Semantic-based Approach Research Articles

An Information Semantics Approach for Knowledge Management and Interoperability for the Global Earth Observation System of Systems

The global earth observation system of systems (GEOSS) is built on current international cooperation efforts among existing distributed earth observing and processing systems. The goal is to formulate an end-to-end process that enables the collection and distribution of accurate, reliable earth observation (EO) data, information, products, and services to both suppliers and consumers worldwide. EOs are obtained from a multitude of sources and require tremendous efforts and coordination among different governments and user groups to come to a shared understanding on a set of concepts involved in a domain. Semantic metadata play a crucial role in resolving the differences in meaning, interpretation, and usage of the same or related data. Also, the knowledge about the geopolitical background of the originating datasets could be encoded in the metadata that would address the diversity on a global scale. In distributed environments like GEOSS, modularization is inevitable. In this paper, we describe the need for an information semantics-based approach for knowledge management and interoperability between heterogeneous GEOSS systems. Further, considering the magnitude of concepts involved in GEOSS, we explore the possibility of using modular ontologies for formulating smaller interconnected ontologies.

A semantics-based approach to malware detection

Malware detection is a crucial aspect of software security. Current malware detectors work by checking for signatures , which attempt to capture the syntactic characteristics of the machine-level byte sequence of the malware. This reliance on a syntactic approach makes current detectors vulnerable to code obfuscations, increasingly used by malware writers, that alter the syntactic properties of the malware byte sequence without significantly affecting their execution behavior. This paper takes the position that the key to malware identification lies in their semantics. It proposes a semantics-based framework for reasoning about malware detectors and proving properties such as soundness and completeness of these detectors. Our approach uses a trace semantics to characterize the behavior of malware as well as that of the program being checked for infection, and uses abstract interpretation to “hide” irrelevant aspects of these behaviors. As a concrete application of our approach, we show that (1) standard signature matching detection schemes are generally sound but not complete, (2) the semantics-aware malware detector proposed by Christodorescu et al. is complete with respect to a number of common obfuscations used by malware writers and (3) the malware detection scheme proposed by Kinder et al. and based on standard model-checking techniques is sound in general and complete on some, but not all, obfuscations handled by the semantics-aware malware detector.

Towards a semantics-based approach in the development of geographic portals

As the demand for geospatial data increases, the lack of efficient ways to find suitable information becomes critical. In this paper, a new methodology for knowledge discovery in geographic portals is presented. Based on the Semantic Web, our approach exploits the Resource Description Framework (RDF) in order to describe the geoportal's information with ontology-based metadata. When users traverse from page to page in the portal, they take advantage of the metadata infrastructure to navigate easily through data of interest. New metadata descriptions are published in the geoportal according to the RDF schemas.

Semantic-based service matching algorithm in pervasive computing environments

The use of semantic descriptions of services helps automated service discovery in pervasive computing environment.A semantic-based flexible service matchmaking approach was presented.This approach matched services based on the aggregated similarities of service type,input/output parameters and QoS parameters,and used service type,input/output parameters filtering to prune out incompatible services.At last,it may select services according to the similar function.Experimental results prove that this approach has good performance to be used in pervasive computing environment.

The event bush as a semantic-based numerical approach to natural hazard assessment (exemplified by volcanology)

The event bush is a new formalism for organizing knowledge in various fields of geoscience, particularly suitable for hazard assessment purposes. Acting as an intermediary between expert knowledge and the well-established field of Bayesian belief networks, the event bush allows at the same time a variety of other applications, linking geoscientific knowledge to the field of artificial intelligence and uniting probabilistic, deterministic, and fuzzy approaches. In this paper, we present basic principles, mathematical formulation, guidelines for application, and examples, including the connection with Bayesian belief networks. Further development of the method will include spatial and temporal modelling, implementation in mapping in GIS medium, formalization by means of predicate logic, definition of variable states in BBNs by membership functions based on the event bush semantics, and other applications.

Syntax vs. semantics: competing approaches to dynamic network intrusion detection

Malicious network traffic, including widespread worm activity, is a growing threat to internet-connected networks and hosts. In this paper, we consider both syntax and semantics based approaches for dynamic network intrusion detection. The semantics-based approach can cope with sophisticated polymorphic and metamorphic worms better than the syntax-based approach. Our contribution in this work is threefold: our syntax-based scheme that uses variable-length partition with multiple breakmarks can detect many polymorphic worms; we believe our semantic-based prototype is the first NIDS that provides semantics-aware capability and our system is more efficient than what is reported by Christodorescu et al. (2005); our designed templates capture polymorphic shellcodes with added sequences of stack and mathematic operations.

A semantic-based approach to content abstraction and annotation for content management

In recent years, knowledge becomes the most important asset of individuals as well organizations, and determines the competitiveness of an enterprise. Content is a knowledge container that implies what human beings transform their knowledge in when they want to communicate with other people. Therefore, effective content management can achieve the goal and value of knowledge management. Content management activities are depending on meta-content which represents the content feature and are generated through the procedures of content abstraction and annotation. In general, the content creator utilizes words and logical combinations to express his intentions and concepts in semantic formats that are comprehensible to human beings. Accordingly, managing content from a semantic approach can effectively improve transparency and visibility of the content, and guides both the content creator and the user to engage in seamless, semantic-based communications and interactions. This study proposes a semantic-based content abstraction and annotation approach and a semantic pattern for bridging the semantic gaps of content management. Based on this approach, a semantic-driven content management environment that features a high interoperability of content can be constructed to accomplish the following goals and benefits: (1) effectively bridging semantic gaps in the existing content management systems; (2) delivering the right content to the right user at the right time; (3) bridging the semantic gaps for the content author and the customer to increase the efficiency of content management; and (4) realizing the acquisition, analysis, access, management, diffusion, interpretation, and innovation of knowledge.

Fieldwork among the Goemai in Nigeria: discovering the grammar of property expressions

Abstract This paper describes fieldwork experiences among the Goemai of Central Nigeria. It first introduces the fieldwork setting, and then focuses on one illustrative example: the investigation of property-denoting (‘adjectival’) expressions. The paper describes the different methods employed, compares them, and evaluates their results. It shows some advantages and disadvantages, and – on this basis – advocates using a combination of methods in order to benefit from each method's advantages while counterbalancing its disadvantages. In particular, the paper argues in favour of a semantics-based approach to fieldwork, illustrating the invaluable insights to be gained from it.

A semantics-based approach to malware detection

Malware detection is a crucial aspect of software security. Current malware detectors work by checking for "signatures," which attempt to capture (syntactic) characteristics of the machine-level byte sequence of the malware. This reliance on a syntactic approach makes such detectors vulnerable to code obfuscations, increasingly used by malware writers, that alter syntactic properties of the malware byte sequence without significantly affecting their execution behavior.This paper takes the position that the key to malware identification lies in their semantics. It proposes a semantics-based framework for reasoning about malware detectors and proving properties such as soundness and completeness of these detectors. Our approach uses a trace semantics to characterize the behaviors of malware as well as the program being checked for infection, and uses abstract interpretation to "hide" irrelevant aspects of these behaviors. As a concrete application of our approach, we show that the semantics-aware malware detector proposed by Christodorescu et al. is complete with respect to a number of common obfuscations used by malware writers.

An ontology-based method for knowledge integration in a collaborative design environment

A collaborative design environment can be viewed as a multi-agent system where each design agent has knowledge about specific domains and can solve different problems. Several agents combine to solve a complex problem through knowledge sharing and inter operation. It is essential to construct an integrated knowledge base to improve the efficiency and consistency of complex problem-solving. An ontology-based knowledge integration framework in a collaborative design environment is presented in this paper. Ontology provides standard vocabulary, technical terminology and a domain model for knowledge integration. The representation and construction of ontology are critic problems for knowledge integration. An object-oriented concept graph representation is presented to represent ontology. It has advantages of both object-oriented methodology and Sowa’s conceptual graph. It can be translated into predicate calculus conveniently, and can represent the intension of concepts. In order to improve the efficiency of ontology construction, a semantic-based approach is presented. Firstly, a semantic affinity based clustering algorithm is presented to generate concepts from the term set of multi-agent systems. Then, ontology is constructed based on knowledge.

Personal Name Resolution Crossover Documents by a Semantics-Based Approach

Cross-document personal name resolution is the process of identifying whether or not a common personal name mentioned in different documents refers to the same individual. Most previous approaches usually rely on lexical matching such as the occurrence of common words surrounding the entity name to measure the similarity between documents, and then clusters the documents according to their referents. In spite of certain successes, measuring similarity based on lexical comparison sometimes ignores important linguistic phenomena at the semantic level such as synonym or paraphrase. This paper presents a semantics-based approach to the resolution of personal name crossover documents that can make the most of both lexical evidences and semantic clues. In our method, the similarity values between documents are determined by estimating the semantic relatedness between words. Further, the semantic labels attached to sentences allow us to highlight the common personal facts that are potentially available among documents. An evaluation on three web datasets demonstrates that our method achieves the better performance than the previous work.

Ontology-Supported Web Service Composition

Web service composition can enhance the efficiency and agility of knowledge management by composing individual Web services together for complex business requirements. There are two main research streams in knowledge representation for Web service composition: the syntactic-based approach and the semantic-based approach. Despite the promises brought by each approach, the two streams are largely separated from each other. In this article, we propose an integrated ontology-supported Web service composition framework, which provides a novel solution to organizational knowledge management. By synergistically leveraging both syntactic-based and semantic-based approaches, this framework provides dual modes to perform service composition. Ontologies are employed to enrich semantics at both the service description and composition levels. The proposed conceptual framework has been implemented in the corporate financial services domain. It is demonstrated that the shared ontology helps to fulfill automated and on-the-fly service composition in particular and knowledge management in general.

Concept abduction and contraction for semantic-based discovery of matches and negotiation spaces in an e-marketplace

In this paper, we present a Description Logic approach – fully compliant with the Semantic web vision and technologies – to extended matchmaking between demands and supplies in a semantic-enabled Electronic Marketplace, which allows the semantic-based treatment of negotiable and strict requirements in the demand/supply descriptions. To this aim, we exploit two novel non-standard Description Logic inference services, Concept Contraction – which extends satisfiability – and Concept Abduction – which extends subsumption. Based on these services, we devise algorithms, which allow to find negotiation spaces and to determine the quality of a possible match, also in the presence of a distinction between strictly required and optional elements. Both the algorithms and the semantic-based approach are novel, and enable a mechanism to boost logic-based discovery and negotiation stages within an e-marketplace. A set of simple experiments confirm the validity of the approach.

SEMANTICS‐ASSISTED PROBLEM SOLVING ON THE SEMANTIC GRID

In this paper we propose a distributed knowledge management framework for semantics and knowledge creation, population, and reuse on the grid. Its objective is to evolve the Grid toward the Semantic Grid with the ultimate purpose of facilitating problem solving in e‐Science. The framework uses ontology as the conceptual backbone and adopts the service‐oriented computing paradigm for information‐ and knowledge‐level computation. We further present a semantics‐based approach to problem solving, which exploits the rich semantic information of grid resource descriptions for resource discovery, instantiation, and composition. The framework and approach has been applied to a UK e‐Science project—Grid Enabled Engineering Design Search and Optimisation in Engineering (GEODISE). An ontology‐enabled problem solving environment (PSE) has been developed in GEODISE to leverage the semantic content of GEODISE resources and the Semantic Grid infrastructure for engineering design. Implementation and initial experimental results are reported.

An Agent-Based Approach for Sourcing Business Rules in Supply Chain Management

In recent years, business rule management has become an important component of enterprise information systems. Business rules represent guidelines about how an enterprise should conduct its business and provide better service for customers. Business rules are being widely deployed in supply chains to support real-time decision making. The research reported in this paper is aimed at designing a dynamically adaptable data-sourcing service for deploying business rules effectively in supply chain management. Such a data-sourcing service is important since execution of business rules requires data to be retrieved from various data sources spread across the enterprise, including the enterprise data warehouse. We propose a semantics-based approach to implement the data-sourcing service for business rules. Our approach captures semantics of business rules and provides an agent-enabled mechanism that dynamically maps business rules to the enterprise data model. A prototype system is implemented to illustrate our sourcing service and demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.

Mining novel connections from online biomedical text databases using semantic query expansion and semantic-relationship pruning

This paper proposes a semantic-based approach for mining novel connections from biomedical literature. The method takes advantage of the biomedical ontologies, MeSH and UMLS, as the source of semantic knowledge. A prototype system, Biomedical Semantic-based Knowledge Discovery System (Bio-SbKDS), is designed to uncover novel hypotheses/connections hidden in biomedical literature through semantic query expansion and semantic-relationship pruning. Bio-SbKDS can automatically generate relevant search terms to retrieve the semantic-relevant articles from the online biomedical text databases. Using the semantic types and semantic relations of the biomedical concepts, Bio-SbKDS can identify the relevant concepts collected from Medline and generate the novel hypothesis between these concepts. Bio-SbKDS successfully replicates Dr. Swanson's two famous discoveries: Raynaud disease/fish oil and migraine/magnesium. Compared with previous approaches, our methods search much less articles, generate much less but more relevant novel hypotheses and require much less human intervention in the discovery procedure.

Self-organizing semantic maps and its application to word alignment in Japanese–Chinese parallel corpora

This paper presents a method involving self-organizing monolingual semantic maps that are visible and continuous representations where Chinese or Japanese words with similar meanings are placed at the same or neighboring points so that the distance between them represents the semantic similarity. We used the self-organizing map, SOM, as a self-organizing device. The words to be self-organized are defined by sets of co-occurring words collected from Chinese or Japanese newspapers, according to their grammatical relationships. The words are then coded into vectors to be forwarded to the SOM, taking into account the semantic correlation between them, which is established using a form of word-similarity computation. The self-organized monolingual semantic maps are assessed by numerical evaluations of accuracy, recall, and the F-measure, as well as by intuition, and by the comparisons with a clustering method and with multivariate statistical analysis. This paper further discusses the possibility that the method we propose can be extended to constructing Japanese–Chinese bilingual semantic maps, with the aim of providing a semantics-based approach to word alignment in Japanese–Chinese parallel corpora. We also show the effectiveness of this extended method through small-scale comparative experiments with a baseline method, where the alignment of Japanese and Chinese words is directly determined through the Euclidean distance of vectors representing the words, with a clustering method, and with multivariate statistical analysis.

Semantic-based Approach to Task Assignment of Individual Profiles

This paper is focused on the problem of skill matching in an organizational context. We endow the classical weighted bipartite graph approach with a semantic based assignment of arcs weight and we describe a skill matching system implementing the approach. The system takes curricula and project specifications as inputs and extracts from them individual profiles respectively offered and requested, according to an ontology modeling skill management context. The suitability of each available individual to each task to assign is evaluated based on an algorithm whose returned scores are used as arc weights. As a result the semantics of profile descriptions is taken into account in the assignment process.

A semantic-based approach to component retrieval

There continues to be a great deal of pressure to design and develop information systems within a short period of time. This urgency has reinvigorated research on software reuse, particularly in component based software development. One of the major problems associated with component-based development is the difficulty in searching and retrieving reusable components that meet the requirement at hand. In part, this problem exists because of the lack of sophisticated query methods and techniques. In this research, a semantic-based approach to component retrieval is presented as a solution to this problem. This approach makes use of domain models containing the objectives, processes, actions, actors, and, an ontology of domain terms, their definitions, and relationships with other domain-specific terms. A reuse repository is developed that contains the components relevant for the creation of new applications, along with their attributes and methods. The natural language interface, domain model, and reusable repository are implemented in a prototype that uses Web and JavaBeans technologies. A sample session is provided for an online auction application to illustrate the usefulness of the proposed approach.

The Relevance of Semantic Subtyping

We compare Meyer and Routley's minimal relevant logic B+ with the recent semantics-based approach to subtyping introduced by Frisch, Castagna and Benzaken in the definition of a type system with intersection and union. We show that – for the functional core of the system – such notion of subtyping, which is defined in purely set-theoretical terms, coincides with the relevant entailment of the logic B+.