A semantic and agent-based approach to support information retrieval, interoperability and multi-lateral viewpoints for heterogeneous environmental databases

PhDData stored in individual autonomous databases often needs to be combined and interrelated. For example, in the Inland Water (IW) environment monitoring domain, the spatial and temporal variation of measurements of different water quality indicators stored in different databases are of interest. Data from multiple data sources is more complex to combine when there is a lack of metadata in a computation forin and when the syntax and semantics of the stored data models are heterogeneous. The main types of information retrieval (IR) requirements are query transparency and data harmonisation for data interoperability and support for multiple user views. A combined Semantic Web based and Agent based distributed system framework has been developed to support the above IR requirements. It has been implemented using the Jena ontology and JADE agent toolkits. The semantic part supports the interoperability of autonomous data sources by merging their intensional data, using a Global-As-View or GAV approach, into a global semantic model, represented in DAML+OIL and in OWL. This is used to mediate between different local database views. The agent part provides the semantic services to import, align and parse semantic metadata instances, to support data mediation and to reason about data mappings during alignment. The framework has applied to support information retrieval, interoperability and multi-lateral viewpoints for four European environmental agency databases. An extended GAV approach has been developed and applied to handle queries that can be reformulated over multiple user views of the stored data. This allows users to retrieve data in a conceptualisation that is better suited to them rather than to have to understand the entire detailed global view conceptualisation. User viewpoints are derived from the global ontology or existing viewpoints of it. This has the advantage that it reduces the number of potential conceptualisations and their associated mappings to be more computationally manageable. Whereas an ad hoc framework based upon conventional distributed programming language and a rule framework could be used to support user views and adaptation to user views, a more formal framework has the benefit in that it can support reasoning about the consistency, equivalence, containment and conflict resolution when traversing data models. A preliminary formulation of the formal model has been undertaken and is based upon extending a Datalog type algebra with hierarchical, attribute and instance value operators. These operators can be applied to support compositional mapping and consistency checking of data views. The multiple viewpoint system was implemented as a Java-based application consisting of two sub-systems, one for viewpoint adaptation and management, the other for query processing and query result adjustment

Ontology Driven Web Extraction from Semi-structured and Unstructured Data for B2B Market Analysis

The Market Blended Insight project1 has the objective of improving the UK business to business marketing performance using the semantic web technologies. In this project, we are implementing an ontology driven web extraction and translation framework to supplement our backend triple store of UK companies, people and geographical information. It deals with both the semi-structured data and the unstructured text on the web, to annotate and then translate the extracted data according to the backend schema

The EDEN-IW ontology model for sharing knowledge and water quality data between heterogeneous databases

Abstract The Environmental Data Exchange Network for Inland Water (EDEN-IW) project's main aim is to develop a system for making disparate and heterogeneous databases of Inland Water quality more accessible to users. The core technology is based upon a combination of: ontological model to represent a Semantic Web based data model for IW; software agents as an infrastructure to share and reason about the IW semantic data model and XML to make the information accessible to Web portals and mainstream Web services. This presentation focuses on the Semantic Web or Ontological model. Currently, we have successfully demonstrated the use of our systems to semantically integrate two main database resources from IOW and NERI -these are available on-line. We are in the process of adding further databases and supporting a wider variety of user queries such as Decision Support System queries

Dialoguing with Data and Data Reduction: An Observational, Narrowing-Down Approach to Social Media Network Analysis

In this article, we propose an observational, narrowing-down approach to analysing social media networks and developing research design by the joint use of computational algorithms and researchers’ inductive exploration and interpretive explanations. The Brexit referendum on Twitter study is used to illustrate how we applied this approach in practice. In this study, observation helped us combine the strengths of computational statistical analysis and modelling and of inductive inquiries. Computational algorithms and tools including Elasticsearch, Kibana and Gephi provided us with an “ethnographic field” where we were able to inductively observe the relationships among users and to reduce the amount of data down to a level in which we could intuitively understand these relationships. In traditional observational studies, talking to human subjects and observing their interactions in a research site are important to ethnographers. Likewise, it is useful for social science researchers to dialogue with data, observe human relationships embodied in the data and reconstructed by computational tools, and understand these relationships through closely examining a small batch of meaningful data that is extracted from large-scale data. In this case study, adopting the proposed approach, we found the importance of political disagreement leading to a tale of two politicians, in which pro-Brexit users denounced @David_Cameron but legitimised @Nigel_Farage

HLA A B AND DRB1 ALLELE FREQUENCIES IN ALLOGENEIC AND HAPLOIDENTICAL HEMATOPOIETIC STEM CELL

In the open world of the (Semantic) web, a world where increasingly diverse materials from disparate sources of different qualities are being made available, an automatic mechanism of the provision of provenance information of these sources is needed. This paper describes voidp, a provenance extension of the void vocabulary, that allows data publishers to specify the provenance relationships of their data. We enumerate voidp's classes and properties, and describe a use case scenario. A wider uptake of voidp by dataset publishers will allow data consuming tools to take advantage of these metadata providing consumers with the origin, i.e., the provenance, of the what is being consumed

Supporting Multi-view Network Analysis to Understand Company Value Chains

The analysis of company value chains is a fundamental task within the MBI (Market Blended Insight) project whose objective is to develop web based techniques to improve performance of UK Business to Business (B2B) marketing activity. Value chains are an important model for understanding the market place and the company interactions within it. This is enhanced by Semantic Web advances in knowledge representation and logic reasoning that allows the flexible integration of data from heterogeneous sources, transformation between different representations and reasoning about its meaning. The project has aggregated data profiles of 3.7 million UK companies which are augmented by Web extractions from heterogeneous sources to provide unparalleled business insight. The project has identified that market insight desires and analysis interests of different types of users are difficult to maintain using single domain ontology. Therefore, the project has developed a technique to undertake a plurality of analyses of value chains by deploying a distributed multi-view ontology to capture different user views over classification of companies and their relationships

Weibo communication and government legitimacy in China: a computer-assisted analysis of Weibo messages on two ‘mass incidents’ †

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Information, Communication & Society on 03 Oct 2013, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2013.839730This article examines whether and to what extent online communication challenges the legitimacy of the authoritarian Chinese government through an analysis of data from Sina’s Weibo (China’s version of Twitter) about the 2011 Wukan and Haimen mass incidents, collected from December 2011-June 2012. The activities of Weibo users and the discourse of tweets they have posted are examined and the extent to which online communication on Weibo challenges government legitimacy is assessed