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This paper presents a novel application of a semantic annotation system, named Cerno, to analyze research publications in electronic format. Specifically, we address the problem of providing automatic support for authors who need to deal with large volumes of research documents. To this end, we have developed Biblio, a user-friendly tool based on Cerno. The tool directs the user's attention to the most important elements of the papers and provides assistance by generating automatically a list of references and an annotated bibliography given a collection of published research articles. The tool performance has been evaluated on a set of papers and preliminary evaluation results are promising. The backend of Biblio uses a standard relational database to store the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Capturing and understanding mathematics from print form is an important task in translating written mathematical knowledge into electronic form. While the problem of syntactically recognising mathematical formulas from scanned images has received attention, very little work has been done on semantic validation and correction of recognised formulas. We present a first step towards such an integrated system by combining the Infty system with a semantic analyser for matrix expressions. We applied the combined system in experiments on the semantic analysis of matrix images scanned from textbooks. While the first results are encouraging, they also demonstrate many ambiguities one has to deal with when analysing matrix expressions in different contexts. We give a detailed overview of the problems we encountered that motivate further research into semantic validation of mathematical formula recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we suggest a postal RFID application model that can be used for real time trace and tracking system implementation of parcel processing and pallet management. This paper also shows the tag recognition performance of parcels by speed and mounting tag material such as thin cans, water bottles, and paper using an implemented postal RFID system to find the best solution for RFID adaptation in postal logistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to discover services in business-driven Web service composition conveniently, accurately, and efficiently, this paper proposes a business process-oriented service discovery approach. In order to link business property with services, this paper proposes a business related description model of operations. Based on the business related relation model proposed in this paper, a relation-driven discovering algorithm for business process-oriented service discovery is presented. Compared with other discovering approach, the proposed discovering approach considers the business relation between operations and can solve the problem of discovering services with meaningful business relation. The experimentation shows the better performance of this algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recommender algorithms have been quite successfully employed in a variety of scenarios from filtering applications to recommendations of movies and books at Amazon.com. However, all these algorithms focus on single item recommendations and do not consider any more complex recommendation structures. This paper explores how semantically rich complex recommendation structures, represented as RDF graphs, can be exchanged and shared in a distributed social network. After presenting a motivating scenario we define several annotation ontologies we use in order to describe context information on the user's desktop and show how our ranking algorithm can exploit this information. We discuss how social distributed networks and interest groups are specified using extended FOAF vocabulary, and how members of these interest groups share semantically rich recommendations in such a network. These recommendations transport shared context as well as ranking information, described in annotation ontologies. We propose an algorithm to compute these rankings which exploits available context information and show how rankings are influenced by the context received from other users as well as by the reputation of the members of the social network with whom the context is exchanged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reports on the development of the formal framework to design strategies for multi-issue non-symmetric meaning negotiations among software agents in a distributed information retrieval system. The advancements of the framework are the following. A resulting strategy compares the contexts of two background domain theories not concept by concept, but the whole context to the other context by accounting the relationships among concepts, the properties, the constraints over properties, and the available instances. It contains the mechanisms for measuring contextual similarity through assessing propositional substitutions and to provide argumentation through generating extra contexts. It uses presuppositions for choosing the best similarity hypotheses and to make the mutual concession to the common sense monotonic. It provides the means to evaluate the possible eagerness to concede through semantic commitments and related notions of knowledgeability and degree of reputation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs), software systems are decomposed into independent units, namely services, that interact with one another through message exchanges. To promote reuse and evolvability, these interactions are explicitly described right from the early phases of the development lifecycle. Up to now, emphasis has been placed on capturing structural aspects of service interactions. Gradually though, the description of behavioral dependencies between service interactions is gaining increasing attention as a means to push forward the SOA vision. This paper deals with the description of these behavioral dependencies during the analysis and design phases. The paper outlines a set of requirements that a language for modeling service interactions at this level should fulfill, and proposes a language whose design is driven by these requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a load balancing method using ring network in the Grid database is proposed. Past research proposed to solve unbalanced load problem. But, past techniques can not be applied as the Grid database has a number of systems and user's request always changes dynamically. The proposed method connects each node having the same replicated data through ring network. If workload overflows in some node, user's request is transferred to a linked node which has the target data. And, this node stops another request from processing until the workload has significantly decreased. Then, to stop request forwarding from a previous node, it changes the link structure by sending a message to the previous node. Through performance evaluation, this paper shows that the proposed method has increased performance and is more suitable to the Grid database than the existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clustering a peer-to-peer (P2P) network into distinct semantic clusters can efficiently improve the search efficiency and enhance scalability of the network. This paper considers P2P systems in which peers employ taxonomy hierarchy to describe the contents of their objects, and presents a taxonomy-based approach for constructing semantics-based super-peer networks. By dynamically clustering peers in taxonomy-based semantic space based on the semantics of their data and organizing the clusters into semantic routing overlays, an efficient query-routing algorithm can be used among these clusters. Preliminary evaluation indicates that our approach achieves a competitive trade-off between search latencies and overheads, and load-balancing among super-peers is well maintained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decentralized structure together with the features of self-organ-ization and fault-tolerance makes peer-to-peer network a promising model for information sharing. However, efficient content-based searching remains a serious challenge of large scale peer-to-peer network. In this paper, we present SemreX, a peer-to-peer system for sharing literature documents. Two main features of SemreX networks are 1) semantic supported literature document retrieval function is provided and 2) peers are self-organized into a semantic overlay according to the similarity of documents which belongs to different topics and queries are routed to semantically similar peers to reduce messages. Experiment results show that SemreX improves search efficiency for literature document retrieval in peer-to-peer network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents, in a nutshell, a unifying framework for conceptually modeling, formally representing, and executing Semantic Web services. We first introduce a conceptual model for representing Semantic Web services and its design principles, then we present a language based on different logical formalisms used to express Semantic Web services that are compliant with our conceptual model. Finally, a high level overview of an execution environment, and its relations to the conceptual model and the language introduced in this paper, are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents WorkflowNet2BPEL4WS a tool to automatically map a graphical workflow model expressed in terms of Workflow Nets (WF-nets) onto BPEL. The Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) has emerged as the de-facto standard for implementing processes and is supported by an increasing number of systems (cf. the IBM WebSphere Choreographer and the Oracle BPEL Process Manager). While being a powerful language, BPEL is difficult to use. Its XML representation is very verbose and only readable for the trained eye. It offers many constructs and typically things can be implemented in many ways, e.g., using links and the flow construct or using sequences and switches. As a result only experienced users are able to select the right construct. Some vendors offer a graphical interface that generates BPEL code. However, the graphical representations are a direct reflection of the BPEL code and not easy to use by end-users. Therefore, we provide a mapping from WF-nets to BPEL. This mapping builds on the rich theory of Petri nets and can also be used to map other languages (e.g., UML, EPC, BPMN, etc.) onto BPEL. To evaluate WorkflowNet2BPEL4WS we used more than 100 processes modeled using Protos (the most widely used business process modeling tool in the Netherlands), automatically converted these into CPN Tools, and applied our mapping. The results of these evaluation are very encouraging and show the applicability of our approach. Keywords: BPEL4WS, Petri nets, workflow management, business process management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computer programming of complex systems is a time consuming effort. Results are often brittle and inflexible. Evolving, self-learning flexible multi-agent systems remain a distant goal. This paper analyzes difficulties toward developing evolving systems and proposes new solutions. The new solutions are inspired by our knowledge of the human mind. The mind develops language and cognitive abilities jointly. Real-time sensor signals and language signals are integrated seamlessly, before signals are understood, at pre-conceptual level. Learning of conceptual contents of the surrounding world depends on language and vice versa. This ability for integrated communication and cognition is a foundation for evolving systems. The paper describes a mathematical technique for such integration: fuzzy dynamic logic and dual cognitive-language models. We briefly discuss relationships between the proposed mathematical technique, working of the mind, applications to understanding-based search engines and evolving multi-agent systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ontologies play a key role in Semantic Web research. A common use of ontologies in Semantic Web is to enrich the current Web resources with some well-defined meaning to enhance the search capabilities of existing web searching systems. This paper reports on how ontologies developed in the EU Semantic Web project SPIRIT are used to support retrieval of documents that are considered to be spatially relevant to users' queries. The query expansion techniques presented in this paper are based on both a domain and a geographical ontology. The proposed techniques are distinguished from conventional ones in that a query is expanded by derivation of its geographical query footprint. The techniques are specially designed to resolve a query (such as castles near Edinburgh) that involves spatial terms (e.g. Edinburgh) and fuzzy spatial relationships (e.g. near) that qualify the spatial terms. Various factors are taken into account to support intelligent expansion of a spatial query, including, spatial terms as encoded in the geographical ontology, non-spatial terms as encoded in the domain ontology, as well as the semantics of the spatial relationships and their context of use. Some experiments have been carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed techniques using sample realistic ontologies. Keywords: Ontology, Semantic Web, Spatial Search, Query Expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information integration and retrieval are useful tasks in many information systems. In these systems, it is far from an easy task to directly integrate information from natural language (NL) sources, because precisely capturing NL semantics is not a trivial issue in the first place. In this paper, we choose the botanical domain to investigate this issue. While most existing systems in this domain support only keyword-based search, this paper introduces an ontology-based approach to process parallel colour descriptions from botanical documents. Based on a semantic model, it takes advantage of ontologies so as to represent the semantics of colour descriptions precisely, to integrate parallel descriptions according to their semantic distances, and to answer colour-related species identification queries. To evaluate this approach, we implement a colour reasoner based on the FaCT-DG Description Logic reasoner, and present some results of our experiments on integrating parallel descriptions and species identification queries. From this highly specialised domain, we learn a set of more general methodological rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BPM system manages increasing number of business processes and the necessity of managing processes during whole process lifecycle from process modeling to process archiving has been emerged. Despite of wide use of the BPM system and the maturing of its technology, the main focus has been mainly on correctly executing process models, and convenient modeling of business processes has not been considered. In this paper, a new method of versioning business processes is developed in order to provide users with an easy modeling interface. Version management of a process enables a history of the process model to be recorded systematically. In our method, an initial version and changes are stored for each process model, and any version can be reconstructed using them. We expect that our method enhances the convenience of process modeling in an environment of huge number of business processes, and thereby assists the process designer. In order to verify the effectiveness of our method, a prototype system is presented in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Workflow management system has been utilized in the web service environment to make mass of different web services work cooperatively. In this paper, the authors propose a novel automatic generation method of web service workflow and build an e-travel system, which could generate travel process automatically according to passenger's requirements. The e-travel system is a dynamic and self-adaptive virtual travel agency, which uses a probability based process-semantic repository as the foundation. This paper will carefully discuss the process-semantic repository and the automatic generation algorithm of web service workflow based on it. At last, some experiments are presented to evaluate the efficiency of the e-travel system with the process-semantic repository. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the normalization problem of XML datasets with DTDs as their schemas. XML documents may contain redundant information due to some anomaly functional dependencies among elements and attributes just as those in relational database schema. The concepts of XML partial functional dependency and transitive functional dependency based on constraint tree model and three XML normal forms: 1xNF, 2xNF and 3xNF, are defined, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because the architecture of an enterprise information system determines relations of its individual parts with its surrounding environment, an effective use of an information system (IS) requires, apart from other things, its painless integration into the enterprise management system. The IS architecture can be seen by different angles. The focus of this paper is in particular on the application architecture of an IS. The reason for analyzing organizational structure modeling approaches and IS architecture is to eliminate common semantic gaps between the languages used by IS users and designers. The architectural design of enterprise IS might be tightly interconnected with enterprise organizational architecture. However, in reality, architectural models of enterprise IS are not fairly understandable for users. For both of these architectural models the orientation on processes often is a joint base. Thus, process approach can prospectively bridge existing gaps between enterprise organizational models and IS architectures. In coherence with that goal the paper presents methodological aspects of how cross-organizational process support can be effectively used for designing the first stage of information system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advancement of Grid and Web service technologies greatly facilitates the aggregation of distributed applications. As the grid workflow generally involves long lasting execution tasks, the quality optimization for grid workflow has much significant importance. In order to accurately define the quality of grid workflow, an extended quality model is proposed which takes account of message compositionality and composition rationality between Web services. Based on the extended quality model, a distributed multi-objective genetic algorithm to optimize the quality of grid workflow is proposed. This approach focuses on the distributed nature of grid environment that consists of autonomous domains and can deal with the global multiple objectives and constrains. The experimental results show that the distributed multi-objective genetic algorithm proposed in this paper can effectively optimize the services selection for grid workflow and has ideal performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we distinguish accurate information from inaccurate or untrustworthy information is a big challenge in the field of information retrieval. This paper discusses trust as a factoid learning problem, which extracts factoid from the content and then rank them according to their likehood as trustworthy ones. Learning methods for performing factoid ranking are proposed in this paper, and then we combine our method with the famous PageRank algorithm to form a more powerful method for retrieval reliable information. Evaluating of the model and the experimental results were presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we proposed two enhanced trust propagation and reputation ranking approaches based on spreading activation model to mitigate the effect of front peer. By front peer it means that these malicious colluding peers always cooperate with others in order to increase their reputation, and then provide misinformation to promote actively malicious peers. One approach is to use adaptive spreading factor to reflect the peer's recommendation ability according to behaviors of the peer's direct/indirect children in trust graph; another way is to investigate the feasibility of propagating distrust to effectively combat front peer. Preliminary simulation results show that those approaches can identify and mitigate the attack of front peer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sensor networks have widespread range of applications these days. New computing locations, new needs and fresh applications have instigated new problems and exciting challenges. The view of sensor network as a distributed database and the sensor node as a table is being widely accepted by the database community. There now exists wide variety of data models and query processing methods to acquire data from sensor networks. This paper identifies a new class of query, named the investigative query, owing to needs of few special applications. Classifying sensor network query processing from communication perspective, defining the new class of query and architecture requirements for processing the same, this paper gives an application of those queries in urban water distribution management and concludes with future directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semantic Web technologies are finally, after a few years of infancy, truly entering the business world to support the growing needs of computer aided information selection and processing. There are already quite well-defined development processes and methods in the software engineering field to handle the construction of large scale and complex enterprise systems, and to reuse knowledge in different software domains patterns are considered to be common practise. Patterns can be described on different levels of abstraction, but the patterns in the focus of this paper are on the software architecture level. In this paper we present a definition of the notion "ontology application pattern", as a special form of software architecture patterns describing an ontology-based system. We also show how such patterns, as well as the description of the pattern instantiations, can be described using a modified architecture description language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Machine-understandable data constitutes the foundation for the Semantic Web. This paper presents a viable way for authoring and annotating Semantic Documents on the desktop. In our approach, the PDF file format is the container for document semantics, being able to store both the content and the related metadata in a single file. To achieve this, we provide a framework (SALT - Semantically Annotated ), that extends the writing environment and supports the creation of metadata for scientific publications. SALT allows the author to create metadata concurrently, i.e. while in the process of writing a document. We discuss some of the requirements which have to be met when developing such a support for creating semantic documents. In addition, we describe a usage scenario to show the feasability and benefit of our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complex relationships, frequently referred to as semantic associa-tions, are the essence of the Semantic Web. Query and retrieval of semantic associations has been an important task in many analytical and scientific activities, such as detecting money laundering and querying for metabolic pathways in biochemistry. We believe that support for semantic path queries should be an integral component of RDF query languages. In this paper, we present SPARQLeR, a novel extension of the SPARQL query language which adds the support for semantic path queries. The proposed extension fits seamlessly within the overall syntax and semantics of SPARQL and allows easy and natural formulation of queries involving a wide variety of regular path patterns in RDF graphs. SPARQLeR's path patterns can capture many low-level details of the queried associations. We also present an implementation of SPARQLeR and its initial performance results. Our implementation is built over BRAHMS, our own RDF storage system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today customers want to use powerful search engines for their huge and increasing content repositories. Full-text-only products with simple result lists are not enough to satisfy this community. Different content sources require different analyzing and indexing strategies and a content-specific result set presentation. There is a lot of research in the field of using semantic web technologies for information retrieval. A wide range of useful standard vocabularies and powerful frameworks have been developed that can be used to gather, transform and store metadata. However, in practise we see a gap between the state of art of information retrieval and customer needs with a defined prise-performance relation. It is a challenge to index a large file server with heterogeneous content annotated with metadata from different vocabularies, to provide an ontology-based navigation, to produce semantic annotated search results, to use faceted browsers as powerful filtering mechanism and do that with an out-of-the-box solution, which is stable, has a good performance and provides a simple way to configure it. With this viewpoint we present in this paper the usage of RDF-based semantic descriptions in an enterprise search solution developed at interface:projects.This paper covers lessons learned from developing a metadata-focused information retrieval system called inter:gator. Especially we discuss the challenges and possible solutions in an enterprise (-wide) search scenario, and show the place where semantic descriptions matter in such a solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Business Process Management System (BPMS) requires transaction management to guarantee reliability of the business process transactions. Several transaction protocols have been suggested for the transaction management, but they are heterogeneous. This heterogeneity interrupts message exchanges among BPMSs which use different transaction protocols, so that the interoperability among the BPMSs cannot be guaranteed. To solve this problem, this paper suggests a semantics-based protocol for business process transactions. The suggested protocol is composed of the static semantics and the operational semantics. In the context of the static semantics, transaction states and messages are defined using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). In the context of the operational semantics, state transitions of business process transactions are defined using the Abstract State Machine (ASM). The suggested approach is expected to enhance interoperability among heterogeneous BPMSs, to increase the understandability for the transaction protocols, and to support automatic transaction execution and systematic transaction monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we introduce a service where ontology summarizes blogs to get useful in the real stores. In ubiquitous computing environment, it would be desired for users to bind their real world situation and useful information on the Internet. However, the current typical device for ubiquitous computing like a cellular phone has a small display, limited operations, and narrow-band network. Therefore, semantics use to extract only the necessary information and services is for the ubiquitous computing. Ubiquitous Metadata Scouter is for the user to scan products barcodes by cameras of cellular phones. It gets the corresponding metadata to the product from the Internet, and collect the related blogs. Then, it analyzes the contents of each blog referring ontologies, and indicates the total reputation. Also, it shows other related products which are much talked about. This paper illustrates each function of this service and our public experiment at the real consumer electronics store and book store in Tokyo since March 2006. It would provide an instant benefit as a semantics usecase in the ubiquitous computing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a map ontology driven approach to natural language traffic information processing, and also describes its evaluation results. Traffic congestion is considered a major urban problem whose solution has long been sought for by engineers and researchers. Recently, the idea of gathering traffic information from mobile users via short message service appears promising. However, the traffic information is difficult to process to achieve a high accuracy because of its direct, indirect and connotative expressions. The proposed map ontology consists of a set of concepts, attributes, relations and constraints on them. The map ontology plays two key roles: 1) a basis for natural language traffic information analysis, and 2) a basis for user query analysis. In this paper we present the major information processing modules and services for mobile users. Experimental results show that the proposed method can improve the traffic information processing accuracy to 93%-95%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, firstly we put forward an AO framework of autonomous ontology, by which a language entity in an ontology is interpreted locally, nevertheless the semantic cooperation is still keeping. Different from various of works based on DDL (Distribute Description Logic [1]), AO framework depends on semantic binding instead of domain-relation to set up relationship between different ontologies so that it avoids damaging the autonomy of each local ontology. Secondly we formalize the basic operations among ontologies, say free-access operation, importing operation, and mapping operation in the AO framework, and give out the proper semantics of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the pi-calculus, this paper proposes a kind of ontology process model used for solving the change implementation and propagation problems of ontology evolution process. This solution is discussed at three levels: the change implementation of single ontology evolution, the push-based synchronization realization for the change propagation in the evolution of multiple dependent ontologies within a single node, and the pull-based synchronization realization for the change propagation of the distributed ontologies evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Defeasible reasoning is a rule-based approach for efficient reasoning with incomplete and conflicting information. Such reasoning is useful in many Semantic Web applications, like policies, business rules, brokering, bargaining and agent negotiations. Nevertheless, defeasible logic is based on solid mathematical formulations and is, thus, not fully comprehensible by end users, who often need graphical trace and explanation mechanisms for the derived conclusions. Directed graphs can assist in confronting this drawback. They are a powerful and flexible tool of information visualization, offering a convenient and comprehensible way of representing relationships between entities. Their applicability, however, is balanced by the fact that it is difficult to associate data of a variety of types with the nodes and the arcs in the graph. In this paper we try to utilize digraphs in the graphical representation of defeasible rules, by exploiting the expressiveness and comprehensibility they offer, but also trying to leverage their major disadvantage, by defining two distinct node types, for rules and atomic formulas, and four distinct connection types for each rule type in defeasible logic and for superiority relationships. The paper also briefly presents a tool that implements this representation methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When there do not exist the directly matched services but exist several services in the repository that can be combined to meet the requirements, how to discovery the multiple services and their composition relations are the critical issues. This paper proposes a composition-oriented and AND/OR graph-based service search method named as CoSA, which can automatically search the composition relation graph in concepts level and composition plan in implement level. Composition operator and domain characteristics are reflected in the heuristic functions. CoSA decreases the service search space and improves the search effectiveness. By unifying the service search and composition problems into one composition-oriented service search problem, CoSA enables the dynamic and automatic service composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automated Web service composition and automated Web service annotation could be seen as complimentary methodologies. While automated annotation allows to extract Web service semantics from existing WSDL documents, automated composition uses this semantics for integrating applications. Therefore applicability of both methodologies is essential for increasing the productivity of information system integration. Although several papers have proposed methods for automated annotation, there is a lack of studies providing analysis of the general structure of Web services. We argue that having an overview of general Web services structures would greatly improve design of new annotation methods. At the same time, progress in automated composition has resulted in several methods for automating Web services orchestration. In this paper we propose application of automated composition also for analysing Web services domain. We identify and analyse some general Web services properties and provide their interpretation in an industrial context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semantic Web makes the automatic discovery and invocation of Web Services become possible. But existing methods perform the capability matching, which is crucial for service discovery, either only according to inputs and outputs (IO), which results in a not very precise matching, or trying to tackle arbitrary services, which results in an undecidable reasoning. In this paper, targeting merely the information-providing type of Web Services, we present a precise and decidable matching method based on the Description Logic reasoner. An outstanding property of our method is that it can determinate the accurate binding of IO between requested and advertised services, which is necessary for automatic invocation yet rarely addressed in previous work. Besides, this paper also describes a useful use case for automatic Web Services discovery and invocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Web Ontology Language (OWL), which is a Description Logic based ontology language, is widely used to represent formal definitions of vocabularies for domain knowledge, especially in the medical domain. The Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL), which is a Rule based ontology language, allows users to take advantage of inferencing of new knowledge from existing OWL knowledge base. In this paper, we describe a use case focused on building SWRL rule base on top of the tooth positional ontology represented in OWL so as to assist a dental decision-making on a missing tooth. Then, we discuss limitations of a current SWRL specification, through our experiences on converting dental knowledge into SWRL rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ontologies are expected in various areas as promising tools to improve communication among people and to achieve interoperability among systems. For communications between different business domains, building an ontology through integrating existing ontologies is more efficient way than building the ontology without them. However, integration of ontologies is very struggling work since languages, domains, and structures of ontologies are different from each other. In this paper, we suggest an Ontology Architecture which solves this problem by providing a systematic framework to classify ontologies from three kinds of viewpoints: language, domain range, constructs. The Ontology Architecture consists of three axes according to the three viewpoints: Ontology Meta Layering axis, Semantic Domain Layering axis, and Ontology Constructs Layering axis. Because three axes in the Ontology Architecture are designed to improve the syntactic and semantic interoperability among ontologies, the integration of ontologies can be readily achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A social networking service can become the basis for the information infrastructure of the future. For that purpose, it is important to extract social networks that reflect actual social networks which users have already had. Providing a simple means for users to register their social relations is also important. We propose a method that combines various approaches to extract social networks. Especially, three kinds of networks are extracted: user-registered Know-link networks; Web-mined Web-link networks; and face-to-face Touch-link networks. This paper describes the combination of social network extraction for an event-participant community. Analyses on the extracted social networks are also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the issue of semantic annotation using horizontal and vertical contexts. Semantic annotation is a task of annotating web pages with ontological information. As information on a web page is usually two-dimensionally laid out, previous semantic annotation methods that view a web page as an ‘object' sequence have limitations. In this paper, to better incorporate the two-dimensional contexts, semantic annotation is formalized as a problem of block detection and text annotation. Block detection is aimed at detecting the text block by making use of context in one dimension and text annotation is aimed at detecting the ‘targeted instance' in the identified blocks using the other dimensional context. A two-stage method for semantic annotation using machine learning has been proposed. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method can significantly outperform the baseline method as well as the sequence-based method for semantic annotation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes an approach to automatically annotate documents for the Euro-Mediterranean Water Information System. This approach uses the citation links and co-citation measure in order to refine annotations extracted from an indexation method. An experiment of this approach with the CiteSeer database is presented and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, many researchers have focused on designing generic and reusable middlewares to overcome the complexity in building adaptive systems. There is a general agreement that the openness provided by component-based approaches coupled with reflection mechanisms is the minimum prerequisites for supporting dynamic reconfigurations. However, this is not sufficient to implement the heart of the adaptation loop namely the decision making on the required reconfiguration that adapts the system in a given context. In this regard, this paper proposes a planning framework that subsumes and automates the adaptation decision-making in reflective component-based adaptive systems. The salient feature of this framework is to model the variability of the adaptive system as a set of variation points at which alternative component compositions and implementations can be selected to form an application configuration. The selection of a feasible configuration in a given context is based on the concept of component wise utility functions that estimates the user benefit of including a specific implementation alternative at a variation point in the composition. We show that the selection problem can be modelled as a multi constraint shortest path that can be found in polynomial time. Our approach is validated through a real world example implementing adaptive scenarios in the domain of mobile computing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes the use of Selective Acknowledgements (SACK) from clients to services as a method for reducing the memory footprint of replicated services. The paper discusses the general concept of SACK in replicated services and presents a specific implementation of SACK for an existing replication infrastructure. Performance measurements exhibiting the effectiveness of SACK are also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Querying about the time-varying locations of moving objects is particularly cumbersome in environments composed of a very large number of distributed spatio-temporal database servers. In particular, searching for a specific object can require to visit each server. In this paper we propose a strategy to avoid such an exhaustive search that is based on the use of a centralized index, called meta-index, which is the entry point for spatio-temporal search queries. This index allows a software agent to determine a search plan for visiting the most likely servers to contain the target object. An important issue for large and dynamic distributed servers systems is to keep the meta-index as up-to-date as possible with the real system. This paper defines and compares two different strategies for maintaining properly updated the meta-index: crawling, where the centralized system that keeps the index controls itself the updating process, and harvesting, where each distributed database server autonomously transfers data directly into the central index system. Both strategies were implemented and compared by using discrete-event simulators with demanding synthetic spatio-temporal data. The results show that crawling has better performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data grid is developed to facilitate sharing data and resources located in different parts of the world. The major barrier to support fast data access in a data grid is the high latency of wide area networks and the Internet. Data replication is adopted to improve data access performance. When different sites hold replicas, there are significant benefits while selecting the best replica. In this paper, we propose a new replica selection strategy based on classification techniques. In this strategy the replica selection problem is regarded as a classification problem. The data transfer history is utilized to help predicting the best site holding the replica. The adoption of the switch mechanism of replica selection model avoids a waste of time for inaccurate classification results. In this paper, we study and simulate KNN and SVM methods for different file access patterns and compare results with the traditional replica catalog model. The results show that our replica selection model outperforms the traditional one for certain file access requests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evolutionary Algorithms (EA) are well suited for solving optimisation problems, especially NP-complete problems. This paper presents the application of the Evolutionary Algorithm GLEAM ( General Learning and Evolutionary Algorithm and Method) in the field of grid computing. Here, grid resources like computing power, software, or storage have to be allocated to jobs that are running in heterogeneous computing environments. The problem is similar to industrial resource scheduling, but has additional characteristics like co-scheduling and high dynamics within the resource pool and the set of requesting jobs. The paper describes the deployment of GLEAM in the global optimising grid resource broker GORBA (Global Optimising Resource Broker and Allocator) and the first promising results in a grid simulation environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we introduce a mobile services environment, namely SMOP, in which semantic web based service capability matching and location-aware information gathering are both used to develop mobile applications. Domain independency and support on semantic matching in mobile service capabilities are the innovative features of the proposed environment. Built-in semantic matching engine of the environment provides the addition of new service domain ontologies which is critical in terms of system extensibility. Therefore the environment is generic in terms of developing various mobile applications and provides most relevant services for mobile users by applying semantic capability matching in service lookups. GPS (Global Positioning System) and map service utilization cause to find near services in addition to capability relevancy. The software architecture and system extensibility support of the environment are discussed in the paper. The real life implementation of the environment for the estate domain is also given as a case study in the evaluation section of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to multisource heterogeneous data is a fundamental research issue in a variety of contexts, including syndicated data retrieval, Web service selection and cooperative information systems. In these variable contexts, the brokering approach to multisource data access provides greater flexibility with respect to the more traditional data integration. The general brokering model assumes that the broker is submitted a query and has the responsibility to optimize the response along specified parameters such as time efficiency, completeness, and consistency. This paper takes a data quality perspective on data brokering and considers data accuracy. Furthermore, the data quality literature assumes that metadata are associated with data to describe their quality. Metadata support data selection without viewing and assessing data directly. On the contrary, previous brokering approaches view data. This paper compares previous results with those of a brokering approach based on metadata which assumes that actual data are transparent to the broker. Testing results comparing the delta between the data visibility and transparency approaches to data brokering are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Process-aware information systems have to be frequently adapted due to business process changes. One important challenge not adequately addressed so far concerns the evolution of process choreographies, i.e., the change of interactions between partner processes in a cross-organizational setting. If respective modifications are applied in an uncontrolled manner, inconsistencies or errors might occur in the sequel. In particular, modifications of private processes performed by a single party may affect the implementation of the private processes of partners as well. In this paper we present the DYCHOR (DYnamic CHOReographies) framework which allows process engineers to detect how changes of private processes may affect related public views and - if so - how they can be propagated to the public and private processes of partners. In particular, DYCHOR exploits the semantics of the applied changes in order to automatically determine the adaptations necessary for the partner processes. Altogether our framework provides an important contribution towards the realization of adaptive, cross-organizational processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many communities need to organize and structure data to improve their utilization and sharing. Much research has been focused on this problem. Many solutions are based on a Terminological and Ontological Resource (TOR) which represents the domain knowledge for a given application. However TORs are often designed without taking into account heterogeneous data from specific resources. For example, in the biomedical domain, these sources may be medical reports, bibliographical resources or biological data extracted from GOA, Gene Ontology or KEGG. This paper presents an integrated visual environment for knowledge engineering. It integrates heterogeneous data from domain databases. Relevant concepts and relations are thus extracted from data resources, using several analysis and treatment processes. The resulting ontology embryo is visualized through a user friendly adaptive interface displaying a knowledge map. The experiments and evaluations dealt with in this paper concern biological data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]