Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic elucidated that knowledge systems will be instrumental in cases where accurate information needs to be communicated to a substantial group of people with different backgrounds and technological resources. However, several challenges and obstacles hold back the wide adoption of virtual assistants by public health departments and organizations. This paper presents the Instant Expert, an open-source semantic web framework to build and integrate voice-enabled smart assistants (i.e., chatbots) for any web platform regardless of the underlying domain and technology. The component allows non-technical domain experts to effortlessly incorporate an operational assistant with voice recognition capability into their websites. Instant Expert is capable of automatically parsing, processing, and modeling Frequently Asked Questions pages as an information resource as well as communicating with an external knowledge engine for ontology-powered inference and dynamic data use. The presented framework uses advanced web technologies to ensure reusability and reliability, and an inference engine for natural-language understanding powered by deep learning and heuristic algorithms. A use case for creating an informatory assistant for COVID-19 based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data is presented to demonstrate the framework’s usage and benefits.
Highlights
Rapid advancements in monitoring and computational techniques have led to the abundance of semantically connected and annotated data in a plethora of fields [1,2], presenting the need for effective tools for its management [3], analysis, and communication [4].Web-based information systems (IS) serve as one-stop platforms to access, analyze, and explore information effectively for decision-making purposes [5,6]
One of the advantages of the Instant Expert is that it allows the sharing of information through numerous challenges by referencing the original source instead of duplication which opens the way for distrust
A recent example of such scenario is the ongoing pandemic of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)
Summary
Rapid advancements in monitoring and computational techniques have led to the abundance of semantically connected and annotated data in a plethora of fields [1,2], presenting the need for effective tools for its management [3], analysis, and communication [4].Web-based information systems (IS) serve as one-stop platforms to access, analyze, and explore information effectively for decision-making purposes [5,6]. Users of information systems (e.g., public, workers, managers, decision-makers, organizational leaders) often look for a certain piece of knowledge for which they may have to master the functionalities and resources provided by the IS [8]. This is especially tedious and discouraging for users who are not continuous visitors to the system. Modern approaches are needed to free the users from the nuances and complexities of information systems and provide a feasible tool to access knowledge [9]. Automated knowledge communication will be critical for participatory decision-making process in disaster mitigation as well [10,11]
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