Challenges of Creating a Knowledge-Based Society: Education & Research for India & Gujarat

Presented at the World Gujarat Conference, Edison, NJ, August 30, 2008

CS 875: Semantic Web

World Wide Web (Web 1.0, or the Web, as we now know it) centers on documents and semistructured data in html, rss, and xml. The next generation Web, also called Web 2.0 and Web 3.0, has already started to emerge. Web 2.0 is about user-generated content, user participation such as through tagging, and social networking. Web 3.0, also called Semantic Web, is about labeling content such that machines can process it more intelligently and humans can exploit it more effectively. These labels or metadata add semantics (meaning) to data, and their formal representation enables powerful reasoning that leads not only to better (semantic) search but also to analysis, discovery, and decision making. Semantic Web is already a rapidly emerging field, with standards, technologies, products, and applications-as well as to excellent job prospects (for MS students) and research opportunities (for PhD students)

CS 475/675: Web Information Systems

This course covers advanced topics in managing W eh-based resources, with a focus on building applications involving heterogeneous data. It will expose students to the following concept, topics, architectures, techniques, and technologies: • data, metadata, information, knowledge, and ontologies• unstructured, semi-structured, structured, multimodal, multimedia, and sensor data syntax,structural/representational, and semantic aspects of data• architectures: federated databases, mediator, information brokering• integration and analysis of Web-based information• automatic information/metadata extraction (entity identification/recognition, disambiguation)• Web search engines, social networks, Web 2.0• Semantic Web and Web 3.0• relevant Web standards and technologies• real-world examples that have major research projects and commercial product

Semantic Web in Action: Ontology-driven Information Search, Integration and Analysis

Keynote at the Net Object Days and MATES, Erfurt, Germany, September 23, 2003

Semantics-Empowered Big Data Processing with Applications

We discuss the nature of Big Data and address the role of semantics in analyzing and processing Big Data that arises in the context of Physical-Cyber-Social Systems. We organize our research around the Five Vs of Big Data, where four of the Vs are harnessed to produce the fifth V - value. To handle the challenge of Volume, we advocate semantic perception that can convert low-level observational data to higher-level abstractions more suitable for decision-making. To handle the challenge of Variety, we resort to the use of semantic models and annotations of data so that much of the intelligent processing can be done at a level independent of heterogeneity of data formats and media. To handle the challenge of Velocity, we seek to use continuous semantics capability to dynamically create event or situation specific models and recognize relevant new concepts, entities and facts. To handle Veracity, we explore the formalization of trust models and approaches to glean trustworthiness. The above four Vs of Big Data are harnessed by the semantics-empowered analytics to derive value for supporting practical applications transcending physical-cyber-social continuum

InfoHarness: Managing Distributed, Heterogeneous Information

Today, important information is scattered in so many places, formats, and media, that getting the right information at the right time and place is an extremely difficult task. Developing a single software product, for example, includes the creation of documents ranging from the requirements specification and project schedules to marketing presentations, multimedia tutorials, and more. Each document may be created by a different person using a different tool, and each may be stored in a different place. InfoHarness is an information integration system, platform, and tool set that addresses these problems, managing huge amounts of heterogeneous information in a distributed environment. Through a powerful, consistent user interface, InfoHarness provides rapid search of and access to information assets including documents and parts of documents, mail messages, images, code files, video clips, Web pages with URLs, InfoHarness queries, and views of relational tables. The system makes all these artifacts available without relocating, restructuring, or reformatting the data

A Framework to Support Spatial, Temporal and Thematic Analytics over Semantic Web Data

Spatial and temporal data are critical components in many applications. This is especially true in analytical applications ranging from scientific discovery to national security and criminal investigation. The analytical process often requires uncovering and analyzing complex thematic relationships between disparate people, places and events. Fundamentally new query operators based on the graph structure of Semantic Web data models, such as semantic associations, are proving useful for this purpose. However, these analysis mechanisms are primarily intended for thematic relationships. In this paper, we describe a framework built around the RDF data model for analysis of thematic, spatial and temporal relationships between named entities. We present a spatiotemporal modeling approach that uses an upper-level ontology in combination with temporal RDF graphs. A set of query operators that use graph patterns to specify a form of context are formally defined. We also describe an efficient implementation of the framework in Oracle DBMS and demonstrate the scalability of our approach with a performance study using both synthetic and real-world RDF datasets of over 25 million triple