Towards a Characterization of the Developmental Environment of Web Applications and its Business Implications

Author(s):  
Pankaj Kamthan

The Web has been changing since its inception. In particular, the evolution of the developmental environment of Web Applications has been multi-directional. This chapter provides a conceptual characterization of such technical directions, relationships between these directions, and their implications towards business organizations. The consequences of a commitment to these directions are considered with the support of examples and/or empirical studies as appropriate. The challenges faced by Semantic Web Applications and Social Web Applications are briefly outlined.

Author(s):  
Leila Zemmouchi-Ghomari

Data play a central role in the effectiveness and efficiency of web applications, such as the Semantic Web. However, data are distributed across a very large number of online sources, due to which a significant effort is needed to integrate this data for its proper utilization. A promising solution to this issue is the linked data initiative, which is based on four principles related to publishing web data and facilitating interlinked and structured online data rather than the existing web of documents. The basic ideas, techniques, and applications of the linked data initiative are surveyed in this paper. The authors discuss some Linked Data open issues and potential tracks to address these pending questions.


Author(s):  
Pankaj Kamthan

In recent years, there has been a steady shift in the nature of Web applications. The vehicle of this transition of Web applications is us, the people. The ability to post photographs or videos, exchange music snippets with peers, and annotate a piece of information, are but a few exemplars of this phenomenon. Indeed, the pseudonym Web 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2005) has been used to describe the apparent “socialization” of the Web. In spite of the significant prospects offered by humancentric Web applications, the mere fact that virtually anyone can set up such applications claiming to sell products and services or upload/post unscrutinized information on a topic as being “definitive,” raises the issues of credibility from a consumers’ viewpoint. Therefore, establishing credibility is essential for an organization’s reputation and for building consumers’ trust. The rest of the article is organized as follows. We first provide the background necessary for later discussion. This is followed by the introduction of a framework within which different types of credibility in the context of human-centric Web applications can be systematically addressed and thereby improved. Next, challenges and directions for future research are outlined. Finally, concluding remarks are given.


Author(s):  
Christopher Walton

In the introductory chapter of this book, we discussed the means by which knowledge can be made available on the Web. That is, the representation of the knowledge in a form by which it can be automatically processed by a computer. To recap, we identified two essential steps that were deemed necessary to achieve this task: 1. We discussed the need to agree on a suitable structure for the knowledge that we wish to represent. This is achieved through the construction of a semantic network, which defines the main concepts of the knowledge, and the relationships between these concepts. We presented an example network that contained the main concepts to differentiate between kinds of cameras. Our network is a conceptualization, or an abstract view of a small part of the world. A conceptualization is defined formally in an ontology, which is in essence a vocabulary for knowledge representation. 2. We discussed the construction of a knowledge base, which is a store of knowledge about a domain in machine-processable form; essentially a database of knowledge. A knowledge base is constructed through the classification of a body of information according to an ontology. The result will be a store of facts and rules that describe the domain. Our example described the classification of different camera features to form a knowledge base. The knowledge base is expressed formally in the language of the ontology over which it is defined. In this chapter we elaborate on these two steps to show how we can define ontologies and knowledge bases specifically for the Web. This will enable us to construct Semantic Web applications that make use of this knowledge. The chapter is devoted to a detailed explanation of the syntax and pragmatics of the RDF, RDFS, and OWL Semantic Web standards. The resource description framework (RDF) is an established standard for knowledge representation on the Web. Taken together with the associated RDF Schema (RDFS) standard, we have a language for representing simple ontologies and knowledge bases on the Web.


Author(s):  
Alexandre Passant ◽  
Philippe Laublet ◽  
John G. Breslin ◽  
Stefan Decker

Although tagging is a widely accepted practice on the Social Web, it raises various issues like tags ambiguity and heterogeneity, as well as the lack of organization between tags. We believe that Semantic Web technologies can help solve many of these issues, especially considering the use of formal resources from the Web of Data in support of existing tagging systems and practices. In this article, we present the MOAT—Meaning Of A Tag—ontology and framework, which aims to achieve this goal. We will detail some motivations and benefits of the approach, both in an Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem and on the Web. As we will detail, our proposal is twofold: It helps solve the problems mentioned previously, and weaves user-generated content into the Web of Data, making it more efficiently interoperable and retrievable.


2010 ◽  
pp. 105-112
Author(s):  
Pankaj Kamthan

In recent years, there has been a steady shift in the nature of Web applications. The vehicle of this transition of Web applications is us, the people. The ability to post photographs or videos, exchange music snippets with peers, and annotate a piece of information, are but a few exemplars of this phenomenon. Indeed, the pseudonym Web 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2005) has been used to describe the apparent “socialization” of the Web. In spite of the significant prospects offered by human-centric Web applications, the mere fact that virtually anyone can set up such applications claiming to sell products and services or upload/ post unscrutinized information on a topic as being “definitive,” raises the issues of credibility from a consumers’ viewpoint. Therefore, establishing credibility is essential for an organization’s reputation and for building consumers’ trust. The rest of the article is organized as follows. We first provide the background necessary for later discussion. This is followed by the introduction of a framework within which different types of credibility in the context of human-centric Web applications can be systematically addressed and thereby improved. Next, challenges and directions for future research are outlined. Finally, concluding remarks are given.


2008 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
LYNDON J. B. NIXON ◽  
ELENA SIMPERL ◽  
RETO KRUMMENACHER ◽  
FRANCISCO MARTIN-RECUERDA

AbstractSemantic technologies promise to solve many challenging problems of the present Web applications. As they achieve a feasible level of maturity, they become increasingly accepted in various business settings at enterprise level. By contrast, their usability in open environments such as the Web—with respect to issues such as scalability, dynamism and openness—still requires additional investigation. In particular, Semantic Web services have inherited the Web service communication model, which is primarily based on synchronous message exchange technology such as remote procedure call (RPC), thus being incompatible with the REST (REpresentational State Transfer) architectural model of the Web. Recent advances in the field of middleware propose ‘semantic tuplespace computing’ as an instrument for coping with this situation. Arguing that truly Web-compliant Web service communication should be based, analogously to the conventional Web, on shared access to persistently published data instead of message passing, space-based middleware introduces a coordination infrastructure by means of which services can exchange information in a time- and reference-decoupled manner. In this article, we introduce the most important approaches in this newly emerging field. Our objective is to analyze and compare the solutions proposed so far, thus giving an account of the current state-of-the-art, and identifying new directions of research and development.


Author(s):  
Shaun D'Souza

The web contains vast repositories of unstructured text. We investigate the opportunity for building a knowledge graph from these text sources. We generate a set of triples which can be used in knowledge gathering and integration. We define the architecture of a language compiler for processing subject-predicate-object triples using the OpenNLP parser. We implement a depth-first search traversal on the POS tagged syntactic tree appending predicate and object information. A parser enables higher precision and higher recall extractions of syntactic relationships across conjunction boundaries. We are able to extract 2-2.5 times the correct extractions of ReVerb. The extractions are used in a variety of semantic web applications and question answering. We verify extraction of 50,000 triples on the ClueWeb dataset.


2010 ◽  
pp. 560-586
Author(s):  
Pankaj Kamthan

In the last decade, patterns have emerged as a notable problem-solving approach in various disciplines. This paper aims to address the communication requirements of the elements of pattern engineering (namely, actors, activities, and artifacts) in general and the pattern realization process in particular. To that regard, a theoretical framework using the Social Web as the medium is proposed and its implications are explored. The prospects of using the Social Web are analyzed by means of practical scenarios and concrete examples. The concerns of using the Social Web related to cost to actors, decentralization and distribution of control, and semiotic quality of representations of patterns are highlighted. The directions for future research including the use of patterns for Social Web applications, and the potential of the confluence of the Social Web and the Semantic Web for communicating the elements of pattern engineering, are briefly explored.


2011 ◽  
pp. 2250-2277
Author(s):  
Pankaj Kamthan

In the last decade, patterns have emerged as a notable problem-solving approach in various disciplines. This paper aims to address the communication requirements of the elements of pattern engineering (namely, actors, activities, and artifacts) in general and the pattern realization process in particular. To that regard, a theoretical framework using the Social Web as the medium is proposed and its implications are explored. The prospects of using the Social Web are analyzed by means of practical scenarios and concrete examples. The concerns of using the Social Web related to cost to actors, decentralization and distribution of control, and semiotic quality of representations of patterns are highlighted. The directions for future research including the use of patterns for Social Web applications, and the potential of the confluence of the Social Web and the Semantic Web for communicating the elements of pattern engineering, are briefly explored.


Author(s):  
Alexandre Passant ◽  
Philippe Laublet ◽  
John G. Breslin ◽  
Stefan Decker

Although tagging is a widely accepted practice on the Social Web, it raises various issues like tags ambiguity and heterogeneity, as well as the lack of organization between tags. We believe that Semantic Web technologies can help solve many of these issues, especially considering the use of formal resources from the Web of Data in support of existing tagging systems and practices. In this article, we present the MOAT—Meaning Of A Tag—ontology and framework, which aims to achieve this goal. We will detail some motivations and benefits of the approach, both in an Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem and on the Web. As we will detail, our proposal is twofold: It helps solve the problems mentioned previously, and weaves user-generated content into the Web of Data, making it more efficiently interoperable and retrievable.


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