Semantic Web Framework Research Articles

RDFScape: Semantic Web meets systems biology.

BackgroundThe recent availability of high-throughput data in molecular biology has increased the need for a formal representation of this knowledge domain. New ontologies are being developed to formalize knowledge, e.g. about the functions of proteins. As the Semantic Web is being introduced into the Life Sciences, the basis for a distributed knowledge-base that can foster biological data analysis is laid. However, there still is a dichotomy, in tools and methodologies, between the use of ontologies in biological investigation, that is, in relation to experimental observations, and their use as a knowledge-base.ResultsRDFScape is a plugin that has been developed to extend a software oriented to biological analysis with support for reasoning on ontologies in the semantic web framework. We show with this plugin how the use of ontological knowledge in biological analysis can be extended through the use of inference. In particular, we present two examples relative to ontologies representing biological pathways: we demonstrate how these can be abstracted and visualized as interaction networks, and how reasoning on causal dependencies within elements of pathways can be implemented.ConclusionsThe use of ontologies for the interpretation of high-throughput biological data can be improved through the use of inference. This allows the use of ontologies not only as annotations, but as a knowledge-base from which new information relevant for specific analysis can be derived.

Semi-automatic web service composition for the life sciences using the BioMoby semantic web framework

Researchers in the life-sciences are currently limited to small-scale informatics experiments and analyses because of the lack of interoperability among life-sciences web services. This limitation can be addressed by annotating services and their interfaces with semantic information, so that interoperability problems can be reasoned about programmatically. The Moby semantic web framework is a popular and mature platform that is used for this purpose. However, the number of services that are available to select from when building a workflow is becoming unmanageable for users. As such, attempts have been made to assist with service selection and composition. These tasks fall under the general label of automated service composition. We present a prototype workflow assembly client that reduces the number of choices that users have to make by (1) restricting the overall set of services presented to them and (2) ranking services so that the the most desirable ones are presented first. We demonstrate via an evaluation of this prototype that a unification of relatively simple techniques can rank desirable services highly while maintaining interactive response times.

Semantic Web Services and Mobile Agents Integration for Efficient Mobile Services

The requirement for ubiquitous service access in wireless environments presents a great challenge in light of well-known problems like high error rate and frequent disconnections. In order to satisfy this requirement, we propose the integration of two modern service technologies: Web Services and Mobile Agents. This integration allows wireless users to access and invoke semantically enriched Web Services without the need for simultaneous, online presence of the service requestor. Moreover, in order to improve the capabilities of Service registries, we exploit the advantages offered by the Semantic Web framework. Specifically, we use enhanced registries enriched with semantic information that provide semantic matching to service queries and published service descriptions. Finally, we discuss the implementation of the proposed framework and present our performance assessment findings.

A meta-control architecture for orchestrating policy enforcement across heterogeneous information sources

There is increasing demand from both organizations and individuals for technology capable of enforcing sophisticated, context-sensitive policies, whether security and privacy policies, corporate policies or policies reflecting various regulatory requirements. In open environments, enforcing such policies requires the ability to reason about the policies themselves as well as the ability to dynamically identify and access heterogeneous sources of information. This article introduces a semantic web framework and a meta-control model to orchestrate policy reasoning with the identification and access of relevant sources of information. Specifically, sources of information are modeled as web services with rich semantic profiles. Policy Enforcing Agents rely on meta-control strategies to dynamically interleave semantic web reasoning and service discovery and access. Meta-control rules can be customized to best capture the requirements associated with different domains and different sets of policies. This architecture has been validated in the context of different environments, including a collaborative enterprise domain as well as several mobile and pervasive computing applications deployed on Carnegie Mellon's campus. We show that, in the particular instance of access control policies, the proposed framework can be viewed as an extension of the XACML architecture, in which Policy Enforcing Agents offer a particularly powerful way of implementing XACML's Policy Information Point (PIP) and Context Handler functionality. At the same time, our proposed architecture extends to a much wider range of policies and regulations. Empirical results suggest that the semantic framework introduced in this article scales favorably on problems with up to hundreds of services and tens of service directories.

연구개발 전주기 지원 시스템 OntoFrame(R)에 대한 사용성 평가

[ <TEX>$OntoFrame^{(R)}$</TEX> ]은 연구자들의 연구개발을 전주기적으로 지원하기 위해 시맨틱 웹 프레임워크를 기반으로 하여 정보유통 서비스와 추론 서비스를 제공하는 시스템이다. 기능성 측면에서 기존에 유사한 서비스를 찾지 못할 만큼 강력함을 가지고 있지만, 시스템 설계와 개발 단계에서 사용성 평가를 수행하지 않아 사용성 측면에서도 만족스러울 지의 여부를 판단하기 힘들다. 이에 본 연구를 통해 국내에서 거의 이루어지고 있지 않은 사용성 평가를 해당 시스템을 대상으로 수행하며, 평가 결과 분석을 통해 기능 중심적이 아닌 사용자 중심적 시스템으로 발전하기 위한 방향을 제시한다. 사용성 평가를 위해 소프트웨어 인간공학(Software Ergonomics) 전문가에 의한 '이론 중심 사용성 평가'와 사용자 그룹에 의한 '사용자 중심 평가(사용자 테스트)'를 병행하였으며, 본 연구 결과가 실제 서비스를 목표로 하는 시스템 개발에 있어서의 기반 연구가 될 것이라 기대한다. [ <TEX>$OntoFrame^{(R)}$</TEX> ] system provides information dissemination service and inference service, based on Semantic Web framework to fully support R&D activities. Although it is one of state-of-the-art systems in the viewpoint of functionality, we are not able to declare whether it has satisfiable usability because of the omission of usability test in development process. Thus, this research tries to reveal the usability level of the <TEX>$OntoFrame^{(R)}$</TEX>, and further to find ways to achieve a user-center system. Both 'theory-based assessment' by a software ergonomics expert and 'user test' by four users are used for evaluating the usability of the <TEX>$OntoFrame^{(R)}$</TEX>. We look forward this research to being a basic reference for practical systems aiming at satisfiable usability.

Ontology-enabled validation of connectivity relationships in a home theater system

This article describes a vision for team-based synthesis of engineering systems, enhanced by technologies for ontology-based computing, cast in a Semantic Web framework. Our long-term research objective is to fully understand the extent to which relationships and constraints in ontology-based descriptions of problem domains, working together with description logic reasoning engines, can influence and improve system-level design procedures, particularly in the early stages of development where errors may have a significant long-term impact, but if detected early are cheap to correct. As a first step, we develop a port–jack ontology for a home theater system and exercise rule sets for combinations of correct/incorrect connectivity. The model checking procedure begins with the formulation of a port–jack ontology that will describe allowable constraining relationships in the port and jack connectivity. Allowable types of connections are expressed in the form of domain restrictions. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Int Syst 21: 1111–1125, 2006.

6.4.3 Ontology‐Enabled Validation of System Structure

AbstractThis paper describes a vision for team‐based synthesis of engineering systems, enhanced by technologies for ontology‐based computing, cast in a Semantic Web framework. As a first step, in this paper we describe an ontology‐enabled procedure for validation of system structure. We apply the procedure to the validation of connectivity relationships in a home theatre system.

Ontology-mediated integration of intranet web services

The recent adoption of XML-based Web services standards has further integrated distributed resources with open Internet protocols at the software service level. Developers are moving beyond simply extending Web resource access and are making a sustained effort to tap into the depth of mutual understanding that can be culled from the Web's diverse content. Ultimately, they will organize this information conceptually and place it in the semantic Web's framework. For end users, the vast increase in available services these initiatives provide can imply either more freedom or more chaos. This flood of options raises the vital issue of how emerging technologies can help to automate the manual operations individual applications require. The smart office task automation framework uses Web services, an ontology, and agent components to create an integrated information-service platform that provides user-centric support for automating intranet office tasks.

Emergent semantics

The article discusses ways to let semantics emerge from simple observations from the bottom-up, rather than imposing concepts on the observations top-down, to provide precise query, retrieval, communication or translation for a wide variety of applications. The following areas are examined: image retrieval and databases; media information spaces including the Semantic Web and MPEG frameworks; language games for emergent semantics; and emergent semantics for ontologies.