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This paper presents a case study for the development of an integration framework in the area of collaborative work environments. This framework is based on REST Web services, and has been designed and implemented as part of the Laboranova European project.

In this report an unsupervised and knowledge-based algorithm for concept sense disambiguation in concept maps is proposed. Concept maps are graphical tools for organizing and representing knowledge, based on concepts and labeled interconnections among them, forming propositions. The disambiguation process is carried combining Magnini’s domain, context information and the gloss. It’s supported in the Spanish WordNet lexical database and the lexical relations hypernyms-hyponyms, meronyms-holonyms and instance.

This document contains requirements and specifications for the data-storage layer of Laboranova’s integration architecture and for the data structure of the idea concept. This document presents technology choices for the implementation of the data-storage layer in a way that facilitates composing the different sub-projects (SPs) of Laboranova into a modular collaborative environment. The idea concept is central in Laboranova and working with ideas involves several aspects: • a conceptualisation of what an idea is; • data structures for ideas (Representations based on these data structures are passed among the software systems which make up the Laboranova environment.); • the integration of idea’s manipulation carried out by the different Laboranova’s tools. This document focuses on the data structures, taking into account the requirements of the visualization tool and the results obtained from a questionnaire (‘Laboranova Data Storage Questionnaire’) which was conducted in May 2007 among Laboranova’s partners. Such questionnaire was intended to gather requirements on technology and integration choices which affect some aspects of the idea data structure. This document also takes into account the user requirements gathered in D6.1.1 (‘Report on deployment scenarios and requirements’, version 1.0), which concern: • Idea management: archival and retrieval of ideas • Versioning: branching; vertical expansion of an idea; originating new ideas changing a first one • Relations between ideas: idea clustering • Flexibility and transparency: integrative design, providing a modular user environment • Integration with current practices: connecting Laboranova with previous tools and processes This document is divided in the following parts: • description of the integration architecture to frame this document with the context of Laboranova and the SPs that compose it; • overall description of the data layer; • conceptualization of the idea data structure by: A) giving a compilation of requirements in defining the idea concept (how an idea could be represented, which elements it should contain, how it should work…); B) presenting a data structure to represent an idea.

The work described in this document has been carried out in the frame of the @LIS TechNET project, which aims to create a live network across Europe and Latin America as a new, virtual, and interactive learning environment, based on software-agent technology. The purpose of this document is to describe a visualization tool developed for the TechNET's planning system. As background, this document also briefly describes what mixed-initiative planning is.

El desarrollo y utilización de las ontologías, se está viendo cada vez más en ascenso, demostrando con ello su gran utilidad en los contextos en los que se necesite formalizar y compartir un conocimiento. Cada vez más se está requiriendo la creación de un ambiente que facilite la colaboración en el trabajo con las ontologías y hoy no están creadas las condiciones para esto. El proceso de elaboración de ontologías, las herramientas disponibles para su obtención y mantenimiento y los lenguajes de especificación que se están utilizando, tienen un alto grado de complejidad para su interpretación y amplia utilización por parte de personas no son expertas en el tema. Esto sugiere la utilización de herramientas más simple, que vinculada con las ontologías pueda ser comprendida y mejor aprovechadas por el hombre y que a su vez mantenga las capacidades para su interpretación computacionalmente. Los mapas conceptuales son una herramienta muy intuitiva para la representación del conocimiento que posee el hombre. Las facilidades que brinda en su elaboración, flexibilidad y estructura, lo han convertido en una herramienta muy útil para la gestión del conocimiento y la colaboración. La flexibilidad de los mapas conceptuales, lo convierte en una herramienta muy poco formal, a diferencia de las ontologías, sin embargo, se considera que esto no impide pensar que se puedan integrar con las ontologías y ser utilizados como un lenguaje de representación gráfico conceptual de estas. En esta investigación se propone la definición de un modelo que permite la integración entre las ontologías y los mapas conceptuales. El Modelo Unificado, como se le ha llamado, es resultado de la unificación de algunas características resultantes de análisis realizados a diferentes formas de representación del conocimiento de la Inteligencia Artificial y los mapas conceptuales. La características identificadas e integradas generó un conjunto de criterios que fundamentan la integración propuesta en ontologías y mapas conceptuales. Se proponen un conjunto de métodos que permiten la transformación del conocimiento representado en un mapa conceptual a OWL y viceversa, como implementación de este modelo. Son propuestas algunas especificaciones sintácticas y el uso de EuroWordnet en los procesos de transformación y se describen algunos ejemplos para un mayor entendimiento del modelo propuesto.

Web services have attracted attention as a possible solution to share knowledge and application logic among different heterogeneous agents. A classic approach to this subject is using SOAP, a W3C protocol aimed to exchange structured information. The Web Services Interoperability organization (WS-I), defines a set of extensions, commonly called WS-*, which further enhance this knowledge exchange defining mechanisms and functionalities such as security, addressability or service composition. This thesis explores a relatively new alternative approach to the SOAP/WS-I stack: REST-based Web services. The acronym REST stands for Representational state transfer; this basically means that each unique URL is a representation of some object. You can get the contents of that object using an HTTP GET; you then might use a POST, PUT or DELETE to modify the object (in practice most of the services use a POST for this). All of Yahoo’s Web services use REST, including Flickr; del.icio.us API uses it; pubsub [http://www.pubsub.com/], Bloglines [http://www.bloglines.com/], Technorati [http://technorati.com/] and both, eBay and Amazon, have Web services for both REST and SOAP. Google seems to be consistent in implementing their Web services to use SOAP, with the exception of Blogger, which uses XML-RPC. The companies and organization that are using REST APIs have not been around for very long, and their APIs came out in the last seven years mostly. So REST is a new way to create and integrate Web services, whose main advantages are: being lightweight (not a lot of extra xml mark-up), human readable results, easy to build services (no toolkits required). Although REST is still generating discussion about possible implementations, and different proposals have been put forward, it provides enough mechanisms to allow knowledge-representations sharing among heterogeneous intelligent services. In this thesis, a novel way to integrate intelligent Web-services is designed and developed, and the resulting system is deployed in the domain of recommendation. Through a mashup, how different services are integrated and how a simple recommendation system consumes data coming from them to provide relevant information to users is presented. Part of this work has been carried out within the context of the Laboranova European project [http://www.laboranova.com/], and has been deployed to integrate a set of applications to create a virtual space to support innovation processes.