ComSem : digitization and semantic annotation of comic books

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Using Rules to Generate and ExecuteWorkflows in Smart Factories

In modern factories, different machines and devices offering their services, such as producing parts or simply providing information, become more and more important. The number and diversity of such devices is increasing and the task of combining available resources into workflows becomes a challenge which can hardly be handled by a human user. In this paper we describe how we use RESTdesc, a formalism to semantically describe possible actions of RESTful Web APIs via existential rules to automatically generate and execute such workflows. Our approach makes use of Notation3 reasoners and their ability to produce proofs. These proofs are interpreted as workflow descriptions which can be easily executed and updated. The latter makes our approach very adaptable to unforeseen situations. By using one rule per possible API call, our system is very modular and easy to maintain; services can be readily added or removed. Our implementation shows how the use of rule-based reasoning can significantly improve the daily work in today’s factories

Using EPUB 3 and the open web platform for enhanced presentation and machine-understandable metadata for digital comics

Various methods are needed to extract information from current (digital) comics. Furthermore, the use of different (proprietary) formats by comic distribution platforms causes an overhead for authors. To overcome these issues, we propose a solution that makes use of the EPUB 3 specification, additionally leveraging the Open Web Platform to support animations, reading assistance, audio and multiple languages in a single format, by using our JavaScript library comicreader.js. We also provide administrative and descriptive metadata in the same format by introducing a new ontology: Dicera. Our solution is complementary to the current extraction methods, on the one hand because they can help with metadata creation, and on the other hand because the machine-understandable metadata alleviates their use. While the reading system support for our solution is currently limited, it can offer all features needed by current comic distribution platforms. When comparing comics generated by our solution to EPUB 3 textbooks, we observed an increase in file size, mainly due to the use of images. In future work, our solution can be further improved by extending the presentation features, investigating different types of comics, studying the use of new EPUB 3 extensions, and by incorporating it in digital book authoring environments