Using Semantic Web to Facilitate Agent-to-Agent Argumentation for e-Commerce

This chapter designs a multi-agent argumentation system for e-commerce. This system applies Semantic Web technology to facilitate agents to share ontologies and describe their own mental states and arguments. All arguments are connected by attacking relations and can be proved or defeated via a dialectical game. In this system, buyer and seller agents can understand arguments and argue over product attributes. This system can help buyers to delegate their buyer agents to search products that exactly match their needs, and help sellers to delegate seller agents to present products and persuade buyer agents into believing that the products can satisfy the buyers’ needs.

A Semantic Web Service Architecture for Learing Object Repositories

The evolution of learning technology standards has resulted in a degree of interoperability across systems that enable the interchange of learning contents and activities. Nonetheless, learning resource metadata does not provide formal computational semantics, which hampers the possibilities to develop technology that automates tasks like learning object selection and negotiation. In this paper, the provision of computational semantics to metadata is addressed from the perspective of the concept of Semantic Web service. An architecture based on the specifications of the WSMO project is described, including the definition of an ontology for learning object metadata, and issues of mediation, all under the perspective of the learning object repository as the central entity in learning object reuse scenarios. The resulting framework serves as a foundation for advanced implementations that consider formal metadata semantics as a mechanism for the automation of tasks related to the interchange of learning objects.

A Tutorial on RDF with Jena

This chapter gives a tutorial on resource description framework (RDF), its XML representation, and Jena, a set of Java-based API designed and implemented to further simplify the manipulation of RDF documents. RDF is a W3C standard which provides a common framework for describing resources in the World Wide Web and other applications. Under this standard framework with the Jena, different resources can be manipulated and exchanged easily, which leads to cost reduction and better efficiency in business applications. In this tutorial, we present some basic concepts and applications of RDF and Jena. In particular, we use a television object to illustrate the usage of RDF in describing various resources being used, the XML syntax in representing the RDF, and the ways Jena manipulate various RDF documents. Furthermore, complete programming codes with detailed explanations are also presented to give readers a better understanding of Jena. References are given at the end for readers’ further investigation.

Semantic Descriptions of Web Services

This chapter introduces the emerging technology of Semantic Web services. It concentrates on two dominant specifications in this domain, namely OWL-S (Web ontology language for services) and WSMO (Web services modeling ontology). We briefly introduce Web services and Semantic Web, two main technologies underlying the Semantic Web services technology and then explain most of the key features of this technology together with simplified examples. We discuss three aspects of Semantic Web services: specifications for semantic descriptions of services, intelligent discovery and selection of services using semantic descriptions, and finally, building more complex services by composing existing ones. Our main goal in this chapter is not only to present an abstract view of this technology but also the introduction of the technical details of the two existing specifications.

Building Dynamic Business Process in P2P Semantic Web

Business process management systems such as the workflow management system and the enterprise application integration system manage process flow on a minute-by-minute basis in various application domains. In the conventional approach, the business process must be predefined before it is implemented. However, involving business users in the early stage of the design phase is neither efficient nor realistic in the dynamic business world. This study proposes a framework to implement a dynamic business process in the P2P Semantic Web, which provides the flexibility to dynamically alter business process and to take semantic data into consideration. The system is demonstrated by a case of a manufacturer that is processing an order.

SWAP - A Framework for Ontology Support in Semantic Web Applications

We present SWAP (Semantic Web application pyramid), a framework for incorporating ontologies in data-oriented semantic Web applications. We have implemented this framework with a measurement ontology for a quality management Web service. This quality management Web service is built on top of a set of XML Web services implementing agents representing quality management clients, quality management servers, and vendors. SWAP facilitates data exchange between these Web services with vendor data stored in databases, and the processing of the data using a combination of RuleML and SQL. The testbed implementation demonstrates the feasibility and scalability of the framework for any type of three-tier ontology-based semantic Web applications involving low to moderate data exchange. We discuss methods for improving this framework for high data exchange volumes as well. The primary contribution of this framework is in the component-based implementation of real-world semantic Web applications.

Web Mining for Protein-to-Protein Interaction Information

This study proposes a mining system for finding protein-to-protein interaction literatures from the databases on the Internet. In this system, we search for discriminating words for protein-to-protein interaction by way of statistics and the results from literatures. A threshold is also evaluated to check if a given literature is related to protein-to-protein interactions. In addition, a keypage-based search mechanism is used to find related papers for protein-to-protein interactions from a given document. To expand the search space and ensure better performance of the system, mechanisms for protein name identification and databases for protein names are also developed. The system is designed with a web-based user interface and a job-dispatching kernel. Experiments are conducted and the results have been checked by a biomedical expert. The experimental results indicate that by using the proposed mining system, it is helpful for researchers to find protein-to-protein literatures from the overwhelming pieces of information available on the biomedical databases over the Internet.

Access Control for Web Service Applications

Given the rapid changes in the information technologies, the issue of information securities and company’s internal controls has become very critical to both internal and external auditors. Recently, external auditors are under pressure to provide real-time assurance. Movement of this kind has complicated as to when and how to grant the access privileges to external auditors. In addition, when there is a high degree of collaborative relationship among organizations, the collaborators need to establish policies of auditors’ access controls and set up conditions and constraints for security and confidentiality reasons. Since auditors among the collaborators have different seniority, the access privileges should be granted based on the seniority of the auditors in the collaborative team members. In contrast, the growth of Web service becomes a new paradigm to provide collaborative auditing service via Web. The access control issue is a crucial issue for the future collaboration. In this study, we propose a role-based Chinese Wall model, which organizes the corporate data into four different types of control groups with different access control policies, for the auditors to access the data among collaborating enterprises. Using the vendor-managed inventories (VMI) example, the study discusses how auditing tasks can be performed under the proposed access control environment. To ensure the functionality of the proposed framework, the study uses Oracle software to demonstrate the feasibility of the model.

Developing Intellingent Semantic Web Services

This chapter introduces an approach to the development of intelligent Semantic Web services, which are envisioned as system cells that actively discover, learn, and communicate knowledge on the Web. The development of these systems often involves not only standardized Web technology, but also the integration of heterogeneous information. The approach in this chapter adopts the Semantic Web services specifications that are given by the DARPA agent markup language (DAML) program, utilizes a system behavior model to represent an intelligent agent, and proposes a high degree of automatic synthesis using code generation and program templates. The author reviews the various techniques that are available to aid the development process, and provides an example to illustrate the stages of software synthesis in the development of such systems.

From World Wide Web to Semantic Web

This chapter introduces the incentives for the creation of the Semantic Web, the methodology for its development, and the current status of this development. In contrast to the human function of understanding, the author summarizes four major steps in creating the ability for machines to understand Web content and generate responses. The semantics in the Semantic Web should be explicitly declared in a form that can be operated by a machine, knowledge organization should be provided to support semantic interpretation, software agents must rely on automatic reasoning ability to obtain implied knowledge, and procedural knowledge should be accessed in a community to generate response behavior. Through illustration of the anticipated research efforts in this technology, the author hopes to provide a clear picture of the current status of emergent Semantic Web technology and a suitable direction for its future development.