Service Ontology Research Articles

Business grid services

Grid services have come to represent the synthesis of web services and grid computing paradigms. Web services provide the means to modularise software, enabling loosely coupled and novel synthesis. Grid computing removes the binding between functional software components and specific hosting hardware, enabling software to be deployed dynamically over a network (e.g., intra-, extra- or inter-net). Applying the constructs of grid computing to the service orientation of enterprise software will allow business service networks to utilise more specialised services. An upper service ontology that enables business grid services to be described and then related to the grid hosting platform is presented. Explicit knowledge is required for enterprise software, hosting servers and the domain that can then be utilised by both SLA and reservation systems. The ontology presented is derived from and validated using a collection of web services taken from leading investment banks.

MOQ: Web services ontologies for QoS and general quality evaluations

When describing web services, one of the obvious aspects that need representing is 'Quality of Service' (QoS), the capability of a web service to meet an acceptable level of service as per factors such as availability and accessibility. However, too much of a focus on developing functional QoS ontologies has led to an over-emphasis on representing solely QoS metrics and units of measurement. For instance, what does round trip time actually mean? Is the round trip time of every data item measured? Is it an average, or is every nth item measured? Is it the actual measure that is important or just the percentage of items that are beyond a certain range? Arguably existing QoS ontologies cannot readily answer many of these design questions because these questions have less to do with evaluating QoS and more to do with representing 'what is quality?' Therefore, there is an unmet need for web services ontologies that are designed at a higher level encompassing domain independent concepts, and generally applicable beyond QoS evaluations. The MOQ set of ontologies, designed from the premise that quality is 'conformance to requirements', aims to fill this need. Comprised of ontologies of requirement, measurement, traceability, and quality management systems, MOQ can be extended to encompass QoS metrics and measurement units or be designed to interoperate with existing QoS ontology. The use of MOQ minimises the ambiguity in QoS evaluations.

A reusable commitment management service using Semantic Web technology

Commitment management is a key issue in service provisioning in the context of virtual organisations (VOs). A service provider – which may be a single agent acting within an organisation, or the VO acting as a collective whole – manages particular resources, and commits these resources to meet specific goals. Commitments can be modelled as constraints on resources. Such constraints are often soft: they can be broken if necessary. The goal of the work described in this paper is to create an open, reusable commitment management service (CMS) based on Semantic Web standards. The chief requirement is that the CMS should be reusable in different domains, able to manage commitments over services described in a wide range of domain-specific service ontologies. This paper presents open Semantic Web representations for (1) expressing individual commitments as constraints over service descriptions, (2) capturing a set of commitments as a soft constraint satisfaction problem, and (3) representing and communicating the solution to a soft CSP. A reference implementation of a constraint solver able to operate on (1) and (2) to produce (3) is described, and its reuse is demonstrated in two distinct domains: e-commerce and e-response.

Web warehouse – a new web information fusion tool for web mining

In this study, we introduce a web information fusion tool – web warehouse, which is suitable for web mining and knowledge discovery. To formulate a web warehouse, a four-layer web warehouse architecture for decision support is firstly proposed. According to the layered web warehouse framework architecture, an extraction–fusion–mapping–loading (EFML) process model for web warehouse construction is then constructed. In the web warehouse process model, a series of web services including wrapper service, mediation service, ontology service and mapping service are used. Particularly, two kinds of mediators are introduced to fuse the heterogeneous web information. Finally, a simple case study is presented to illustrate the construction process of web warehouse.

Enhancing Managing Decisions with Artificial Intelligence

This article presents a tool that allows the user to generate intelligent systems. Initially, we show a Multi-Agent system called SMAGS, which has the ability of integrating different information systems and manage the information inherent to the project of interest in real time, as well as acting as a “Virtual Manager”. Next, we included new Artificial Intelligence (IA) techniques with semantic interpretation and metrical testing to supply the user with a CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) tool with the ability of generating intelligent computerized information systems, which can learn from information from intelligent searches in ontology servers, case bases, specialist in the area, or even from fragmented data from the Internet, with the purpose of enhancing decision taking.

An Experimental Ontology Server for an Information Grid Environment

Semantic web and grid technologies offer a promising approach to facilitate semantic information retrieval based on heterogeneous document repositories. In this paper the authors describe the design and implementation of an Ontology Server (OS) component to be used in a distributed contents management grid system. Such a system could be used to build collection document repositories, mutually interoperable at the semantic level. From the contents point of view, the distributed system is built as a collection of multimedia documents repository nodes glued together by an OS. A set of methodologies and tools to organize the knowledge space around the notion of contents community is developed, where each content provider will publish a set of ontologies to collect metadata information organized and published through a knowledge community, built on top of the OS. These methodologies were deployed while setting up a prototype to connect about 20 museums in the city of Naples (Italy).

Automatic Fuzzy Ontology Generation for Semantic Help-Desk Support

Customer service support is an important operation for most multinational manufacturing companies. With the advancement of internet technologies, customer services nowadays are supported through web-based systems. More recently, rapid development of the semantic web and semantic web services has prompted us to develop a semantic help-desk for supporting customer services over the semantic web environment, which is presented in this paper. In particular, a fuzzy formal concept analysis (FCA)-based approach is developed for automatic generation of fuzzy machine service ontology that can deal with uncertain information. The proposed automatic fuzzy ontology generation technique consists of the following steps: fuzzy formal concept analysis, fuzzy conceptual clustering, and ontology generation. As such, the supporting machine services provided by the proposed system will potentially improve customer satisfaction in terms of reducing machine down time and increasing productivity. In this paper, an experiment has also been conducted for performance evaluation. The experimental result shows that the proposed approach has attained good performance in terms of both accuracy and efficiency when the queries are associated with appropriate membership values, and a suitable confident threshold is set.

Organization and problem ontology for supply chain information support system

One means of effective supply chain management is through sharing knowledge among the supply chain’s constituents. Knowledge about a supply chain can be classified as organizational and problem specific. Organizational knowledge helps in understanding the domain requirements for supply chain management. Problem-specific knowledge provides input for problem-solving modules. The concept of ontology is applied to systematically document shared knowledge about issues and problems in the supply chain domain. Ontology development for a supply chain—a collaborative process that crosses the individual organizational boundaries of its member and comprises knowledge capture, assembly, storage, and dissemination—is described. The paper then discusses ontology server organization, which facilitates reuse of ontologies in an open environment.

Facilitating Service Discovery with Semantic Overlay

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing share many common characteristics. It is believed that the combination of the two emerging techniques is a very promising method in promoting the web services (WS). Because the service discovery plays a key role in the integration, here a P2P-based framework to manage the knowledge of service and locating services is proposed. In this paper, the details of the principle, constructing and maintaining of service semantic overlay architecture have been described, and the way how the semantic overlay facilitates discovery of service resources is illustrated. To enable the semantic web service superiority, Service Ontology, which is considered as the service semantic model, is employed to depict service. The service discovery includes two phases: searching on the service semantic overlay; and local discovery in peer’s service repository. Various solutions have been proposed to realize those two phases. Furthermore, tests are carried out to evaluate service discovery on the architecture.

Facilitating the Specification of Semantic Web Services Using Model-Driven Development

The Semantic Web promises automated invocation, discovery, and composition of Web services by enhancing services with semantic descriptions. An upper ontology for Web services called OWL-S has been created to provide a mechanism for describing service semantics in a standard, well-defined manner. Unfortunately, the learning curve for semantic-rich description languages such as OWL-S can be steep, especially given the current state of tool support for the language. This paper describes a suite of automated software tools that we have developed to facilitate the construction of OWL-S specifications. The tools operate in two stages. In the first stage, a model-driven architecture technique is used to generate an OWL-S description of a Web service from a Unified Modeling Language (UML) model. This allows the developer to focus on creating a model of the Web service in a standard UML tool, leveraging existing knowledge. In the second stage, an interactive approach for generating groundings is used. This paper describes both tools and demonstrates how the use of lightweight interactive tools facilitates creation of OWL-S specifications.

A Method for Automatic Generation of OWL-S Service Ontology

We present in this paper the methodology for automatic generation of OWL-S service model ontology along with the results and issues. First, we extract information related to atomic services and their properties such as IOPE from the UML class diagram, and retrieve information related to the composition of services from the UML state-chart diagram. Then, the XSLT applications utilize the acquired information to generate the OWL-S service model ontology through the predefined mappings between OWL-S constructs for composite services and UML state-chart primitives. For the justification of generated service ontology, several validation checks are performed. Our service ontology generation method is general and fully automatic, as well as effective, in that it is achieved in an environment familiar to developers, and information needed to generate service ontology is provided necessarily during service development. It is also noticeable to facilitate representing the condition with GUI rather than a complex language such as OCL.

Mapping AGROVOC and the Chinese Agricultural Thesaurus: Definitions, tools, procedures

This paper describes the procedures for a concept-based mapping of two agricultural thesauri, the multilingual AGROVOC, created and maintained by the Food and Agricultural Organization, and the bilingual Chinese Agricultural Thesaurus, created and maintained by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science. Conducted under the auspices of FAO's Agricultural Ontology Service, the mapping project aims to extend AGROVOC with an additional set of perspectives on the agricultural domains, enrich its domain and language coverage, and make use of AGROVOC as a common data model for data exchange among a wide range of multilingual repositories within agriculture.

DartGrid: a semantic infrastructure for building database Grid applications

AbstractIn the presence of a Database Grid where a huge number of highly diverse, widely distributed, autonomously managed databases can be involved in a sharing cycle, database tools and middleware should be well suited for schema mediation and query processing in a semantically meaningful way. In this paper, an implemented system called DartGrid is presented. DartGrid is intended to provide a semantic infrastructure for building database grid applications. We explore the essential and fundamental roles played by Resource Description Framework (RDF) semantics for database grids and implement a set of semantically enabled tools and grid services such as semantic browser, semantic mapping tools, ontology service, semantic query service and semantic registration service. We propose an RDF‐View‐based approach for relational schema mediation and describe the view‐based semantic query rewriting algorithm implemented in DartGrid. DartGrid has been used to build a real database grid application for Traditional Chinese Medicine in China. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A framework for supporting bottom-up ontology evolution for discovery and description of Grid services

The problem of service sharing in a Grid environment arises from the heterogeneity of ontologies. The discovery and description of Grid services based on the heterogeneous ontologies might give rise to misunderstanding of the contents. In order to reduce and ultimately to remove the misunderstanding, a domain-specific ontology should be shared among concerned parties, and the abilities of Grid services should be discovered and described based on that shared ontology. However, since the ontology evolves as time goes by, the shared ontology for the Grid services should have a flexible infrastructure that has an ability to reflect the changes in ontologies. This paper proposes a flexible ontology management approach for discovery and description of Grid service capabilities supporting ontology evolution whose goal is to enhance the interoperability among Grid services. In this approach, concepts and descriptions in an ontology are defined independently, and they are connected by relationships. In addition, the relationships are updated based on real-time evaluations of ontology users in order to flexibly support ontology evolution. A bottom-up ontology evolution means such environment that allows ontology users to evaluate impact factors of concepts in an ontology and that results of the evaluation are reflected to the modification of the ontology. The contribution of this paper is to suggest the ontology management framework that not only enables semantic discovery and description of a Grid service capability but also supports a bottom-up ontology evolution based on the users’ evaluations.

Products and Services Ontologies

Using Semantic Web technologies for e-business tasks, like product search or content integration, requires ontologies for products and services. Their manual creation is problematic due to (1) the high specificity, resulting in a large number of concepts, and (2) the need for timely ontology maintenance due to product innovation; and due to cost, since building such ontologies from scratch requires significant resources. At the same time, industrial categorization standards, like UNSPSC, eCl@ss, eOTD, or the RosettaNet Technical Dictionary, reflect some degree of consensus and contain a wealth of concept definitions plus a hierarchy. They can thus be valuable input for creating domain ontologies. However, the transformation of existing standards, originally developed for some purpose other than ontology engineering, into useful ontologies is not as straightforward as it appears. In this paper, (1) we argue that deriving products and services ontologies from industrial taxonomies is more feasible than manual ontology engineering; (2) show that the representation of the original semantics of the input standard, especially the taxonomic relationship, is an important modeling decision that determines the usefulness of the resulting ontology; (3) illustrate the problem by analyzing existing ontologies derived from UNSPCS and eCl@ss; (4) present a methodology for creating ontologies in OWL based on the reuse of existing standards; and (5) demonstrate this approach by transforming eCl@ss 5.1 into a practically useful products and services ontology.

Incorporating domain knowledge into data mining process: An ontology based framework

With the explosive growth of data available, there is an urgent need to develop continuous data mining which reduces manual interaction evidently. A novel model for data mining is proposed in evolving environment. First, some valid mining task schedules are generated, and then autonomous and local mining are executed periodically, finally, previous results are merged and refined. The framework based on the model creates a communication mechanism to incorporate domain knowledge into continuous process through ontology service. The local and merge mining are transparent to the end user and heterogeneous data source by ontology. Experiments suggest that the framework should be useful in guiding the continous mining process.

Data mining ontology development for high user usability

This paper mainly introduces the development and implementation of the user-centered data mining service ontology on Universal Knowledge Grid (UKG), UKG is an ontology-based grid architecture model to build large-scale distributed knowledge discovery system on the grid. The data mining ontology services are the main service offering by UKG. It can meet the user requirements of knowledge discovery in different domains and different hierarchies and make the system exoteric, extensible and high usable. A data mining solution for money laundering is introduced.

SIADEX: An interactive knowledge-based planner for decision support in forest fire fighting

SIADEX is a complex framework that integrates several AI techniques able to design fighting plans against forest fires. It is based on four main components, a web server, that centralizes all the flow of information between the system and the user, the ontology server, that is the cornerstone of the architecture as the basis for knowledge sharing and exchange between all the components, and the planning and monitoring servers that are offered as intelligent services through the web server. This perspective also allow to view SIADEX as a collaborative working environment where it provides two basic functionalities: the intelligent services offered to the user (the ontology, planning and monitoring modules) and a middleware level that interfaces these back-end services to the front-end software of the user (a web browser) achieving several valuable goals like transparent access of the user to a distributed architecture, an ubiquitous access to the services that allow the mobility of the user and his/her independence of the access device.

ASN.1 기반의 온톨로지 추론을 이용한 시각 미디어 서비스 검색

온톨로지의 용용 분야 중 하나인 정보 검색(Information Retrieval) 분야는 그 응용에 있어서 가장 도전적인 분야 중 하나이며, 그 중에서도 이미지의 메타데이터와 온톨로지를 기반으로 하는 정보 검색은 키워드 기반의 이미지 검색을 대체 할만한 기술로 각광 받고 있다. 미술 작품이나 풍경 사진 둥 시각 미디어는 정보 검색에서도 수요가 매우 많은 영역이다. 본 논문에서는 인터넷 상에서 복수의 시각 미디어 제공자가 있고 이제공자들의 정보를 가지고 있는 단일 중계자가 있는 상황에서 시각 미디어를 효율적으로 검색하는 방법을 제안한다. 즉 서비스 온톨로지, 제공자 온톨로지 같은 온톨로지를 정의하고 사용자의 질의에 맞는 제공자의 목록을 효율적으로 얻기 위한 ASN.1 기반의 추론 방법을 제안하였다 이 방법은 기존의 트리 기반이나 구간 (interval) 기반의 방법에 비해 더 효율적이었다. 끝으로 실험을 통하여 제안한 방법의 효율성을 입증하였다. 또한 제공자가 중계자에게 자신의 서비스를 등록할 때 생기는 서비스 온톨로지에 병합하는 문제에 대한 효과적인 방법을 제안하였다. Information retrieval is one of the most challenging areas in which the ontology technology is effectively used. Among them image retrieval using the image meta data and ontology is the one that can substitute the keyword-based image retrieval. In the paper, the retrieval of visual media such as the art image and photo picture is handled. It is assumed that there are more than one service providers of the visual media and also there is one central service broker that mediates the user's query. Given the user's query the first step that must be done in the service broker is to get the list of candidate service providers that fit the query. This is done by defining various ontologies such as the service ontology and matching the query against the ontology and providers. A novel matching method based on the ASN.1. The experiment shows that the method is more effective than existing tree-based and interval-based methods. Ontology merging issue is also handled that can happen when the service providers register their service into the service broker. An effective method is also proposed.

Constructing intelligent and open mobile commerce using a semantic web approach

To achieve the full potential of mobile commerce (m-Commerce), many problems need to be resolved, such as how to make m-Commerce seamlessly span wide areas with heterogeneous information sources; how to improve the matchmaking between user requirements and product specifications; and how to make m-Commerce systems more intelligent in taking different actions according to different user context environments. We believe that the semantic web is a promising technology to solve these problems. In this paper, a framework is proposed in which semantic web ontology is used to model the contexts, user profiles, and product/service information. The semantic web service ontology, OWL-S, is extended for matching user requirements with product specifications at the semantic level, with context information taken into account. Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) is used for inferencing with context and user profile descriptions. Our system adopts a multi-agent infrastructure to deal with the integration and interaction between information sources and users. This paper demonstrates some of the great potential of semantic web technology for m-Commerce.