Linked USDL: a vocabulary for web-scale service trading

Real-world services ranging from cloud solutions to consulting currently dominate economic activity. Yet, despite the increasing number of service marketplaces online, service trading on the Web remains highly restricted. Services are at best traded within closed silos that offer mainly manual search and comparison capabilities through a Web storefront. Thus, it is seldom possible to automate the customisation, bundling, and trading of services, which would foster a more efficient and effective service sector. In this paper we present Linked USDL, a comprehensive vocabulary for capturing and sharing rich service descriptions, which aims to support the trading of services over the Web in an open, scalable, and highly automated manner. The vocabulary adopts and exploits Linked Data as a means to efficiently support communication over the Web, to promote and simplify its adoption by reusing vocabularies and datasets, and to enable the opportunistic engagement of multiple cross-domain providers

Prikaz znanja u internetu stvari: semantičko modeliranje i njegove primjene

Semantic modelling provides a potential basis for interoperating among different systems and applications in the Internet of Things (IoT). However, current work has mostly focused on IoT resource management while not on the access and utilisation of information generated by the “Things”. We present the design of a comprehensive and lightweight semantic description model for knowledge representation in the IoT domain. The design follows the widely recognised best practices in knowledge engineering and ontology modelling. Users are allowed to extend the model by linking to external ontologies, knowledge bases or existing linked data. Scalable access to IoT services and resources is achieved through a distributed, semantic storage design. The usefulness of the model is also illustrated through an IoT service discovery method.Semantičko modeliranje pruža potencijalnu osnovu za me.udjelovanje različitih sustava i aplikacija unutar interneta stvari (IoT). Međutim, postojeći radovi uglavnom su fokusirani na upravljanje IoT resursima, ali ne i pristupu i korištenju informacija koje generira “stvar”. Predstavljamo projektiranje sveobuhvatnog i laganog semantičkog opisnog modela za prikaz znanja u IoT domeni. Projektiranje slijedi široko-priznate najbolje običaje u inženjerstvu znanja i ontološkom modeliranju. Korisnicima se dopušta proširenje modela povezivanjem na eksterne ontologije, baze znanja ili postoje će povezane podatke. Skalabilni pristup IoT uslugama i resursima postiže se kroz distribuirano, semantičko projektiranje pohrane. Upotrebljivost modela tako.er je ilustrirana kroz metodu pronalaska IoT usluga

The immunomodulator PSK induces in vitro cytotoxic activity in tumour cell lines via arrest of cell cycle and induction of apoptosis

Background Protein-bound polysaccharide (PSK) is derived from the CM-101 strain of the fungus Coriolus versicolor and has shown anticancer activity in vitro and in in vivo experimental models and human cancers. Several randomized clinical trials have demonstrated that PSK has great potential in adjuvant cancer therapy, with positive results in the adjuvant treatment of gastric, esophageal, colorectal, breast and lung cancers. These studies have suggested the efficacy of PSK as an immunomodulator of biological responses. The precise molecular mechanisms responsible for its biological activity have yet to be fully elucidated.Methods The in vitro cytotoxic anti-tumour activity of PSK has been evaluated in various tumour cell lines derived from leukaemias, melanomas, fibrosarcomas and cervix, lung, pancreas and gastric cancers. Tumour cell proliferation in vitro was measured by BrdU incorporation and viable cell count. Effect of PSK on human peripheral blood lymphocyte (PBL) proliferation in vitro was also analyzed. Studies of cell cycle and apoptosis were performed in PSK-treated cells.Results PSK showed in vitro inhibition of tumour cell proliferation as measured by BrdU incorporation and viable cell count. The inhibition ranged from 22 to 84%. Inhibition mechanisms were identified as cell cycle arrest, with cell accumulation in G0/G1 phase and increase in apoptosis and caspase-3 expression. These results indicate that PSK has a direct cytotoxic activity in vitro, inhibiting tumour cell proliferation. In contrast, PSK shows a synergistic effect with IL-2 that increases PBL proliferation.Conclusion These results indicate that PSK has cytotoxic activity in vitro on tumour cell lines. This new cytotoxic activity of PSK on tumour cells is independent of its previously described immunomodulatory activity on NK cells.AGL was supported by FIS Postdoctoral Research Contract CP03/00111. Studies were partially supported by a grant from Kureha Chemical Industry (Japan)

Towards the open service web

SOA4All, a collaborative European research and development project, is pioneering advanced web technology that will allow billions of parties to expose and consume IT services online. Four complementary technical advances are being integrated to create a coherent and domain-independent service delivery platform. Service-oriented architectures and service-orientation principles are being used to support the development of complex services based on distributed and reusable components. Web principles and technology are used to provide an underlying infrastructure that allows the integration of services at a world wide scale. Web 2.0 is used to structure human-machine cooperation in an efficient, user-adapted and cost effective manner. And semantic technology is used to enable service discovery

A core ontology for business process analysis

Business Process Management (BPM) aims at supporting the whole life-cycle necessary to deploy and maintain business processes in organisations. An important step of the BPM life-cycle is the analysis of the processes deployed in companies. However, the degree of automation currently achieved cannot support the level of adaptation required by businesses. Initial steps have been performed towards including some sort of automated reasoning within Business Process Analysis (BPA) but this is typically limited to using taxonomies. We present a core ontology aimed at enhancing the state of the art in BPA. The ontology builds upon a Time Ontology and is structured around the process, resource, and object perspectives as typically adopted when analysing business processes. The ontology has been extended and validated by means of an Events Ontology and an Events Analysis Ontology aimed at capturing the audit trails generated by Process-Aware Information Systems and deriving additional knowledge