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The Health-e-Child project aims to develop an integrated healthcare platform for European paediatrics. In order to achieve a comprehensive view of children's health, a complex integration of biomedical data, information, and knowledge is necessary. Ontologies will be used to formally define this domain knowledge and will form the basis for the medical knowledge management system. This paper introduces an innovative methodology for the vertical integration of biomedical knowledge. This approach will be largely clinician-centered and will enable the definition of ontology fragments, connections between them (semantic bridges) and enriched ontology fragments (views). The strategy for the specification and capture of fragments, bridges and views is outlined with preliminary examples demonstrated in the collection of biomedical information from hospital databases, biomedical ontologies, and biomedical public databases. Keywords: Vertical Knowledge Integration, Approximate Queries, Ontology Views, Semantic Bridges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transfusion Ontology is a simple task-based ontology developed in the emergency health care domain. Taking the assumption that ontologies are instruments for supporting exchange of information among parties, the principles governing the design of this ontology was mainly based on the identification of the interactions of messages to be exchanged among parties. This paper shows how this simple design principle is able to guide a whole ontology construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we will propose our ideas for a semantically ready competency model. The model will allow semantic enrichment on different levels, creating truly meaningful competencies. The aim of this model is to provide a flexible approach for (re)use, matching, interpretation, exchange and storage for competencies. Our competency model is based on the DOGMA ontology framework and the proposed IEEE standards RCD and SCRM. We will focus on the model itself and how semantics can be applied to it as these elements form the basis for any kind of processing on them. Keywords: competence, competency, RCD, semantics, DOGMA, e-HRM, HRM, occupation, ontology, Semantic Web. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today's mobile data applications aspire to deliver services to a user anywhere - anytime while fulfilling his Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. However, the success of the service delivery heavily relies on the QoS offered by the underlying networks. As the services operate in a heterogeneous networking environment, we argue that the generic information about the networks' offered-QoS may enable an anyhow mobile service delivery based on an intelligent (proactive) selection of ‘any' network available in the user's context (location and time). Towards this direction, we develop a QoS-predictions service provider, which includes functionality for the acquisition of generic offered-QoS information and which, via a multidimensional processing and history-based reasoning, will provide predictions of the expected offered-QoS in a reliable and timely manner. We acquire the generic QoS-information from distributed mobile services' components quantitatively (actively and passively) measuring the applicationlevel QoS, while the reasoning is based on statistical data mining and pattern recognition techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the recent proliferation of documents, automatic metadata extraction from document becomes an important task. In this paper, we propose a novel template matching based method for header metadata extraction form semi-structured documents stored in PDF. In our approach, templates are defined, and the document is considered as strings with format. Templates are used to guide finite state automaton (FSA) to extract header metadata of papers. The testing results indicate that our approach can effectively extract metadata, without any training cost and available to some special situation. This approach can effectively assist the automatic index creation in lots of fields such as digital libraries, information retrieval, and data mining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we describe a framework for the application of semantic granularities to the Semantic Web. Given a data source and an ontology formalizing qualities which describe the source, we define a dynamic granularity system for the navigation of the repository according to different levels of detail, i.e., granularities. Semantic granularities summarize the degree of informativeness of the qualities, taking into account both the individuals populating the repository, which concur in the definition of the implicit semantics, and the ontology schema, which gives the formal semantics. The method adapts and extends to ontologies existing natural language processing techniques for topics generalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing development of web-based reputation systems in the 21st century will have a powerful social and economic impact on both business entities and individual customers, because it makes transparent quality assessment on products and services to achieve customer assurance in the distributed web-based Reputation Systems. The web-based reputation systems will be the foundation for web intelligence in the future. Trust and Reputation help capture business intelligence through establishing customer trust relationships, learning consumer behavior, capturing market reaction on products and services, disseminating customer feedback, buyers' opinions and end-user recommendations. It also reveals dishonest services, unfair trading, biased assessment, discriminatory actions, fraudulent behaviors, and un-true advertising. The continuing development of these technologies will help in the improvement of professional business behavior, sales, reputation of sellers, providers, products and services. Given the importance of reputation in this paper, we propose ontology for reputation. In the business world we can consider the reputation of a product or the reputation of a service or the reputation of an agent. In this paper we propose ontology for these entities that can help us unravel the components and conceptualize the components of reputation of each of the entities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Service-Oriented computing can be characterized as the motivating force for interoperable web applications. Businesses that embark on service-oriented technology are inclined to an effective interoperation with other businesses. This interoperation not only can expand businesses' markets but also allow the provision of quality services to citizens for carrying out their everyday transactions. However for an effective utilization of service-oriented computing a variety of other technologies must be involved namely semantics, pragmatics, effective search techniques, intelligent agents and pervasive services. In this paper we focus in one of the phases of service-oriented computing, the web service discovery, and propose an effective pragmatic and pervasive methodology that will enable potential business partners to discover the web servicesThe term web services, as in this paper, is used to refer to semantic web services./processes of their interest. We are particularly emphasizing on the importance of pragmatics and their application during web service discovery, because only a pragmatic consideration can provide complete and unambiguous meaning to web service usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present an ongoing project on the concept of interaction among people via a mobile (city) application. The focus of our research lies on its usability and sociability, i.e., on all aspects that are related to community forming and development in a city context. In order to analyze them, we have developed a method that combines two techniques that are not common in usability studies: the association technique and the laddering method. We have called this combination the ‘connotation chain' technique. In this paper, we will first introduce this technique showing its advantages and disadvantages in a usability study. Then, we will present the results of applying this technique to our specific objective and, finally, we will discuss its implications for the further development of the interface of this application. Keywords: Mobile communication within a city context, Communities, Association technique, Laddering and User-centered design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several approaches for data interoperation identified by Karp have been implemented for biological databases. We extend Karp's approach for interoperation not only to protein databases but also to knowledge bases and other information sources. This paper outlines algebra for protein data source composition based on our existing work of Protein Ontology (PO). In this paper we consider the case of establishing correspondence between various protein data sources using semantic relationships over the conceptual framework of PO. Here we provide specific set of relationships over PO framework to cover data semantics for integrating data information from diverse protein data sources. These relationships help in defining semantic query algebra for PO to efficiently reason and query the instance store. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a method for query approximation in Geographical Information Systems. In our approach, queries are expressed by the Geographical Pictorial Query Language (GeoPQL), and query approximation is performed using WordNet, a lexical database for the English language available on the Internet. Due to the focus on geographical context, we address WordNetpartitiontaxonomies. If a concept contained in a query has no match in the database, the query is approximated using the immediate superconcepts and subconcepts in the WordNet taxonomy, and their related degrees of similarity. Semantic similarity is evaluated using the information content approach, which shows a higher correlation with human judgment than the traditional similarity measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes, for the case of Enterprise Java Bean components and JBoss application server, how replication for availability can be supported to tolerate application server/transaction manager failures. Replicating the state associated with the progression of a transaction (i.e., which phase of two-phase commit is enacted and the transactional resources involved) provides an opportunity to continue a transaction using a backup transaction manager if the transaction manager of the primary fails. Existing application servers do not support this functionality. The paper discusses the technical issues involved and shows how a solution can be engineered. Keywords: Availability, application servers, components, Enterprise Java Beans, fault tolerance, middleware, replication, transactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the era of stove-piped Geographical Information Systems up to interesting mash-ups involving Internet based mapping services, the approaches of handling Geographical Information (GI) have changed significantly. This paper briefly concentrates up on the distinctive features and current implementations of Spatial Data Access Patterns. Considering the information requirements of the users in Emergency Operations Center, this paper identifies the issues and challenges in handling GI in dynamically changing environments. Two new patterns based on appropriate integration of Semantics and Grid technology are introduced, that may satisfy the identified requirements. Necessary alterations in current practices for handling GI is discussed with detail considerations for realization of these patterns on open environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increasing number of recent information retrieval systems make use of ontologies to help the users clarify their information needs and come up with semantic representations of documents. A particular concern here is the integration of these semantic approaches with traditional search technology. The research presented in this paper examines how ontologies can be efficiently applied to large-scale search systems for the web. We describe how these systems can be enriched with adapted ontologies to provide both an in-depth understanding of the user's needs as well as an easy integration with standard vector-space retrieval systems. The ontology concepts are adapted to the domain terminology by computing a feature vector for each concept. Later, the feature vectors are used to enrich a provided query. The whole retrieval system is under development as part of a larger Semantic Web standardization project for the Norwegian oil & gas sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is part of an ongoing research effort to better understand the process of conceptual modeling. As part of this effort, we are currently developing a modeling laboratory named MoDial (Modeling Dialogues). The main contribution of this paper is a conceptual meta-model of that part of MoDial which aims to capture the elicitation aspects of the modeling process used in creating a model, rather than the model as such.The current meta-model is the result of a two-stage research process. The first stage involves theoretical input from literature and earlier results. The second stage is concerned with (modest) empirical validation in terms of interviews with modeling experts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One distinctive feature of pervasive computing environments is the common need to gather and process context information about real persons. Unfortunately, this unavoidably affects persons' privacy. Each time someone uses a cellular phone, a credit card, or surfs the web, he leaves a trace that is stored and processed. In a pervasive sensing environment, however, the amount of information collected is much larger than today and also might be used to reconstruct personal information with great accuracy. The question we address in this paper is how to control dissemination and flow of personal data across organizational, and personal boundaries, i.e., to potential addressees of privacy relevant information. This paper presents the User-Centric Privacy Framework (UCPF). It aims at protecting a user's privacy based on the enforcement of privacy preferences. They are expressed as a set of constraints over some set of context information. To achieve the goal of cross-boundary control, we introduce two novel abstractions, namely Transformations and Foreign Constraints, in order to extend the possibilities of a user to describe privacy protection criteria beyond the expressiveness usually found today. Transformations are understood as any process that the user may define over a specific piece of context. This is a main building block for obfuscating - or even plainly lying about - the context in question. Foreign Constraints are an important complementing extension because they allow for modeling conditions defined on external users that are not the tracked individual, but may influence disclosure of personal data to third parties. We are confident that these two easy-to-use abstractions together with the general privacy framework presented in this paper constitute a strong contribution to the protection of the personal privacy in pervasive computing environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the analysis phase of information systems development, it is important to have the conceptual schema validated by the business domain expert, to ensure that the schema accurately models the relevant aspects of the business domain. An effective way to facilitate this validation is to verbalize the schema in language that is both unambiguous and easily understood by the domain expert, who may be non-technical. Such verbalization has long been a major aspect of the Object-Role Modeling (ORM) approach, and basic support for verbalization exists in some ORM tools. Second generation ORM (ORM 2) significantly extends the expressibility of ORM models (e.g. deontic modalities, role value constraints, etc.). This paper discusses the automated support for verbalization of ORM 2 models provided by NORMA (Neumont ORM Architect), an open-source software tool that facilitates entry, validation, and mapping of ORM 2 models. NORMA supports verbalization patterns that go well beyond previous verbalization work. The verbalization for individual elements in the core ORM model is generated using an XSLT transform applied to an XML file that succinctly identifies different verbalization patterns and describes how phrases are combined to produce a readable verbalization. This paper discusses the XML patterns used to describe ORM constraints and the tightly coupled facilities that enable end-users to easily adapt the verbalization phrases to cater for different domain experts and native languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an experimental study for extracting a terminology from a corpus made of Curriculum Vitae (CV). This terminology is to be used for ontology acquisition. The choice of the pruning rate of the terminology is crucial relative to the quality of the ontology acquired. In this paper, we investigate this pruning rate by using several evaluation measures (precision, recall, F-measure, and ROC curve). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an extension to the Object-Role Modeling approach to support formal declaration of dynamic rules. Dynamic rules differ from static rules by pertaining to properties of state transitions, rather than to the states themselves. In this paper, application of dynamic rules is restricted to so-called single-step transactions, with an old state (the input of the transaction) and a new state (the direct result of that transaction). Such restricted rules are easier to formulate (and enforce) than a constraint applying historically over all possible states. In our approach, dynamic rules specify an elementary transaction type indicating which kind of object or fact is being added, deleted or updated, and (optionally) pre-conditions relevant to the transaction, followed by a condition stating the properties of the new state, including the relation between the new state and the old state. These dynamic rules are formulated in a syntax designed to be easily validated by non-technical domain experts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In software engineering, the notion of unit testing was successfully introduced and applied. Unit tests are easy manageable tests for small parts of a program - single units. They proved especially useful to capture unwanted changes and side effects during the maintenance of a program, and they grow with the evolution of the program. Ontologies behave quite differently than program units. As there is no information hiding in ontology engineering, and thus no black box components, at first the idea of unit testing for ontologies seems not applicable. In this paper we motivate the need for unit testing, describe the adaptation to the unit testing approach, and give use cases and examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If a mobile device is to offer rich context-aware behaviour it must have a good knowledge of the world around us. This paper explores the concept of universal context model, able to represent any form of context information and therefore be an enabler to the full spectrum of context-aware applications. It explores how such a model may accurately represent - as far as practically possible - the multitude of different objects we encounter in our surrounding environment and their many states and interrelationships. Three key propositions are that the context model should be of an object-oriented nature, that location is most appropriately and flexibly represented as a relationship between two objects rather than being considered as a special type of object unto itself, and finally, that objects may be coupled with observer-dependent validity rules that determine if the object is visible within the model. Keywords: context-aware, location-aware, context model, context, object model, e-government, mobile government services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a system for learning and utilizing context-dependent user models. The user models attempt to capture the interests of a user and link the interests to the situation of the user. The models are used for making recommendations to applications and services on what might interest the user in her current situation. In the design process we have analyzed several mock-ups of new mobile, context-aware services and applications. The mock-ups spanned rather diverse domains, which helped us to ensure that the system is applicable to a wide range of tasks, such as modality recommendations (e.g., switching to speech output when driving a car), service category recommendations (e.g., journey planners at a bus stop), and recommendations of group members (e.g., people with whom to share a car). The structure of the presented system is highly modular. First of all, this ensures that the algorithms that are used to build the user models can be easily replaced. Secondly, the modularity makes it easier to evaluate how well different algorithms perform in different domains. The current implementation of the system supports rule based reasoning and tree augmented naïve Bayesian classifiers (TAN). The system consists of three components, each of which has been implemented as a web service. The entire system has been deployed and is in use in the EU IST project MobiLife. In this paper, we detail the components that are part of the system and introduce the interactions between the components. In addition, we briefly discuss the quality of the recommendations that our system produces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on finding maximum rooted spanning trees (MRSTs) for structured web search including hop constraints. We describe the meaning of structured web search and develop two binary integer linear programming models to find the best MRST. New methods for measuring the relevance among web objects are devised and used for structured web search. Some case studies are performed with real web sites and results are reported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ontologies are the foundation of the Semantic Web (SW) and one of the keys necessary to its success. Conversely, ontology views hold the promise of; (a) provide a manageable portion of a larger ontology for the localized applications and users, (b) enable precise extraction of sub-onlogies of a larger ontology that commits to the main ontology, (c) enable localized customization and usage of the portion of a larger ontology and (d) enable interoperability between large ontology bases and applications. Therefore, it is interesting to look at ontology views and their desired properties, as there exists no agreed upon standard, methodology or formalism to specify, define and materialize ontology views. Thus, in this paper, we elaborate on our own research direction towards proposing a meaningful ontology view formalism and its associated semantics. Keywords: Semantic Web (SW), ontology, ontology views. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present an approach for designing and deploying context-aware services in the context of physical hypermedia applications, those applications in which mobile users explore real and digital objects using the hypermedia paradigm. We show how to adapt the objects' response to the user's navigation context by changing the role these objects play in the user's travel. We first motivate our research with a simple example and survey some related work; next we introduce the concept of travel object and show that physical objects might assume the role of different type of travel objects. We then present an architectural approach for context-aware services and describe its evolution into a software substrate for physical hypermedia services. We conclude by indicating some further work we are pursuing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new query pattern-based relational schema-to-XML schema translation (QP-T) algorithm to resolve implicit referential integrity issue. Various translation methods have been introduced on structural aspects and/or semantic aspects. However, most of conventional methods consider only explicit referential integrities specified in relational schema. It causes several problems such as incorrect transformation, abnormal relational model transition, and so on. The QP-T algorithm analyzes query pattern and extract implicit referential integrities through equi-join between columns. The QP-T algorithm is based on a concept that columns related to equi-join in relational schema can have referential integrity. The most distinct contribution of QP-T algorithm is to enhance extraction of referential integrity relation information for translation. Therefore, the QP-T algorithm reflects not only explicit referential integrities but also implicit referential integrities during RDB-to-XML translation. The QP-T algorithm also prevents XML documents from incorrect conversion and increase translation accuracy. Keywords: Relational Schema Model, Query Pattern, XML Shema Model, Referential Integrity Relation Information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multicast requires reliability in peer-to-peer or multiple-to-multiple communication services and such demand for reliability becomes more and more an important factor to manage the whole network. Communication method for multicast is a way of communication for a transmitter that provides multicast data to every registered member in the transmitter's group, and it can be classified into the traditional and the reliable communication methods in general. The traditional communication method is very fast in connection but quality of service is poor. In contrast, the reliable communication method provides good quality in service but its speed is somewhat poor. Thus to enhance such demerits, this paper proposes communication method of multicast by using QCBT (Quality of Service Core Based Tree ) method. In this paper, a fair and practical bandwidth is used for data packet transmission along with the use of QCBT. The bandwidth and data processing capability filters out the transmitted data from an QCBT router through transmission packet and upgrades multimedia data packet more effectively. Therefore, recipients in various levels receive the effective data packet and based on these facts, the study actualizes and evaluates efficiency of a router, which is able to transmit the fair bandwidth from QCBT router in a simulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software design process has been followed and widely used to describe logical organisation of software using different types of models. However, when it comes to remote communication over software design, it is prone to miscommunication, misunderstanding or misinterpretation especially with ambiguous terms or people having different backgrounds and knowledge of the software design process. This motivates the use of unified knowledge representation of software design process i.e. software design process ontology for communications and coordination. The knowledge representation introduced here in the form of software design process ontology is based on a formal description of the software design process using the web ontology language OWL. Software design process knowledge is defined or captured in a formal and machine processable fashion. The software design process knowledge is then open and facilitates the sharing of software design among software engineers. We discuss software design process ontology development in this paper. Keywords: Ontology, ontology development, software design process ontology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A problem with traditional information retrieval systems is that they typically retrieve information without an explicitly defined domain of interest to the user. Consequently, the system presents a lot of information that is of little relevance to the user. Ideally, the queries' real intentions should be exposed and reflected in the way the underlying retrieval machinery can deal with them. In this paper we propose using abstraction layers to differentiate on the query terms. We explain why we believe this differentiation of query terms is necessary and the potentials of this approach. The whole retrieval system is under development as part of a Semantic Web standardization project for the Norwegian oil and gas industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decision making is a tough process. It involves dealing with a lot of uncertainty and projecting what the final outcome might be. Depending on the projection of the uncertain outcome, a decision has to be taken. In a peer-to-peer financial interaction, the trusting agent in order to analyze the Risk has to consider the possible likelihood of failure of the interaction and the possible consequences of failure to its resources involved in the interaction before concluding whether to interact with the probable trusted agent or not. Further it might also have to choose and decide on an agent to interact with from a set of probable trusted agents. In this paper we propose a Fuzzy Risk based decision making system that would assist the trusting agent to ease its decision making process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last years many laws have been promulgated in diverse countries to protect citizens' privacy. This fact is due to the increase of privacy threats caused by the tendency of using information technologies in all scopes. Location Based Services (LBS) compose a situation where this privacy can be harmed. Even there exist mechanisms to protect this right in LBS, generally this services have not been developed over regulatory norms or if so, it has been in a partial way or interpreting those norms in a particular form. This situation could be a consequence of the lack of a common knowledge base representing the actual legislation in matters of privacy. In this paper an ontology of the main Spanish privacy norm is presented as well as the method used to construct it. The ontology is specifically aimed and applied to the preservation of privacy in LBS. Keywords: Ontology, regulation, privacy, location-based services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the usability of vector geographic data structures. We define usability of a geographic representation as the ability to fit the user's view, the user application and the user platform, plus the ability to be derived from a data producer dataset and to be maintained in the future if needed. Specifying the structure of a usable representation and deriving the corresponding data require specific tools and expertness. We propose to assist users in this process by means of a Web-based system able to assist users in specifying and performing a dataset restructuration process. The first step is to help users to set their requirements. To achieve this goal, we propose a graphical interface to specify differences between an existing data structure and a target data structure. The second step is to help users to commit these requirements into a transformation process applied to an existing dataset. We propose mechanisms to plan and execute this process and to check its result. The system relies on knowledge of existing data structures, platforms grammar rules and typical application schemas. The first part of this paper analyses the notion of a data structure and how to specify it. The second part describes our proposal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is not to present outcomes of research, but rather present a new research plan in the use of chorems in geographic information systems. Created by R. Brunet, chorems are a schematic representation of a territory. Presently, geographic decision-makers are not totally satisfied by conventional cartography, essentially because they want to know where and what are the problems. And so chorems appear as an interesting approach to unveil geographic problems, and so to help decision makers understand their territory, their structure and their evolution. After having given the definition and presented some applications of chorems, we show how chorems can be discovered by spatial data mining, can help decision making, and also how chorem maps can be a novel approach to visually entry a geographic database or datawarehouse. Comparing with the Ben Shneiderman's approach, chorems can give an overview of the territory; then by zooming and filtering, and sub-chorem maps can be generated for smaller territories. Finally a list of barriers to overcome is given as main landmarks for a new research program in order to design new kind of geographic information systems or spatial decision support systems. Keywords: chorems, spatial data mining, geographic databases, geographic datawarehouses, geographic knowledge, GIS, visual entry system, research plan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Development of a spatial data warehouse (SDW) is a complex task, which if assisted with the methodological framework could facilitate its realization. In particular, the requirements specification phase, being one of the earliest steps of system development, should attract attention since it may entail significant problems if faulty or incomplete. However, a lack of methodology for the SDW design and the presence of two actors in specifying data requirements, i.e., users and source systems, complicates more the development process. In this paper, we propose three different approaches for requirements specifications that lead to the creation of conceptual schemas for SDW applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines a framework to support the demand-driven analysis of spatio-temporal data. It will support decision making involving complex, multidimensional data and addresses the following challenges: (1) the demand-driven acquisition of context data, (2) the combination of context and user data, (3) the consideration of different aspects and levels of detail on the analysis and (4) the storage and integration of analysis results for further use. The framework will provide web-services based on open standards to populate and explore multidimensional spatio-temporal structures interactively. Online Analitical Pro-cesing (OLAP) concepts will serve as model for storing and querying the data. Roaming-services will be used to update contents coming from different Spatial Data Infrastructures. Semantical descriptions will allow switching analysis operations at different levels of detail. Research questions and challenges related to the underlying model and implementation aspects will be discussed. Keywords: spatial OLAP, semantic web services, roamable services, spatio-temporal decision support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integration and interoperability is a basic requirement for geographic information systems (GIS). The web provides access to geographic data in several ways: on the one hand, web-based interactive GIS applications provide maps and routing information to end users; on the other hand, the data of some GIS can be accessed in a programmatic way using a web service. Thereby, the data is made available for other GIS applications. However, integrating data from various sources is a tedious task which requires the mapping of the involved schemas as a first step. Schema matching analyzes and identifies similarities of two schemas, but all approaches can be only semi-automatic as human intervention is required to verify the result of a schema matching algorithm. In this paper, we present an approach that improves the matching result of existing solutions by using semantic information provided by the context of the geographic application. This reduces the effort for manually correcting the results which has been validated in several application examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-repair is a key area of functionality in overlay networks, especially as overlays become increasingly widely deployed and relied upon. Today's common practice is for each overlay to implement its own self-repair mechanism. However, apart from leading to duplication of effort, this practice inhibits choice and flexibility in selecting from among multiple self-repair mechanisms that make different deployment-specific trade-offs between dependability and overhead. In this paper, we present an approach in which overlay networks provide functional behaviour only, and rely for their self-repair on a generic self-repair service. In our previously-published work in this area, we have focused on the distributed algorithms encapsulated within our self-repair service. In this paper we focus instead on API and integration issues. In particular, we show how overlay implementations can interact with our generic self-repair service using a small and simple API. We concretise the discussion by illustrating the use of this API from within an implementation of the popular Chord overlay. This involves minimal changes to the implementation while considerably increasing its available range of self-repair strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the transition from IPv4 to IPv6, it is necessary to provide IPv6 access service for IPv6 islands inside the native IPv4 network to access the native IPv6 network. The existing IPv4/IPv6 transition methods make IPv6-relay gateways maintained by IPv6 service providers become potential communication bottlenecks. In this paper, a new method PS6 is presented to reduce the reliance on these relay gateways by shifting the burden to edge gateways on each IPv6 island. In this method, direct tunnels are set up between IPv6 islands, and a overlay network is maintained between edge gateways of IPv6 islands to propagate information of tunnel end points. After describing the algorithm and overlay network design, we analyze the scalability of the algorithm. The simulation results and theoretical analysis show that the proposed method is reliable and scalable. Keywords: IPv6 Access Service, Overlay Network, IPv4/IPv6 Transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a two-layer hybrid P2P network (HP2P), in which the upper layer is structured Chord network, and the lower layer is unstructured flooding network. HP2P benefits from the advantages of both structured and unstructured networks and significantly improves the performance such as stability, scalability and lookup latency of the network. In this paper, the Chord overlay algorithm is formalized. The data structure, node joining, node leaving, routing table stabilizing and lookup services are introduced in detail. Further the caching mechanism is employed to accelerate lookup services. In particular, the analysis shows that the stability of Chord overlay in HP2P network has been enhanced indeed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distributed systems are now both very large and highly dynamic. Peer to peer overlay networks have been proved efficient to cope with this new deal that traditional approaches can no longer accommodate. While the challenge of organizing peers in an overlay network has generated a lot of interest leading to a large number of solutions, maintaining critical data in such a network remains an open issue. In this paper, we are interested in defining the portion of nodes and frequency one has to probe, given the churn observed in the system, in order to achieve a given probability of maintaining the persistence of some critical data. More specifically, we provide a clear result relating the size and the frequency of the probing set along with its proof as well as an analysis of the way of leveraging such an information in a large scale dynamic distributed system. Keywords: Churn, Core, Dynamic system, Peer to peer system, Persistence, Probabilistic guarantee, Quality of service, Survivability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information and communication technology (ICT) has witnessed mobility as an important development over the last few years. So far the discussion about mobile information systems has largely been techno-centric and supplier oriented rather than business-centric and user oriented. The lack of available methods for business driven evaluation motivates the research question of effective decision making support. This paper summarizes the PhD research effort aimed at constructing a decision support model to enhance the awareness and understanding of mobile applications impact. It presents a formal approach and lays out in the underlying research methodology as well as the epistemological position. This contribution also highlights the recent and dynamic debate on suitable IS research standards, thereby inviting a discussion on appropriate artifact-based design research and the central question of validation to successfully complete the research project. Keywords: Mobile business, conceptual modeling, business process modeling, ICT strategy, IS research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the Single Sign On (SSO) issue in personal Area Networks (PANs) comprising of heterogeneous handheld devices. Architectures for service SSO solutions at the enterprise level are already in the market and some standards for such solutions exist. In this paper however we introduce the notion of device level SSO. By device SSO, we refer to the process of logging on to one device and then subsequently being authorized for other devices on a need only basis, without the user being prompted for his credentials or requiring any further manual interaction. Device SSO secures the authentication process in a PAN and alleviates the users from the burden of handling and managing the credentials of each device in the PAN. While borrowing elements from the enterprise level SSO standards, our architecture has been custom-tailored to the characteristics and inherent features of a PAN environment. Client server and peer-to-peer SSO schemes have been designed to fit both PAN star and mesh architectures. The proposed scheme is an application layer solution that is independent of the device platform and the underlying radio link. A sample prototype application has been developed as a proof of concept that runs on laptops and PDAs communicating over Bluetooth links. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grid computing environments have recently been extended with Pervasive computing characteristics leading to a new paradigm, namely the Pervasive Grid Computing. In particular, QoS of existing Grid services is being augmented by means of location-awareness. This paper presents a location service that locates active mobile objects, such as Wi-Fi enabled devices and RFID tagged entities, in a real Pervasive Grid. The key feature of the service is the use of ontologies and rules to define a uniform, unambiguous and well-defined model for the location information, independently from the particular positioning system. Moreover, the location service performs logic and reasoning mechanisms both for providing physical and semantic locations of mobile objects and for inferring the finest granularity for location information in the case a mobile object is located by more than one positioning system. The service has been developed at the top of the standard OGSA architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is increasingly used to improve the efficiency of business processes by providing the capability of automatic identification and data capture and it is expected to extend its significant potential to daily life improvement. On the other hand, the convergence of the telecommunication, media and information technology industries has generated massive change in not just industries but also our daily lives, and none are more apparent than the mobile phone. Such convergence trend for mobile phone seems inevitable and the integration of RFID technology and mobile phone is regarded as one of promising technologies to accelerate such convergence trend toward the ubiquitous computing environment. In this paper, we discuss the benefits, business cases and system architectures emerging from the integration between RFID technology - especially, RFID reader - and mobile phone with existing wireless network infrastructure in terms of business and software perspectives. Moreover, we present the reference implementation for the RFID-based cellular network architecture incorporated with a mobile phone mounted with RFID reader in order to evaluate the technical feasibility of this convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast to decreasing costs of electronic appliances enabling the realization of pervasive systems, the price of individual development of the software making up eHome systems is one of the major problems preventing their large-scale adoption. By introducing a specification, configuration, and deployment process, the environment-specific development effort is reduced. We support this process by our tool suite, the eHomeConfigurator which is introduced in this paper. It creates a configuration graph, capable of describing dependencies and contexts of components in the eHome field. The tool suite is used to configure and deploy various eHome services on different home environments. Compared to the classical development process, the effort for setting up eHome systems is reduced significantly and opens up the possibility to decrease the development costs for eHome systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although persistent availability is one of the basic requirements of the middlewares for pervasive computing systems to provide "anytime anywhere" services, very little work has been done on this issue. Soft System Bus (SSB) was proposed to provide "anytime anywhere" middleware platform support to large-scale reactive systems which run continuously and persistently. However, till now no SSB has been implemented. In this paper, we present a comparative study between the SSB and different types of traditional middlewares, e.g., synchronous Request/Reply, Message Oriented, Publish/ Subscribe middlewares, etc, in order to find the implementation issues of an SSB. We show that although existing middlewares have some characteristics that are common in an SSB too, they lack some features which are unique and essential for an SSB. Finally, we present the implementation issues of an SSB to ensure persistent availability. Keywords: Soft System Bus, Data/Instruction Station, Middleware. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies have focused on the facts that numeral classifiers give decisive clues to the semantic categorizing of nouns. However, few studies have analyzed the ontological relationships of classifiers or the construction of classifier ontology. In this paper, a semi-automatic method of extracting and representing the various ontological relations of Korean numeral classifiers is proposed. Shallow parsing and word-sense disambiguation were used to extract semantic relations from natural language texts and from wordnets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we will focus on the importance of management of knowledge held by the organization's human resources and gained through experience and practice. For this issue, we propose a model for software best practices' integration in a Knowledge Management System (KMS) of a Software Development Community of Practices (SDCoP). This model aims on the one hand, to integrate human, organizational, cultural and technical dimensions of the Knowledge Management (KM) discipline and on the other hand, to cover all the KM's process. In response to these needs, the proposed model, purpose of this paper, is founded on the basis of ontologies and intelligent agents' technologies. Keywords: Best Practices, competencies, Knowledge Management, Software Development Process, Ontology, Intelligent Agents, OWL, Jena, Nuin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In context-aware mobile systems, data on past user behaviour or use of a device can give critical information. The scale of this data may be large, and it must be quickly searched and retrieved. Compression is a powerful tool for both storing and indexing data. For text documents powerful algorithms using structured storage achieve high compression and rapid search and retrieval. Byte-stream techniques provide higher compression, but lack indexation and have slow retrieval. Location is a common form of context frequently used in research prototypes of tourist guide systems, location-aware searching and adaptive hypermedia. In this paper, we present an exploration of record-based compression of Global Positioning System (GPS) data that reveals significant technical limitations on what can be achieved on mobile devices, and a discussion of the benefits of different compression techniques on GPS data. Keywords: Compression, GPS, Context-aware. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is the introduction of a methodology for designing context-driven data selection, that is the possibility to tailor the available, usually too rich, data to be held on portable mobile devices, according to context. First of all, we will introduce the concept of context and its model, a data structure that expresses knowledge on the user, the environment and the possible scenarios. We will then focus on the proposed methodology for selecting, by means of such information, the relevant data to be made available on a user device. An application of the proposed methodology is the possibility to select data of interest for portable devices, where computation, memory, power and connectivity resources are limited, and thus, tailororing the available, usually too rich, data according to context is a mandatory task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]