An Ontology-Based Multimedia Annotator for the Semantic Web of Language Engineering

The development of the Semantic Web, the next-generation Web, greatly relies on the availability of ontologies and powerful annotation tools. However, there is a lack of ontology-based annotation tools for linguistic multimedia data. Existing tools either lack ontology support or provide limited support for multimedia. To fill the gap, we present an ontology-based linguistic multimedia annotation tool, OntoELAN, which features: (1) the support for OWL ontologies; (2) the management of language profiles, which allow the user to choose a subset of ontological terms for annotation; (3) the management of ontological tiers, which can be annotated with language profile terms and, therefore, corresponding ontological terms; and (4) storing OntoELAN annotation documents in XML format based on multimedia and domain ontologies. To our best knowledge, OntoELAN is the first audio/video annotation tool in the linguistic domain that provides support for ontology-based annotation. It is expected that the availability of such a tool will greatly facilitate the creation of linguistic multimedia repositories as islands of the Semantic Web of language engineering.

A Tool for Working with Web Ontologies

The task of building an open and scalable ontology browsing and editing tool based on OWL, the first standardized Web-oriented ontology language, requires the rethinking of critical user interface and ontological engineering issues. In this article, we describe Swoop, a browser and editor specifically tailored to OWL ontologies. Taking a “Web view” of things has proven quite instructive, and we discuss some insights into Web ontologies that we gained through our experience with Swoop, including issues related to the display, navigation, editing, and collaborative annotation of OWL ontological data.

Semantic E-Business

We define semantic e-business as “an approach to managing knowledge for coordination of e-business processes through the systematic application of Semantic Web technologies.” Advances in Semantic Web-based technologies offer the means to integrate heterogeneous systems across organizations in a meaningful way by incorporating ontology — a common, standard, and shareable vocabulary used to represent the meaning of system entities; knowledge representation, with structured collections of information and sets of inference rules that can be used to conduct automated reasoning; and intelligent agents that collect content from diverse sources and exchange semantically enriched information. These primary components of the Semantic Web vision form the foundation technology for semantic e-business. The challenge for research in information systems and e-business is to provide insight into the design of business models and technical architecture that demonstrate the potential of technical advancements in the computer and engineering sciences to be beneficial to business and consumers. Semantic e-business seeks to apply fundamental work done in Semantic Web technologies to support the transparent flow of semantically enriched information and knowledge — including content and know-how — to enable, enhance, and coordinate collaborative e-business processes within and across organizational boundaries. Semantic e-business processes are characterized by the seamless and transparent flow of semantically enriched informationand knowledge. We present a holistic view of semantic e-business that integrates emergent and well-grounded Semantic Web technologies to improve the current state of the art in the transparency of e-business processes.

Querying the Web Reconsidered

A decade of experience with research proposals as well as standardized query languages for the conventional Web and the recent emergence of query languages for the Semantic Web call for a reconsideration of design principles for Web and Semantic Web query languages. This chapter first argues that a new generation of versatile Web query languages is needed for solving the challenges posed by the changing Web: We call versatile those query languages able to cope with both Weband Semantic Web data expressed in any (Web or Semantic Web) markup language. This chapter further suggests that well-known referential transparency and novel answer-closedness are essential features of versatile query languages. Indeed, they allow queries to be considered like forms and answers like form-fillings in the spirit of the query-by-example paradigm. This chapter finally suggests that the decentralized and heterogeneous nature of the Web requires incomplete data specifications (or incomplete queries) and incomplete data selections (or incomplete answers); the form-like query can be specified without precise knowledge of the queried data, and answers can be restricted to contain only an excerpt of the queried data.

Archetype-Based Semantic Interoperability of Web Service Messages in the Health Care Domain

In this chapter, we describe an infrastructure enabling archetype-based semantic interoperability of Web service messages exchanged in the health care domain. We annotate the Web service messages with the OWL representation of the archetypes. Then, by providing the ontology mapping between the archetypes, we show that the interoperability of the Web service message instances can be achieved automatically. An OWL mapping tool, called OWLmt, has been developed for this purpose. OWLmt uses OWL-QL engine, which enables the mapping tool to reason over the source archetype instances while generating the target archetype instances according to the mapping patterns defined through a GUI.

Semantics for the Semantic Web

Enabling applications that exploit heterogeneous data in the Semantic Web will require us to harness a broad variety of semantics. Considering the role of semantics in a number of research areas in computer science, we organize semantics in three forms — implicit, formal, and powerful — and explore their roles in enabling some of the key capabilities related to the Semantic Web. The central message of this article is that building the Semantic Web purely on description logics will artificially limit its potential, and that we will need to both exploit well-known techniques that support implicit semantics, and develop more powerful semantic techniques.

Family History Information Exchange Services Using HL7 Clinical Genomics Standard Specifications

A number of family history applications are in use by health care professionals (e.g., CAGENE, Progeny, Partners Health care Family History Program) as well as by patients (e.g., the U.S. Surgeon General’s Family History Program). Each has its own proprietary data format for pedigree drawing and for the maintenance of family history health information. Interoperability between applications is essentially non-existent. To date, disparate family history applications cannot easily exchange patient information. The receiving application should be able to understand the semantics of the incoming family history and enable the user to view and/or to edit it using the receiving applications interface. We envision that any family history application will be able to send and receive an individual’s family history information using the newly created HL7 Clinical Genomics Specifications through the Semantic Web, using services that will transform one format to the other through the HL7 canonical representation.

General Adaptation Framework

Integration of heterogeneous applications and data sources into an interoperable system is one of the most relevant challenges for many knowledge-based corporations nowadays. Development of a global environment that would support knowledge transfer from human experts to automated Web services, which are able to learn, is a very profit-promising and challenging task. The domain of industrial maintenance is not an exception. This chapter outlines in detail an approach for adaptation of heterogeneous Web resources into a unified environment as a first step toward interoperability of smart industrial resources, where distributed human experts and learning Web services are utilized by various devices for self monitoring and self diagnostics. The proposed General Adaptation Framework utilizes a potential of the Semantic Web technology and primarily focuses on the aspect of a semantic adaptation (or mediation) of existing widely used models of data representation to RDF-based semantically rich format. To perform the semantic adaptation of industrial resources, the approach of two-stage transformation (syntactical and semantic) is elaborated and implemented for monitoring of a concrete industrial device with underlying XML-based data representation model as a use case.

A Layered Model for Building Ontology Translation Systems

In this chapter we present a model for building ontology translation systems between ontology languages and/or ontology tools, where translation decisions are defined at four different layers: lexical, syntax, semantic, and pragmatic. This layered approach provides a major contribution to the current state of the art in ontology translation, since it makes ontology translation systems easier to build and understand and, consequently, to maintain and reuse. As part of this model, we propose a method that guides in the process of developing ontology translation systems according to this approach. The method identifies four main activities: feasibility study, analysis of source, and target formats, design, and implementation of the translation system, with their decomposition in tasks, and recommends the techniques to be used inside each of them.

A Survey on Ontology Creation Methodologies

In the current literature of knowledge management and artificial intelligence, several different approaches to the problem have been carried out of developing domain ontologies from scratch. All these approaches deal fundamentally with three problems: (1) providing a collection of general terms describing classes and relations to be employed in the description of the domain itself; (2) organizing the terms into a taxonomy of the classes by the ISA relation; and (3) expressing in an explicit way the constraints that make the ISA pairs meaningful. Though a number of such approaches can be found, no systematic analysis of them exists which can be used to understand the inspiring motivation, the applicability context, and the structure of the approaches. In this paper, we provide a framework for analyzing the existing methodologies that compares them to a set of general criteria. In particular, we obtain a classification based upon the direction of ontology construction; bottom-up are those methodologies that start with some descriptions of the domain and obtain a classification, while top-down ones start with an abstract view of the domain itself, which is given a priori. The resulting classification is useful not only for theoretical purposes but also in the practice of deployment of ontologies in Information Systems, since it provides a framework for choosing the right methodology to be applied in the specific context, depending also on the needs of the application itself.