysis of dye degradation by laccase/mediator systems

The laccase catalyzed transformation of the acid dye Indigo Carmine (CI Acid Blue 74) was studied using various redox mediators: violuric acid (VIO), 2,2,6,6-tetramethyl-1-piperidinyloxyl (TEMPO), 1-hydroxybenzotriazole (HOBT), and 2,2-azinobis-(3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-disulfonic acid diammonium salt (ABTS). Inline UV/Vis and IR spectroscopy was employed to monitor the decolorization in real-time during batch decolorization. ABTS was the most effective mediator follwed by TEMPO. Stopped flow kinetics was employed to study the initial phase of dye degradation in more detail. While the batch decolorization experiments suggested zero-order rate laws for dye transformation at an early stage, the more accurate stopped-flow kinetic experiments revealed that the rate laws for the initial phase were actually more complicated. Different pH optima for dye decolorization were found for the laccase catalyzed reaction (pH 3.5) and for the oxidation brought about by the isolated ABTS radical cation (pH 6.7)

Pragmatic Ontology Evolution: Reconciling User Requirements and Application Performance

Increasingly, organizations are adopting ontologies to describe their large catalogues of items. These ontologies need to evolve regularly in response to changes in the domain and the emergence of new requirements. An important step of this process is the selection of candidate concepts to include in the new version of the ontology. This operation needs to take into account a variety of factors and in particular reconcile user requirements and application performance. Current ontology evolution methods focus either on ranking concepts according to their relevance or on preserving compatibility with existing applications. However, they do not take in consideration the impact of the ontology evolution process on the performance of computational tasks – e.g., in this work we focus on instance tagging, similarity computation, generation of recommendations, and data clustering. In this paper, we propose the Pragmatic Ontology Evolution (POE) framework, a novel approach for selecting from a group of candidates a set of concepts able to produce a new version of a given ontology that i) is consistent with the a set of user requirements (e.g., max number of concepts in the ontology), ii) is parametrised with respect to a number of dimensions (e.g., topological considerations), and iii) effectively supports relevant computational tasks. Our approach also supports users in navigating the space of possible solutions by showing how certain choices, such as limiting the number of concepts or privileging trendy concepts rather than historical ones, would reflect on the application performance. An evaluation of POE on the real-world scenario of the evolving Springer Nature taxonomy for editorial classification yielded excellent results, demonstrating a significant improvement over alternative approaches

Building web service ontologies

Harmelen, F.A.H. van [Promotor]Stuckenschmidt, H. [Copromotor

UML for the Semantic Web: Transformation-Based Approaches

The perspective role of UML as a conceptual modelling language for the Semantic Web has become an important research topic. We argue that UML could be a key technology for overcoming the ontology development bottleneck thanks to its wide acceptance and sophisticated tool support. Transformational approaches are a promising way of establishing a connection between UML and web-based ontology languages. We compare some proposals for defining transformations between UML and web ontology languages and discuss the different ways they handle the conceptual differences between these languages. We identify commonalities and differences of the approaches and point out open questions that have not or not satisfyingly been addressed by existing approaches

TourMISLOD: a Tourism Linked Data Set

The TourMISLOD dataset exposes as linked data a significant portion of the content of TourMIS, a key source of European tourism statistics data. TourMISLOD contains information about the Arrivals, Bednights and Capacity tourism indicators, recorded from 1985 onwards, about over 150 European cities and in connection to 19 major markets. Due to licensing issues, the usage of this dataset is currently limited to the TourMIS consortium. Nevertheless, a prototype application has already revealed the dataset’s usefulness for decision support

Empathy and Peer Defending: Half-longitudinal Mediation Role of Social and Emotional Competencies

Empathy has been studied systematically in relation to school bullying. It is also an important component of bullying prevention and intervention programs aimed at promoting bystander intervention. These interventions encourage peers to intervene and defend the victim or stop the aggressor by increasing empathy levels. Previous research has highlighted that social and emotional competencies (SEC) are essential in both cognitive and affective empathy and prosocial behaviors such as defending. However, few studies have addressed the mechanisms by which empathy facilitates defense. In this study, we tested whether SEC mediate the relationship between first cognitive, then affective empathy and defending in a cross-lagged panel model for a half-longitudinal design. Participants included 414 adolescents with answers at both time points, and 281 with answers only at T1. The mean age of participants at T1 was 12.72 (SD = 1.14), while for T2 it was 12.30 (SD = 0.89). Results confirm the indirect effect of empathy on defending through SEC only for cognitive empathy and not for affective empathy