Semantic Web Standards Research Articles

Dynamic Tourism Information System Using the Semantic Web

The semantic web is one of the most promising and emerging areas of computer science. Its ability to make information that is only human understandable to be understood and processed by machines increases its relevance and time efficiency. In this paper we present a semantic web application that contains a dynamic knowledge base holding hotel related information, which is updated at every run from the information provided in the hotels' websites, and a natural language querying platform where the user can enter his free form natural language queries. DL Query is used as the engine that performs the retrieval of data from the ontology. A simple user experiment shows that the system is time effective and helpful in decision making. The area of tourism is one that already uses all the available internet technologies very extensively. The area is ver y dynamic because it is one of the world's largest industries and its growth shows an increase every year. It has been predicted by the World Tourism Organization (2) that by 2020 the tourists travelling around the globe will have increased by more than 200%. Almost all of the travelers rely entirely upon the internet to search out information about their destination, airfares, hotels, areas for sightseeing or shopping etcetera. In (3) it is shown that about 95% of Web users use the Internet to gather travel related information and about 93% indicate that they visited tourism Web sites when planning for vacations. This increase in usage is what has brought about this great rise in tourism information systems present on the World Wide Web, offering structured tourism related information. However, this information is normally isolated from each other and rarely includes details. One can not predict the nature or background of the traveller or his internet search skills. Nevertheless, he has to search each requirement separately, open several web pages, compare information, and then draw his conclusions. The burden of finding data and connecting it to relevant information is placed entirely upon the user. The semantic web is a solution when it comes to reliable searching since it adds meaning to data that the web contains and becomes machine processable, enabling precise and in-depth searching. The application presented in this paper is a dynamic portal for the hotel selection parameter of tourism, based on semantic web standards. Queried information is extracted from the actual websites of the hotels and stored in the dynamic ontology, where from the information is formatted and presented to the user.

Can Social Semantic Web Techniques Foster Collaborative Curriculum Mapping In Medicine?

BackgroundCurriculum mapping, which is aimed at the systematic realignment of the planned, taught, and learned curriculum, is considered a challenging and ongoing effort in medical education. Second-generation curriculum managing systems foster knowledge management processes including curriculum mapping in order to give comprehensive support to learners, teachers, and administrators. The large quantity of custom-built software in this field indicates a shortcoming of available IT tools and standards.ObjectiveThe project reported here aims at the systematic adoption of techniques and standards of the Social Semantic Web to implement collaborative curriculum mapping for a complete medical model curriculum.MethodsA semantic MediaWiki (SMW)-based Web application has been introduced as a platform for the elicitation and revision process of the Aachen Catalogue of Learning Objectives (ACLO). The semantic wiki uses a domain model of the curricular context and offers structured (form-based) data entry, multiple views, structured querying, semantic indexing, and commenting for learning objectives (“LOs”). Semantic indexing of learning objectives relies on both a controlled vocabulary of international medical classifications (ICD, MeSH) and a folksonomy maintained by the users. An additional module supporting the global checking of consistency complements the semantic wiki. Statements of the Object Constraint Language define the consistency criteria. We evaluated the application by a scenario-based formative usability study, where the participants solved tasks in the (fictional) context of 7 typical situations and answered a questionnaire containing Likert-scaled items and free-text questions.ResultsAt present, ACLO contains roughly 5350 operational (ie, specific and measurable) objectives acquired during the last 25 months. The wiki-based user interface uses 13 online forms for data entry and 4 online forms for flexible searches of LOs, and all the forms are accessible by standard Web browsers. The formative usability study yielded positive results (median rating of 2 (“good”) in all 7 general usability items) and produced valuable qualitative feedback, especially concerning navigation and comprehensibility. Although not asked to, the participants (n=5) detected critical aspects of the curriculum (similar learning objectives addressed repeatedly and missing objectives), thus proving the system’s ability to support curriculum revision.ConclusionsThe SMW-based approach enabled an agile implementation of computer-supported knowledge management. The approach, based on standard Social Semantic Web formats and technology, represents a feasible and effectively applicable compromise between answering to the individual requirements of curriculum management at a particular medical school and using proprietary systems.

IT Gaining Ground in Learning

Continuously emerging forms of eLearning like MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses), PLE (Personal Learning Environment) and the use of Semantic Web standards in learning environments, are consistent proof that IT, the Internet, the World Wide Web, Content Management Systems, audio/video lectures, videoconferences, Semantic Web are here to stay, evolve and furthermore, to take control of the learning process, making from it a flexible, viable, profitable and extensively used solution for delivering knowledge. In this general context, the present paper offers an eLearning state-of-the-art and an overview of the trends and technologies proposed, developed and implemented in a particular eLearning environment, over the last years, as part of a postdoctoral research program. The mentioned environment was the Moodle portal used at the “Politehnica” University of Timisoara, the implemented standards were the hCard and hCalendar microformats and the proposed model was one of collective learning through question answering.

Tracking politics with POWER

PurposePOWER is an ontology of political processes and entities. It is designed for tracking politicians, political organizations and elections, both in mainstream and social media. The aim of this paper is to propose a data model to describe political agents and their relations over time.Design/methodology/approachThe authors propose a data model to describe political agents (politicans, political instutions and political associations) and their relations over time. The model is formalized as an ontology using the RDF format and the population is performed in two steps. First, a bootstrap process loads data collected from authoritative sources. Then, the ontology is enriched with alternative media names extracted from the web.FindingsThe ontology is published as a public resource following the guidelines of linked data and semantic web standards can be accessed via SPARQL endpoint.Originality/valueThe authors have developed an ontology for the political domain tailored to aid in the tasks of named entity recognition and resolution. It represents the complexity and dynamic nature of relations between political agents (politicians, political associations and political institutions) over time.

A Survey on Tools essential for Semantic web Research

The Syntactic web search scheme is upgraded by adding semantics through the recent trends of Semantic web. The importance of Semantic web is due to the increased level of appropriate results on information retrieval. It brings a wide participation of researchers all over the world. Even beginners could gain an easier understanding of the Semantic web standards. This paper clearly illustrates some of the tools and technologies that are applied for effective semantic web development. Most of the efficient tools are open for access. Certain commercial tools for specific mode of development are also available.

An ontological model for supporting intention-based information sharing on collaborative problem solving

In web-based collaborative systems practitioners can share messages about their problems on daily work activities. These messages can also be used for analytical purposes. This possibility depends on a proper classification and adequate recovery of the messages regarding semantic and pragmatic aspects. The construction of a knowledge representation model that considers the pragmatic aspects of the messages is still an open research challenge. We argue that a model of this nature must include the association of semantics with illocutionary aspects of the users' communication. This paper proposes an ontology using Semantic Web (SemWeb) standards to associate messages to illocutions and ontology terms, as an integrated representation. The proposed model is grounded in the Pragmatic Web (PragWeb) perspective including Semiotics and Speech Act Theory (SAT). Furthermore, we conduct a case study with scenarios of two different systems, where special education specialists share problems of their daily work activities.

Semantics Empowered Web 3.0: Managing Enterprise, Social, Sensor, and Cloud-based Data and Services for Advanced Applications

After the traditional document-centric Web 1.0 and user-generated content focused Web 2.0, Web 3.0 has become a repository of an ever growing variety of Web resources that include data and services associated with enterprises, social networks, sensors, cloud, as well as mobile and other devices that constitute the Internet of Things. These pose unprecedented challenges in terms of heterogeneity (variety), scale (volume), and continuous changes (velocity), as well as present corresponding opportunities if they can be exploited. Just as semantics has played a critical role in dealing with data heterogeneity in the past to provide interoperability and integration, it is playing an even more critical role in dealing with the challenges and helping users and applications exploit all forms of Web 3.0 data. This book presents a unified approach to harness and exploit all forms of contemporary Web resources using the core principles of ability to associate meaning with data through conceptual or domain models and semantic descriptions including annotations, and through advanced semantic techniques for search, integration, and analysis. It discusses the use of Semantic Web standards and techniques when appropriate, but also advocates the use of lighter weight, easier to use, and more scalable options when they are more suitable. The authors' extensive experience spanning research and prototypes to development of operational applications and commercial technologies and products guide the treatment of the material. Table of Contents: Role of Semantics and Metadata / Types and Models of Semantics / Annotation -- Adding Semantics to Data / Semantics for Enterprise Data / Semantics for Services / Semantics for Sensor Data / Semantics for Social Data / Semantics for Cloud Computing / Semantics for Advanced Applications

TraceALL: a semantic web framework for food traceability systems

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to describe TraceALL which is a Semantic Web (SW), ontology‐based, service‐oriented framework which aims to provide the necessary infrastructure enabling food industry (particularly SMEs) to implement traceability applications using an innovative generic framework.Design/methodology/approachThe framework builds upon the idea of the Semantic Web and provides an open and extensible underlying platform that allows different traceability interconnected applications to be designed and developed. More specifically, the framework provides a formal, ontology‐based, general‐purpose methodology to support knowledge representation and information modelling in traceability systems. Additionally, it suggests an open application framework based on widely used Semantic Web standards. Finally it provides a set of core services for storing, processing and retrieving traceability information in a scalable way. These components, taken together, facilitate the efficient development of next generation traceability applications.FindingsBased on a case study which the authors executed as a proof of concept and studying the relevant literature it was found that TraceALL facilitates the development of next generation traceability applications because, from a food safety perspective, it enables all stakeholders in the food supply chain to have an information trail that follows the product's physical trail, but at the same time is cost effective, easy to manage and applicable within a globalised, networked, interoperable economic environment.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first food traceability system based completely on solid existing standards of the Semantic Web initiative. The authors consider that the inspiring analogy between resources such as those described in the Semantic Web initiative and the core traceability concept of a Traceable Resource Unit (TRU) is an extremely useful concept for developing cost‐effective traceability applications that possess many key requirements, which are described in the paper.

A keyword-driven approach for generating OWL DL conformance test data

The conformance of semantic technologies has to be systematically evaluated to measure and verify the real adherence of these technologies to the Semantic Web standards. Current evaluations of semantic technology conformance are not exhaustive enough and do not directly cover user requirements and use scenarios, which raises the need for a simple, extensible and parameterizable method to generate test data for such evaluations. To address this need, this paper presents a keyword-driven approach for generating ontology language conformance test data that can be used to evaluate semantic technologies, details the definition of a test suite for evaluating OWL DL conformance using this approach, and describes the use and extension of this test suite during the evaluation of some tools.

PharmaTrek: A Semantic Web Explorer for Open Innovation in Multitarget Drug Discovery

The realisation that vast amounts of pharmacological data for small molecules are continuously being reported in bibliographic sources has promoted in recent years the rise of initiatives aiming at collecting, organising, and storing these data together with chemical structures. Today, there are numerous databases that connect hundreds of thousands of small molecules to thousands of biological responses of their interaction with macromolecules. Some of these repositories, such as GLIDA, PDSP, BindingDB, IUPHARdb, PubChem, ChEMBL, and DrugBank, make all data available in the public domain. [1] In addition, some others, such as BioPrint, Integrity, Wombat, and GOSTAR, offer access to their data only through licensing from the respective commercial providers. [2] This wide diversity of sources does not facilitate direct access and interrogation of the entire contents covered by all of them. Integrating all these repositories into a single accessible resource is not trivial, mainly due to issues related with the use of different vocabularies and ontologies for the various domain entities which makes cross-referencing among multiple sources a challenging task. [3] But even if some degree of integration is accomplished, managing and updating such an integrated framework in an efficient manner may require significant human resources and be extremely time consuming and difficult to fully automate. [4] Managing chemical structures, for instance, involves taking into consideration a fair amount of detailed aspects such as salt formulation and isomerism (tautomerism, regioisomerism, and optical and geometrical isomerisms), and it has been reported that different molecular identifiers may actually lead to an essentially different number of unique chemical structures depending on the user criteria for defining uniqueness. [5] On the other hand, managing pharmacological data across databases is also complicated, as one may encounter different values for the same molecule – protein interaction obtained from different laboratories, from the same protein but different species, or from the same protein and species but different settings and conditions. [6] In parallel, there have been some recent initiatives to provide some conceptual meaning to the connections established between objects from different domains, so the links are stored in such a way that become more understandable to computers. This is the main goal of applying

A Research on E - learning Resources Construction Based on Semantic Web

Abstract Traditional e-learning platforms have the flaws that it's usually difficult to query or positioning, and realize the cross platform sharing and interoperability. In the paper, the semantic web and metadata standard is discussed, and a kind of e - learning system framework based on semantic web is put forward to try to solve the flaws of traditional elearning platforms.

Searching and browsing Linked Data with SWSE: The Semantic Web Search Engine

In this paper, we discuss the architecture and implementation of the Semantic Web Search Engine (SWSE). Following traditional search engine architecture, SWSE consists of crawling, data enhancing, indexing and a user interface for search, browsing and retrieval of information; unlike traditional search engines, SWSE operates over RDF Web data – loosely also known as Linked Data – which implies unique challenges for the system design, architecture, algorithms, implementation and user interface. In particular, many challenges exist in adopting Semantic Web technologies for Web data: the unique challenges of the Web – in terms of scale, unreliability, inconsistency and noise – are largely overlooked by the current Semantic Web standards. Herein, we describe the current SWSE system, initially detailing the architecture and later elaborating upon the function, design, implementation and performance of each individual component. In so doing, we also give an insight into how current Semantic Web standards can be tailored, in a best-effort manner, for use on Web data. Throughout, we offer evaluation and complementary argumentation to support our design choices, and also offer discussion on future directions and open research questions. Later, we also provide candid discussion relating to the difficulties currently faced in bringing such a search engine into the mainstream, and lessons learnt from roughly six years working on the Semantic Web Search Engine project.

Semantic Annotation for the Web of Data: An Ontology and RDF based Automated Approach

The construction of metadata which annotates the documents is one of the major tasks for making data understandable to the machine on the Semantic Web. Most of the exiting Semantic Web authoring tools allow user with limited knowledge Semantic Web technologies such as RDF, OWL to markup documents with semantics. These tools help to create the semantic annotations to the documents either during or after composing the documents. The common is these approaches all need human annotator to manually determine the semantic information of the content and then create the metadata which describes this information via tools. This research proposes an approach to bridge the gap between today’s Web and the Semantic Web. The word sense disambiguation technique is utilized to automatically discover the underlying semantic information of the text document, based on the popular open-domain vocabulary ontology the Wordnet. This semantic information is then annotated to the documents in RDF that conforms to the Semantic Web standards for future reuse. We believe this is one of the feasible ways to bring a large-scale of documents to the Semantic Web.

A social web platform based on semantics to share exam questions: the SOLE approach

Internet has changed dramatically leaning and teaching scenarios. As a consequence of this, learning resources are being produced, catalogued and stored using innovative ways, using social and Semantic Web, among others. SOLE provides a platform in which exam questions can be produced supported by Web 2.0 tools, catalogued and labelled via Semantic Web and stored and distributed using e-learning standards. This paper presents, SOLE, a social network of exam questions sharing particularised for software engineering domain, based on semantics and built using Semantic Web and e-learning standards, such as IMS question and test interoperability specification 2.1.

Searching and Browsing Linked Data with SWSE: The Semantic Web Search Engine

In this paper, we discuss the architecture and implementation of the Semantic Web Search Engine (SWSE). Following traditional search engine architecture, SWSE consists of crawling, data enhancing, indexing and a user interface for search, browsing and retrieval of information; unlike traditional search engines, SWSE operates over RDF Web data -- loosely also known as Linked Data -- which implies unique challenges for the system design, architecture, algorithms, implementation and user interface. In particular, many challenges exist in adopting Semantic Web technologies for Web data: the unique challenges of the Web -- in terms of scale, unreliability, inconsistency and noise -- are largely overlooked by the current Semantic Web standards. Herein, we describe the current SWSE system, initially detailing the architecture and later elaborating upon the function, design, implementation and performance of each individual component. In so doing, we also give an insight into how current Semantic Web standards can be tailored, in a besteffort manner, for use on Web data. Throughout, we offer evaluation and complementary argumentation to support our design choices, and also offer discussion on future directions and open research questions. Later, we also provide candid discussion relating to the difficulties currently faced in bringing such a search engine into the mainstream, and lessons learnt from roughly six years working on the Semantic Web Search Engine project.

The Strongest Link: Libraries and Linked Data

Since 1999 the W3C has been working on a set of Semantic Web standards that have the potential to revolutionize web search. Also known as Linked Data, the Machine-Readable Web, the Web of Data, or Web 3.0, the Semantic Web relies on highly structured metadata that allow computers to understand the relationships between objects. Semantic web standards are complex, and difficult to conceptualize, but they offer solutions to many of the issues that plague libraries, including precise web search, authority control, classification, data portability, and disambiguation. This article will outline some of the benefits that linked data could have for libraries, will discuss some of the non-technical obstacles that we face in moving forward, and will finally offer suggestions for practical ways in which libraries can participate in the development of the semantic web.

Next generation models for storage and representation of microbial biological annotation

BackgroundTraditional genome annotation systems were developed in a very different computing era, one where the World Wide Web was just emerging. Consequently, these systems are built as centralized black boxes focused on generating high quality annotation submissions to GenBank/EMBL supported by expert manual curation. The exponential growth of sequence data drives a growing need for increasingly higher quality and automatically generated annotation.Typical annotation pipelines utilize traditional database technologies, clustered computing resources, Perl, C, and UNIX file systems to process raw sequence data, identify genes, and predict and categorize gene function. These technologies tightly couple the annotation software system to hardware and third party software (e.g. relational database systems and schemas). This makes annotation systems hard to reproduce, inflexible to modification over time, difficult to assess, difficult to partition across multiple geographic sites, and difficult to understand for those who are not domain experts. These systems are not readily open to scrutiny and therefore not scientifically tractable.The advent of Semantic Web standards such as Resource Description Framework (RDF) and OWL Web Ontology Language (OWL) enables us to construct systems that address these challenges in a new comprehensive way. ResultsHere, we develop a framework for linking traditional data to OWL-based ontologies in genome annotation. We show how data standards can decouple hardware and third party software tools from annotation pipelines, thereby making annotation pipelines easier to reproduce and assess. An illustrative example shows how TURTLE (Terse RDF Triple Language) can be used as a human readable, but also semantically-aware, equivalent to GenBank/EMBL files. ConclusionsThe power of this approach lies in its ability to assemble annotation data from multiple databases across multiple locations into a representation that is understandable to researchers. In this way, all researchers, experimental and computational, will more easily understand the informatics processes constructing genome annotation and ultimately be able to help improve the systems that produce them.

Function Semantic Representation (FSR): A Rule-Based Ontology for Product Functions

Defining or understanding a product in terms of its functions facilitates a wide variety of tasks such as design synthesis, modeling, and analysis. However, the lack of a semantically correct formal representation of product functions creates a barrier to their effective capture, exchange, and reuse. This paper presents Function Semantics Representation, a rule-based ontological formalism that is consistent with the Semantic Web standards to capture different components of a product function. In particular, the Semantic Web Rule Language is used to overcome limitations in using the basic Web Ontology Language ontology to explicitly capture advanced semantics essential to completely represent product functions. This enables support for an effective reasoning mechanism to develop and validate the product function (or functional model). We present examples that demonstrate consistency checking and the ability to retrieve functionally similar products from a repository.

Semantic Web computing in industry

The Semantic Web has attracted significant attention during the last decade. On the one hand, many research groups have changed their focus towards Semantic Web research and research funding agencies particularly in Europe have explicitly mentioned Semantic Web in their calls for proposals. On the other hand, industry has also begun to watch developments with interest and a number of large companies have started to experiment with Semantic Web technologies to ascertain if these new technologies can be leveraged to add more value for their customers or internally within the company, while there are already several offers of vendors of Semantic Web solutions on the market. The essence of the Semantic Web is to structure Web-based information to make it more interoperable, machine-readable and thereafter to provide a means to relate various information concepts more easily and in a reusable way. The Semantic Web acts as an additional layer on the top of the Web, and is built around explicit representations of information concepts and their relationships such as ontologies and taxonomies. Furthermore, Semantic Web technologies are not only valuable on an open environment like the Web, but also in closed systems such as in industrial settings. Hence, these technologies can be efficiently deployed for domains including Web Services, Enterprise Application Integration, Knowledge Management and E-Commerce, fulfilling existing gaps in current applications. This paper focuses on this synthesis between Semantic Web technologies and systems problems within industrial applications. There will be a short review of Semantic Web standards, languages and technologies followed by a more detailed review of applications of Semantic Web computing in industry. The paper covers theoretical considerations as well as use cases and experience reports on the topic, and we also present some current challenges and opportunities in the domain.

OpenFlyData: An exemplar data web integrating gene expression data on the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster

Motivation: Integrating heterogeneous data across distributed sources is a major requirement for in silico bioinformatics supporting translational research. For example, genome-scale data on patterns of gene expression in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster are widely used in functional genomic studies in many organisms to inform candidate gene selection and validate experimental results. However, current data integration solutions tend to be heavy weight, and require significant initial and ongoing investment of effort. Development of a common Web-based data integration infrastructure (a.k.a. data web), using Semantic Web standards, promises to alleviate these difficulties, but little is known about the feasibility, costs, risks or practical means of migrating to such an infrastructure. Results: We describe the development of OpenFlyData, a proof-of-concept system integrating gene expression data on D. melanogaster, combining Semantic Web standards with light-weight approaches to Web programming based on Web 2.0 design patterns. To support researchers designing and validating functional genomic studies, OpenFlyData includes user-facing search applications providing intuitive access to and comparison of gene expression data from FlyAtlas, the BDGP in situ database, and FlyTED, using data from FlyBase to expand and disambiguate gene names. OpenFlyData’s services are also openly accessible, and are available for reuse by other bioinformaticians and application developers. Semi-automated methods and tools were developed to support labour- and knowledge-intensive tasks involved in deploying SPARQL services. These include methods for generating ontologies and relational-to-RDF mappings for relational databases, which we illustrate using the FlyBase Chado database schema; and methods for mapping gene identifiers between databases. The advantages of using Semantic Web standards for biomedical data integration are discussed, as are open issues. In particular, although the performance of open source SPARQL implementations is sufficient to query gene expression data directly from user-facing applications such as Web-based data fusions (a.k.a. mashups), we found open SPARQL endpoints to be vulnerable to denial-of-service-type problems, which must be mitigated to ensure reliability of services based on this standard. These results are relevant to data integration activities in translational bioinformatics. Availability: The gene expression search applications and SPARQL endpoints developed for OpenFlyData are deployed at http://openflydata.org. FlyUI, a library of JavaScript widgets providing re-usable user-interface components for Drosophila gene expression data, is available at http://flyui.googlecode.com. Software and ontologies to support transformation of data from FlyBase, FlyAtlas, BDGP and FlyTED to RDF are available at http://openflydata.googlecode.com. SPARQLite, an implementation of the SPARQL protocol, is available at http://sparqlite.googlecode.com. All software is provided under the GPL version 3 open source license.