Ontologies Vs. Formats Vs. Schema Vs. APIs

Ontologies Vs. Formats Vs. Schema Vs. APIs: Tom Gruber thinks that "ontologies are a technology to make a minimal commitment while being as clear as possible. The minimalism comes by abstracting away from implementation details, which are biased by needs of efficiency and convenience. The clarity comes from careful specification, with at least some of the specification document couched in a formal language that forces one to be explicit about assumptions and the meanings of terms."

Towards a Canonical Method to Solve Patterns of Ontology Modeling Issues (9 Month Report)

Towards a Canonical Method to Solve Patterns of Ontology Modeling Issues (9 Month Report: "This report presents a brief description of the different activities carried out in the field of ontology engineering. It identifies a lack of guidelines on how to address modeling issues during the ontology conceptualization phase, in the current methodologies to build ontologies from scratch. It describes an example scenario of an ontology modeling task and it proposes a possible solution inspired by folksonomy based systems and faceted classification. This is followed by a study of the difficulties found to adapt the IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) standard to model an ontology fit for purpose in a specific university curricula domain. It also gives an example of a prototype for a potential next generation semantic web application and a brief summary of the main viewpoints that will characterize such applications. Finally it outlines possible paths of further research to address ontology modeling issues and it suggests looking at various sources for possible solutions (schemes of folksonomy and faceted classification, design principles of object-oriented and relational database applications, and ontology evaluation).

Ontologies

Ontologies: "Imagine that you have a beaker capable of holding 10cc of a liquid and you pour 5cc of water into it. Some people would say that the beaker is half-full ... others would say that it is half-empty ... and some would say that it is filled to one-half of its capacity or that it merely contains 5cc of water.

The point of this exercise is to demonstrate that we can portray the same item in various ways, with each representing a different perspective or mindset. Thus, when selections are made from the set of possible portraits and are then gathered together in the conceptual framework known as an ontology, the result is but one of several possible vistas."

Towards semantic web agents: Knowledge Web and AgentLink

Towards semantic web agents: Knowledge Web and AgentLink: "This paper presents an overview on the role of agents in the Semantic Web, that was the topic of the AgentLink Technical Forum Group on "Semantic Web Agents", aimed at fostering closer collaboration between the European communities working in these areas. The paper is structured in three main sections. In the first one, we argue how agents are an essential component of the Semantic Web, then we provide a brief history, by no means comprehensive, of how the Semantic Web vision -- that includes agents -- has evolved in the past fifteen years. We then conclude reporting on the topics presented and discussed during the Technical Forum."

IST Results - EU research driving the web services seismic shift

IST Results - EU research driving the web services seismic shift: "The growth of web services marks a seismic shift in computing. Web services, composed of a multitude of simple software applications, have the potential to crack the monolithic software application model and create a new online-services landscape, accessible to all. New research reveals that Europe is closely involved in setting the key standards for this development.

Web services provide a standard means of interlinking two or more discrete software applications, each of which could be hosted on quite different platforms and/or frameworks. Thanks to such interoperability, web services can be combined to carry out quite complex operations. Software programs offering simple services can interact with each other and in the process deliver sophisticated added-value services."

The semantic web is upon us, says Berners-Lee

The semantic web is upon us, says Berners-Lee - WebWatch: "The semantic web, where machines are able to read the contents of documents as readily as people can, now has all the standards and technologies it needs to succeed, according to W3C director Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Speaking at the WWW2006 conference in Edinburgh on Wednesday, he said it was now time for web developers and content producers to start using semantic languages in addition to HTML."

The Semantic Web Revisited

ECS EPrints Service - The Semantic Web Revisited: "The original Scientific American article on the Semantic Web appeared in 2001. It described the evolution of a Web that consisted largely of documents for humans to read to one that included data and information for computers to manipulate. The Semantic Web is a Web of actionable information--information derived from data through a semantic theory for interpreting the symbols. This simple idea, however, remains largely unrealized. Shopbots and auction bots abound on the Web, but these are essentially handcrafted for particular tasks; they have little ability to interact with heterogeneous data and information types. Because we haven't yet delivered large-scale, agent-based mediation, some commentators argue that the Semantic Web has failed to deliver. We argue that agents can only flourish when standards are well established and that the Web standards for expressing shared meaning have progressed steadily over the past five years. Furthermore, we see the use of ontologies in the e-science community presaging ultimate success for the Semantic Web--just as the use of HTTP within the CERN particle physics community led to the revolutionary success of the original Web. This article is part of a special issue on the Future of AI."

Content-based Ontology Ranking

ECS EPrints Service - Content-based Ontology Ranking: "Techniques to rank ontologies are crucial to aid and encourage the re-use of publicly available ontologies. This paper presents a system that obtains a list of ontologies from a search engine that contain the terms provided by a knowledge engineer and ranks them. The ranking of these ontologies will be done according to how many of the concept labels in those ontologies match a set of terms extracted from a corpus of documents related to the domain of knowledge identified by the knowledge engineer's original search terms."

New Siderean Software Navigates from Bird's-Eye to Bug's-Eye View

New Siderean Software Navigates from Bird's-Eye to Bug's-Eye View: "Seamark Navigator is location- and format-independent. "No longer are enterprise users forced to make decisions based on algorithmic results lurking behind a text box; now, users can make these decisions with confidence, knowing they have considered all the relevant content and relationships they may not have known existed."

The Seamark navigation engine uses "facets" (properties, categories, features) to guide users to relevant content. The Seamark Navigator provided faceted navigation in its earlier versions, but Petrossian noted that the key distinguishing piece of the new version is the new dynamic capabilities. Seamark Navigator 4.0 stitches metadata together on-the-fly, using RDF (resource description framework), a Semantic Web specification from the W3C (http://www.w3.org/RDF). It's flexible and doesn't require data models to be fixed, he explained. Because of this, the product can illustrate unseen relationships. Products from competitors also can bridge information silos but require "considerable coding in advance and lots of heavy-lifting proprietary technology," according to Petrossian. Seamark Navigator is also a bidirectional system, in that it allows users to contribute tags."

Vikings Set Out to Conquer Semantic Web

Vikings set out to conquer Semantic Web: "German scientists are working on a project they call Wikinger (German for 'Viking') based on the concept of Wikipedia to provide virtual knowledge networking in addition to the classic exchange of knowledge at Congresses. The goal of the project is to create a domain-neutral platform for scientists to allow them to perform research in knowledge bases regardless of where they are and to generate new knowledge via the Internet in collaboration. The researchers are paying special attention to support for colleagues in networking new contributions with current knowledge. To this end, techniques from the Semantic Web are being used."