Signed Web Forms

As more and more Web applications are available on the Internet, they are becoming a standard way also for many organizations and institutions to offer their services and/or improve the efficiency of office procedures. Some of these applications require the user to input some information, typically by filling out a form, and submit the data. In many cases the user is required to digitally sign the data submitted. The problem of the digital signature has been solved with appropriate algorithms based on the use of two different keys: the private key and the public key. The private key must be known only to its legitimate owner, certified by a Certification Authority, and must be protected from unauthorized access. This problem has been solved by means of smart-cards and USB-tokens. However when the user decides to sign a document displayed on the screen, the software actually uses his private key to sign an internal representation of the document. Thus, another problem arises: the user must be sure that the document actually signed is the same document he has been shown. Since few years the WYSIWYS (What You See Is What You Sign) technology has been suggested, so that users know exactly what they sign. We propose an architecture based on this technology. The signing module is embedded in a Web Service that must be invoked to obtain the digital signature of a given document. This Web Service shows the document to the user that decides whether to sign it or not. Finally, we have tested this architecture by implementing a prototype of a Form-based Web application

Formalizing Knowledge by Ontologies: OWL and KIF

During the last years, the activities of knowledge formalization and sharing useful to allow for semantically enabled management of information have been attracting growing attention, expecially in distributed environments like the Web. In this report, after a general introduction about the basis of knowledge abstraction and its formalization through ontologies, we briefly present a list of relevant formal languages used to represent knowledge: CycL, FLogic, LOOM, KIF, Ontolingua, RDF(S) and OWL. Then we focus our attention on the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and the Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF). OWL is the main language used to describe and share ontologies over the Web: there are three OWL sublanguages with a growing degree of expressiveness. We describe its structure as well as the way it is used in order to reasons over asserted knowledge. Moreover we briefly present three relevant OWL ontology editors: Prot?eg?e, SWOOP and Ontotrack and two important OWL reasoners: Pellet and FACT++. KIF is mainly a standard to describe knowledge among different computer systems so as to facilitate its exchange. We describe the main elements of KIF syntax; we also consider Sigma, an environment for creating, testing, modifying, and performing inference with KIF ontologies. We comment some meaningful example of both OWL and KIF ontologies and, in conclusion, we compare their main expresive features

Collaborative management of KYOTO Multilingual Knowledge Base: the Wikyoto Knowledge Editor

In this paper we introduce the Wikyoto Knowledge Editor, the wiki Web-based environment where the multilingual and multicultural community of KYOTO users interacts to maintain and extend, with respect to their particular domain of interest, the background knowledge resources of the KYOTO system, constituting the Multilingual Knowledge Base. KYOTO is a knowledge-driven system for fact mining from a multilingual collection of information sources concerning a specific domain of interest. Facts are mined from relevant documents that are linguistically and semantically annotated exploiting the Multilingual Knowledge Base, made of several languagespecific WordNets all referred to a common Central Ontology

Semantic Web gets into collaborative tagging

Collaborative tagging is a new content sharing and organization trend, mainly diffused over the Web, which has attracted growing attention during the last years. It refers to the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content. Today many different collaborative tagging systems are available on the Web, enabling users to add descriptive keywords to different types of Internet resources (web pages, photos, videos, etc.). The great number of advantages offered by the availability of collaboratively tagged resources in terms of their organization and shared information is underlined by their growing adoption, also in non-technical communities of users. In spite of this, analyzing the current structure and usage patterns of collaborative tagging systems, we can discover many important aspects which still need to be improved so as to bring tagging systems to their full potential. In particular, problems related to synonymy, polysemy, different lexical forms, different spellings and misspelling errors, but also the lack of accurancy caused by different levels of precision and distinct kinds of tag-to-resource association represent a great limit, causing inconsistencies among the terms used in the tagging process and thus reducing the efficiency of content search and the effectiveness of the tag space structuring and organization. This kind of problems is mainly caused by the lack of semantic information inclusion in the tagging process. Considering the increasing attention focused on the Semantic Web, we propose a new model of tagging system, based on semantic keywords. We let the users easily define the meaning of their tags, referencing some sort of social ontology. As social ontology we explore the adequacy of the support offered by the entries of Wikipedia andWordNet. Finally we present SemKey, a tool that allows users to tag in a semantic context, providing an evaluation of the system proposed in comparison with classical tagging tools

KAFnotator: a multilingual semantic text annotation tool

At present, the availability of high quality an- notated corpora is fundamental to carry out or to evaluate several Natural Language Process- ing and Text Mining tasks. To create consis- tently annotated corpora, direct human inter- vention represents a key factor: teams of man- ual taggers, usually composed by linguistically skilled people, are needed to refine existing annotations or to add new ones. As a conse- quence, manual corpora annotation is an ex- pensive and a highly demanding task in term of involved resource

The Physics of the B Factories

This work is on the Physics of the B Factories. Part A of this book contains a brief description of the SLAC and KEK B Factories as well as their detectors, BaBar and Belle, and data taking related issues. Part B discusses tools and methods used by the experiments in order to obtain results. The results themselves can be found in Part C

Improving the Hansard Production of the Chamber of Deputies Through the Introduction of XML

No abstract availabl