Image Annotation on the Semantic Web

Image Annotation on the Semantic Web: "Many applications that involve multimedia content make use of some form of metadata that describe this content. The goals of this document are (i) to explain what the advantages are of using Semantic Web languages and technologies for the creation, storage, manipulation, interchange and processing of image metadata, and (ii) to provide guidelines for doing so. The document gives a number of use cases that illustrate ways to exploit Semantic Web technologies for image annotation, an overview of RDF and OWL vocabularies developed for this task and an overview of relevant tools."

Searching and Ranking Ontologies on the Semantic Web

Searching and Ranking Ontologies on the Semantic Web: "The number of ontologies available online is increasing constantly. Tools that are capable of searching, retrieving, and ranking ontologies are becoming crucial to facilitate ontology search and reuse. In this document, we describe OntoSearch, which is a tool for capturing and searching ontologies on the Semantic web. We also briefly describe AKTiveRank which is used to rank OWL ontologies based on certain ontology-structure analysis."

Freedom and Restraint: Tags, Vocabularies and Ontologies

Freedom and Restraint: Tags, Vocabularies and Ontologies: "The benefit of metadata is widely recognized. However, the nature of that information and the method of production remains a topic of some debate. This division is most noticeable between those who believe in ’free tagging’, and those who prefer the more formal construction of an ontology to define both the vocabulary of the domain and the relationships between the concepts within it. Looking at the community surrounding online amateur authors and the descriptive metadata they have developed over the last thirty years we consider what we can learn from a mature but amateur tagging community. This paper considers how these two systems might be used together to add the easy usability of free tagging to ontology descriptions and the conceptual richness of ontologies to free tags."

Caboodle Launches Open Source Semantic Web-Based Search Engine

LinuxElectrons - Caboodle Networks Launches Open Source Semantic Web-Based Search Engine: "BURLINGAME, Calif.: Caboodle Networks has launched an open source search engine based upon semantic web standards. This new search engine, Kit, (available for free at http://semantical.org) is ideal for finding digital content and services otherwise poorly suited to discovery by traditional text-retrieval search engines the company claims. Kit can intelligently recommend related digital content such as games, music, images, and video, thereby truly leveraging the value hidden in the “long tail” of published content. Now companies and individuals hosting Internet gaming and music sites, as well as companies such as wireless carriers with mobile portals, have access to the very best standards-based solution for locating and recommending their downloadable content and services."

IST Project Wide

Project Wide: "WIDE aims to provide a basis for improving the quality and efficiency of innovative product design. The objectives are to investigate and demonstrate the application of emerging Semantic Web (SW) technologies and methods in an integrated, scalable and reconfigurable design information support management and knowledge sharing system. The key to improving innovative design lies in better information management and knowledge sharing support of the inter-working of multi-disciplinary design teams. The machine-understandable semantics of information sources, offered by the SW, driven by a general design process ontology (based upon an existing Knowledge Level theory of designing), together with meta data based filtering and presentation techniques, thus form the key components of the information support management and knowledge sharing system to be developed in the project."

Named Graphs as a Mechanism for Reasoning about Provenance

ECS EPrints Service - Named Graphs as a Mechanism for Reasoning about Provenance: "Named Graphs is a simple, compatible extension to the RDF abstract syntax that enables statements to be made about RDF graphs. This approach is in contrast to earlier attempts such as RDF reification, or knowledge-base specific extensions including quads and contexts. In this paper we demonstrate the use of Named Graphs and our experiences developing new kinds of semantic web application that build on Named Graphs for digital signatures, provenance, and semantic reasoning. We present a working example based on the Named Graphs for Jena (NG4J) API, from which we developed a semantic version control system for Software Engineering capable of reasoning about Named Graph-based provenance. We go on to discuss the implications of Named Graphs for Description Logics and semantic inference strategies."

Smart RSS Readers at Attensa

Smart RSS Readers at Attensa: "The Attensa RSS network is based on unique, proven intellectual property in a scaleable RSS architecture that efficiently organizes, distributes and measures RSS news feed articles and their associated attention metadata. Using Attensa network attention streams that accommodate the Attention.xml standard, metadata is unobtrusively fingerprinted and triangulated through collaborative filtering to deliver the most relevant information. By sharing, aggregating and triangulating the attention streams (anonymously and in near real-time) generated by the millions of people using RSS feeds, new possibilities emerge to provide individuals with higher value content. This metadata can be used to rank the popularity of articles by measuring the audience size and appetite for news from specific bloggers and news sources. It can also be used to create privacy protected anonymous user profiles, based on permission, that can recommend content, refine blog and Website searching and enhance the experience of tracking the news that matters to millions of people."

Mind the Gap: Another Look at the Problem of the Semantic Gap in Image Retrieval

ECS EPrints Service - Mind the Gap: Another look at the problem of the semantic gap in image retrieval: "This paper attempts to review and characterise the problem of the semantic gap in image retrieval and the attempts being made to bridge it. In particular, we draw from our own experience in user queries, automatic annotation and ontological techniques. The first section of the paper describes a characterisation of the semantic gap as a hierarchy between the raw media and full semantic understanding of the media's content. The second section discusses real users' queries with respect to the semantic gap. The final sections of the paper describe our own experience in attempting to bridge the semantic gap. In particular we discuss our work on auto-annotation and semantic-space models of image retrieval in order to bridge the gap from the bottom up, and the use of ontologies, which capture more semantics than keyword object labels alone, as a technique for bridging the gap from the top down."

Ontology Construction from Online Ontologies

ECS EPrints Service - Ontology Construction from Online Ontologies: "One of the main hurdles towards a wide endorsement of ontologies is the high cost of constructing them. Reuse of existing ontologies offers a much cheaper alternative than building new ones from scratch, yet tools to support such reuse are still in their infancy. However, more ontologies are becoming available on the web, and online libraries for storing and indexing ontologies are increasing in number and demand. Search engines have also started to appear, to facilitate search and retrieval of online ontologies. This paper presents a fresh view on constructing ontologies automatically, by identifying, ranking, and merging fragments of online ontologies."

Enter the Semantic Grid

IST Results - Enter the Semantic Grid: "The upshot is a technological infrastructure in which semantically-aware middleware allows collections of resources - computing, storage, data sets, digital libraries, scientific instruments, businesses and people – to rapidly come together to form virtual organisations to solve a specific problem and disband just as easily once a solution is found. By overcoming cross-organisational, cross-industry and cross-country boundaries, and increasing interoperability by making semantic assumptions explicit, the Semantic Grid promises to aid organisations and businesses in any field where input from multiple and potentially highly differentiated actors is required."