Social Network Technologies for Semantic Linking of Information Objects in Scientific Digital Library

Abstract. In the last decade, scientific digital libraries were traditionally used for publishing research results and for enabling wide open access to them. Functional capabilities of digital libraries can be extended by offering users the opportunity of linking information objects of the library and providing for created linkages explicitly defined semantics based on a given ontology. Such an activity of users, which is peculiar to social networks, motivated by different reasons, and carried out on their own initiative, results in the dynamic semantic structure of the digital library content. In the environment of such a kind of a social network, certain new forms of scientific activities become possible and data sources can be created that provide more information for scientometric researches as compared to presently available ones. In this paper, we propose an approach for creating such networks and discuss results of its implementation in the Socionet environment; the Socionet is a large-scale online information space that covers information resources of a number of scientific, educational, etc. organizations. This work was supported by the Russian Foundation for Humanities, project no. 14-02-12010-v

Qualifying Ontology-Based Visual Query Formulation

Abstract. This paper elaborates on ontology-based end-user visual query formulation, particularly for users who otherwise cannot/do not desire to use formal textual query languages to retrieve data due to the lack of technical knowledge and skills. Then, it provides a set of quality attributes and features, primarily elicited via a series of industrial end-user workshops and user studies carried out in the course of an industrial EU project, to guide the design and development of successor visual query systems

Ontology-based end-user visual query formulation: Why, what, who, how, and which?

Value creation in an organisation is a time-sensitive and data-intensive process, yet it is often delayed and bounded by the reliance on IT experts extracting data for domain experts. Hence, there is a need for providing people who are not professional developers with the flexibility to pose relatively complex and ad hoc queries in an easy and intuitive way. In this respect, visual methods for query formulation undertake the challenge of making querying independent of users’ technical skills and the knowledge of the underlying textual query language and the structure of data. An ontology is more promising than the logical schema of the underlying data for guiding users in formulating queries, since it provides a richer vocabulary closer to the users’ understanding. However, on the one hand, today the most of world’s enterprise data reside in relational databases rather than triple stores, and on the other, visual query formulation has become more compelling due to ever-increasing data size and complexity—known as Big Data. This article presents and argues for ontology-based visual query formulation for end-users; discusses its feasibility in terms of ontology-based data access, which virtualises legacy relational databases as RDF, and the dimensions of Big Data; presents key conceptual aspects and dimensions, challenges, and requirements; and reviews, categorises, and discusses notable approaches and systems