An Ontology-based Approach to Web Site Design and Development

Building a data-intensive web site is a complex task. Ad-hoc rapid prototyping approaches easily lead to unsatisfactory results, e. g. poor maintainability and extensibility. The situation becomes even more difficult when customization issues arise and web sites need to present customized views to individual users. To address this problem, a number of model-based approaches have been proposed, which attempt to simplify the design and development of data-intensive web sites. However these approaches suffer a number of limitations, such as relatively little support for the composition of sophisticated user interfaces and the specification of presentation styles and little support for customization design. In this work we propose and implement an ontology-based approach, OntoWeaver, which provides comprehensive support for the design and development of data-intensive web sites. In particular, OntoWeaver provides a set of ontologies to represent all aspects of data-intensive web sites in a declarative and re-usable format. The declarative nature of the specification of web sites opens up a number of possibilities with respect to intelligent analysis and management. Moreover, OntoWeaver includes providing high level support for developing customized web sites. Finally, it offers a powerful tool suite to support the design and development of data-intensive web sites. In the course of this research, we have also extended OntoWeaver by addressing the issue of integrating web service technology into a high level web site design framework

Modelling data intensive web sites with OntoWeaver

This paper illustrates the OntoWeaver modelling approach, which relies on a set of comprehensive site ontologies to model all aspects of data intensive web sites and thus offers high level support for the design and development of data-intensive web sites. In particular, the OntoWeaver site ontologies comprise two components: a site view ontology and a presentation ontology. The site view ontology provides meta-models to allow for the composition of sophisticated site views, which allow end users to navigate and manipulate the underlying domain databases. The presentation ontology abstracts the look and feel for site views and makes it possible for the visual appearance and layout to be specified at a high level of abstractio

OntoWeaver S: supporting the design of knowledge portals

This paper presents OntoWeaver-S, an ontology-based infrastructure for building knowledge portals. In particular, OntoWeaver-S is integrated with a comprehensive web service platform, IRS-II, for the publication, discovery, and execution of web services. In this way, OntoWeaver-S supports the access and provision of remote web services for knowledge portals. Moreover, it provides a set of comprehensive site ontologies to model and represent knowledge portals, and thus is able to offer high level support for the design and development process. Finally, OntoWeaver-S provides a set of powerful tools to support knowledge portals at design time as well as at run time

Integrating web services into data intensive web sites

Designing web sites is a complex task. Ad-hoc rapid prototyping easily leads to unsatisfactory results, e.g. poor maintainability and extensibility. However, existing web design frameworks focus exclusively on data presentation: the development of specific functionalities is still achieved through low-level programming. In this paper we address this issue by describing our work on the integration of (semantic) web services into a web design framework, OntoWeaver. The resulting architecture, OntoWeaver-S, supports rapid prototyping of service centred data-intensive web sites, which allow access to remote web services. In particular, OntoWeaver-S is integrated with a comprehensive web service platform, IRS-II, for the specification, discovery, and execution of web services. Moreover, it employs a set of comprehensive site ontologies to model and represent all aspects of service-centred data-intensive web sites, and thus is able to offer high level support for the design and development process

An infrastructure for building semantic web portals

In this paper, we present our KMi semantic web portal infrastructure, which supports two important tasks of semantic web portals, namely metadata extraction and data querying. Central to our infrastructure are three components: i) an automated metadata extraction tool, ASDI, which supports the extraction of high quality metadata from heterogeneous sources, ii) an ontology-driven question answering tool, AquaLog, which makes use of the domain specific ontology and the semantic metadata extracted by ASDI to answers questions in natural language format, and iii) a semantic search engine, which enhances traditional text-based searching by making use of the underlying ontologies and the extracted metadata. A semantic web portal application has been built, which illustrates the usage of this infrastructure

Design of customized Web applications with OntoWeaver

OntoWeaver is our conceptual modelling methodology and a tool that support the specification and implementation of customized web applications. It relies on a number of different types of ontologies to declaratively describe all aspects of a web application. This paper focuses on the OntoWeaver customization framework, which exploits a user model, a customization rule model, and a declarative site model, to enable the design and development of customized web applications at a conceptual level. OntoWeaver makes use of the Jess inference engine to reason upon the site specifications and their underlying site ontologies according to the customization rules and the valuable user profiles to provide customization support in an intelligent way. The ontology-based approach enables the target web applications to be represented in an exchangeable format. Hence, the management and maintenance of web applications can be carried out at a conceptual level without having to worry about the implementation details. Likewise, the declarative nature of the site specifications and the generic customization framework allow the specification of customization requirements to be carried out at the conceptual level

Integration of OWL-S into IRS-III

IRS-III is the first WSMO compliant system for supporting the Semantic Web Services technologies and it is based on the IRS-II [3]. This paper presents how we integrated the OWL-S [5] service description ontology to IRS-III. We describe how the underlying model of IRS-III supports OWL-S

The usability of semantic search tools: a review

The goal of semantic search is to improve on traditional search methods by exploiting the semantic metadata. In this paper, we argue that supporting iterative and exploratory search modes is important to the usability of all search systems. We also identify the types of semantic queries the users need to make, the issues concerning the search environment and the problems that are intrinsic to semantic search in particular. We then review the four modes of user interaction in existing semantic search systems, namely keyword-based, form-based, view-based and natural language-based systems. Future development should focus on multimodal search systems, which exploit the advantages of more than one mode of interaction, and on developing the search systems that can search heterogeneous semantic metadata on the open semantic Web

Prompt-to-afterglow transition of optical emission in a long gamma-ray burst consistent with a fireball

Long gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), which signify the end-life collapsing of very massive stars, are produced by extremely relativistic jets colliding into circumstellar medium. Huge energy is released both in the first few seconds, namely the internal dissipation phase that powers prompt emissions, and in the subsequent self-similar jet-deceleration phase that produces afterglows observed in broad-band electromagnetic spectrum. However, prompt optical emissions of GRBs have been rarely detected, seriously limiting our understanding of the transition between the two phases. Here we report detection of prompt optical emissions from a gamma-ray burst (i.e. GRB 201223A) using a dedicated telescope array with a high temporal resolution and a wide time coverage. The early phase coincident with prompt {\gamma}-ray emissions show a luminosity in great excess with respect to the extrapolation of {\gamma}-rays, while the later luminosity bump is consistent with onset of the afterglow. The clearly detected transition allows us to differentiate physical processes contributing to early optical emissions and to diagnose the composition of the jetComment: Authors' version of article published in Nature Astronomy, see their website for official versio