Search

Summary: Providing historical information to deal with knowledge loss about a scientific experiment has been the focus of some several researches. However, computational support for large‐scale scientific experiments is still incipient and is considered one of e‐science's greatest challenges. In this vein, providing provenance information to a scientist is part of these challenges. Provenance information helps to assure the reliability and reproducibility of experiments. Therefore, this work has as its main objective to present a new ontology—Open Provenance Model Ontology‐e (OPMO‐e)—which is part of an architecture, named SciProvMiner. Open Provenance Model Ontology‐e is a new ontology that encompasses both prospective and retrospective provenance. SciProvMiner captures the provenance and implements all inference and completeness rules defined by Open Provenance Model to provide provenance information beyond those already established. We hypothesize that the capture and management of provenance data will provide scientists with implicit strategical information about the experiment through OPMO‐e. Case studies were carried out to evaluate OPMO‐e use considering SciProvMiner. The obtained results revealed that the use of the proposed ontology and SciProvMiner can enhance scientist's knowledge about an experiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Eletrônica de Sistemas de Informação is the property of Revista Electronica de Sistemas de Informacao and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Provenance determines the origin of the data by tracing and recording the actions that are performed on the data. Therefore, provenance is used in many fields to ensure the reliability and quality of data. In this work, provenance information is used to meet the security needs in information systems. For this purpose, a domain-independent provenance model is proposed. The proposed provenance model is based on the Open Provenance Model and Semantic Web technologies. The goal of the proposed provenance model is to integrate the provenance and security concepts in order to detect privacy violations by querying the provenance data. In order to evaluate the proposed provenance model, we illustrated our domain-independent model by integrating it with an infectious disease domain and implemented the Healthcare Provenance Information System. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) present factual information about domains of interest. They are used in a wide variety of applications and in different domains, serving as powerful backbones for organizing and extracting knowledge from complex data. In both industry and academia, a variety of platforms have been proposed for managing Knowledge Graphs. To use the full potential of KGs within these platforms, it is essential to have proper provenance management to understand where certain information in a KG stems from. This plays an important role in increasing trust and supporting open science principles. It enables reproducibility and updatability of KGs. In this paper, we propose a framework for provenance management of KG generation within a web portal. We present how our framework captures, stores, and retrieves provenance information. Our provenance representation is aligned with the standardized W3C Provenance Ontology. Through our framework, we can rerun the KG generation process over the same or different source data. With this, we support four applications: reproducibility, altered rerun, undo operation, and provenance retrieval. In summary, our framework aligns with the core principles of open science. By promoting transparency and reproducibility, it enhances the reliability and trustworthiness of research outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provenance, i.e., the origin or source of something, is becoming an important concern, since it offers the means to verify data products, to infer their quality, to analyse the processes that led to them, and to decide whether they can be trusted. For instance, provenance enables the reproducibility of scientific results; provenance is necessary to track attribution and credit in curated databases; and, it is essential for reasoners to make trust judgements about the information they use over the Semantic Web. As the Web allows information sharing, discovery, aggregation, filtering and flow in an unprecedented manner, it also becomes very difficult to identify, reliably, the original source that produced an information item on the Web. Since the emerging use of provenance in niche applications is undoubtedly demonstrating the benefits of provenance, this monograph contends that provenance can and should reliably be tracked and exploited on the Web, and investigates the necessary foundations to achieve such a vision. Multiple data sources have been used to compile the largest bibliographical database on provenance so far. This large corpus permits the analysis of emerging trends in the research community. Specifically, the CiteSpace tool identifies clusters of papers that constitute research fronts, from which characteristics are extracted to structure a foundational framework for provenance on the Web. Such an endeavour requires a multi-disciplinary approach, since it requires contributions from many computer science sub-disciplines, but also other non-technical fields given the human challenge that is anticipated. To develop such a vision, it is necessary to provide a definition of provenance that applies to the Web context. A conceptual definition of provenance is expressed in terms of processes, and is shown to generalise various definitions of provenance commonly encountered. Furthermore, by bringing realistic distributed systems assumptions, this definition is refined as a query over assertions made by applications. Given that the majority of work on provenance has been undertaken by the database, workflow and e-science communities, some of their work is reviewed, contrasting approaches, and focusing on important topics believed to be crucial for bringing provenance to the Web, such as abstraction, collections, storage, queries, workflow evolution, semantics and activities involving human interactions. However, provenance approaches developed in the context of databases and workflows essentially deal with closed systems. By that, it is meant that workflow or database management systems are in full control of the data they manage, and track their provenance within their own scope, but not beyond. In the context of the Web, a broader approach is required by which chunks of provenance representation can be brought together to describe the provenance of information flowing across multiple systems. For this purpose, this monograph puts forward the Open Provenance Vision, which is an approach that consists of controlled vocabulary, serialisation formats and interfaces to allow the provenance of individual systems to be expressed, connected in a coherent fashion, and queried seamlessly. In this context, the Open Provenance Model is an emerging community-driven representation of provenance, which has been actively used by some 20 teams to exchange provenance information, in line with the Open Provenance Vision. After identifying an open approach and a model for provenance, techniques to expose provenance over the Web are investigated. In particular, Semantic Web technologies are discussed since they have been successfully exploited to express, query and reason over provenance. Symmetrically, Semantic Web technologies such as RDF, underpinning the Linked Data effort, are analysed since they offer their own difficulties with respect to provenance. A powerful argument for provenance is that it can help make systems transparent, so that it becomes possible to determine whether a particular use of information is appropriate under a set of rules. Such capability helps make systems and information accountable. To offer accountability, provenance itself must be authentic, and rely on security approaches, which are described in the monograph. This is then followed by systems where provenance is the basis of an auditing mechanism to check past processes against rules or regulations. In practice, not all users want to check and audit provenance, instead, they may rely on measures of quality or trust; hence, emerging provenance-based approaches to compute trust and quality of data are reviewed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provenanc refers to the origin of information. Therefore, provenance is the metadata that record the history of data. As provenance is the derivation history of an object starting from its original source, the provenance information is used to analyse processes that are performed on an object and to track by whom these processes are performed. Thus, provenance shows the trustworthiness and quality of data. In a provenance management system in order to verify the trustworthy of provenance information, security needs must be also fulfilled. In this work, an ontology‐based privacy‐aware provenance management model is proposed. The proposed model is based on the Open Provenance Model, which is a common model for provenance. The proposed model aims to detect privacy violations, to reduce privacy risks by using permissions and prohibitions, and also to query the provenance data. The proposed model is implemented with Semantic Web technologies and demonstrated for the health care domain in order to preserve patients' privacy. Also, an infectious disease ontology and a vaccination ontology are integrated to the system in order to track the patients' vaccination history, to improve the quality of medical processes, the reliability of medical data, and the decision making in the health care domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Reproducibility is a crucial property of data since it allows users to understand and verify how data were derived, and therefore allows them to put their trust in such data. Reproducibility is essential for science, because the reproducibility of experimental results is a tenet of the scientific method, but reproducibility is also beneficial in many other fields, including automated decision making, visualization, and automated data feeds. To achieve the vision of reproducibility, the workflow-based community has strongly advocated the use of provenance as an underpinning mechanism for reproducibility, since a rich representation of provenance allows steps to be reproduced and all intermediary and final results checked and validated. Concurrently, multiple ontology-based representations of provenance have been devised, to be able to describe past computations, uniformly across a variety of technologies. However, such Semantic Web representations of provenance do not have any formal link with execution. Even assuming a faithful and non-malicious environment, how can we claim that an ontology-based representation of provenance enables reproducibility, since it has not been given any execution semantics, and therefore has no formal way of expressing the reproduction of computations? This is the problem that this paper tackles by defining a denotational semantics for the Open Provenance Model, which is referred to as the reproducibility semantics. This semantics is used to implement a reproducibility service, leveraging multiple Semantic Web technologies, and offering a variety of reproducibility approaches, found in the literature. A series of empirical experiments were designed to exhibit the range of reproducibility capabilities of our approach; in particular, we demonstrate the ability to reproduce computations involving multiple technologies, as is commonly found on the Web. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Scientists are becoming increasingly dependent upon resources available through the Internet including, for example, datasets and computational modelling services, which are changing the way they conduct their research activities. This paper investigates the use of workflow tools enhanced with semantics to facilitate the design, execution, analysis and interpretation of workflow experiments and exploratory studies. Current workflow technologies do not incorporate any representation of experimental constraints and goals, which we refer to in this paper as scientist’s intent. This paper proposes an abstract model of intent based on the Open Provenance Model (OPM) specification. To realise this model a framework based upon a number of Semantic Web technologies has been developed, including the OWL ontology language and the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL). Through the use of social simulation case studies the paper illustrates the benefits of using this framework in terms of workflow monitoring, workflow provenance and annotation of experimental results. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Background: The advancement of science and technologies play an immense role in the way scientific experiments are being conducted. Understanding how experiments are performed and how results are derived has become significantly more complex with the recent explosive growth of heterogeneous research data and methods. Therefore, it is important that the provenance of results is tracked, described, and managed throughout the research lifecycle starting from the beginning of an experiment to its end to ensure reproducibility of results described in publications. However, there is a lack of interoperable representation of end-to-end provenance of scientific experiments that interlinks data, processing steps, and results from an experiment's computational and non-computational processes. Results: We present the "REPRODUCE-ME" data model and ontology to describe the end-to-end provenance of scientific experiments by extending existing standards in the semantic web. The ontology brings together different aspects of the provenance of scientific studies by interlinking non-computational data and steps with computational data and steps to achieve understandability and reproducibility. We explain the important classes and properties of the ontology and how they are mapped to existing ontologies like PROV-O and P-Plan. The ontology is evaluated by answering competency questions over the knowledge base of scientific experiments consisting of computational and non-computational data and steps. Conclusion: We have designed and developed an interoperable way to represent the complete path of a scientific experiment consisting of computational and non-computational steps. We have applied and evaluated our approach to a set of scientific experiments in different subject domains like computational science, biological imaging, and microscopy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data provenance has evolved from a niche topic to a mainstream area of research in databases and other research communities. This article gives a comprehensive introduction to data provenance. The main focus is on provenance in the context of databases. However, it will be insightful to also consider connections to related research in programming languages, software engineering, semantic web, formal logic, and other communities. The target audience are researchers and practitioners that want to gain a solid understanding of data provenance and the state-of-the-art in this research area. The article only assumes that the reader has a basic understanding of database concepts, but not necessarily any prior exposure to provenance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monitoring continuously captured surveillance videos is a challenging and time consuming task. To assist this issue, a new framework is introduced that applies anomaly detection, semantic annotation and provides a concept-based search interface. In particular, novel optical flow based features are used for abnormal crowd behaviour detection. Then, processed surveillance videos are annotated using a new semantic metadata model based on multimedia standards using Semantic Web technologies. In this way, globally inter-operable metadata about abnormal crowd behaviours are generated. Finally, for the first time, based on crowd behaviours, a novel concept-based semantic search interface is proposed. In the proposed interface, along with search results (video segments), statistical data about crowd behaviours are also presented. With extensive user studies, it is demonstrated that the proposed concept-based semantic search interface enables efficient search and analysis of abnormal crowd behaviours. Although there are existing works to achieve (a) crowd anomaly detection, (b) semantic annotation and (c) semantic search interface, none of the existing works combine these three system components in a novel framework like the one proposed in this paper. In each system component, we introduce contributions to the field as well as use the Semantic Web technologies to combine and standardize output of different system components; output of the anomaly detection is automatically annotated with metadata and stored to a semantic database. When continuous surveillance videos are processed, only the semantic database is updated. Finally, the user interface queries the updated database for searching/analyzing surveillance videos without changing any coding. Thus, the framework supports re-usability. This paper explains and evaluates different components of the framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the importance of social semantic web, which is a combination of the semantic web and the social web, has been increasing with active data creation and sharing through the Web. In this paper, we proposes a provenance based trust evaluation scheme of multimedia documents by extending the PROV data model in social semantic web. The proposed scheme extends the PROV data model of W3C to manage the provenance and evaluate the trust of multimedia documents in a social semantic web environment. The trust of multimedia documents is evaluated by considering the agent trust, source document trust, and reputation score of current document. The evaluated trust is managed as provenance information, and when users request a query, the query results are generated by considering trust. To verify the validity of the proposed scheme, the trust is compared and evaluated using SPARQL queries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data workflow systems (DWFSs) enable bioinformatics researchers to combine components for data access and data analytics, and to share the final data analytics approach with their collaborators. Increasingly, such systems have to cope with large-scale data, such as full genomes (about 200 GB each), public fact repositories (about 100 TB of data) and 3D imaging data at even larger scales. As moving the data becomes cumbersome, the DWFS needs to embed its processes into a cloud infrastructure, where the data are already hosted. As the standardized public data play an increasingly important role, the DWFS needs to comply with Semantic Web technologies. This advancement to DWFS would reduce overhead costs and accelerate the progress in bioinformatics research based on large-scale data and public resources, as researchers would require less specialized IT knowledge for the implementation. Furthermore, the high data growth rates in bioinformatics research drive the demand for parallel and distributed computing, which then imposes a need for scalability and high-throughput capabilities onto the DWFS. As a result, requirements for data sharing and access to public knowledge bases suggest that compliance of the DWFS with Semantic Web standards is necessary. In this article, we will analyze the existing DWFS with regard to their capabilities toward public open data use as well as large-scale computational and human interface requirements. We untangle the parameters for selecting a preferable solution for bioinformatics research with particular consideration to using cloud services and Semantic Web technologies. Our analysis leads to research guidelines and recommendations toward the development of future DWFS for the bioinformatics research community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ingénierie des Systèmes d'Information is the property of International Information & Engineering Technology Association (IIETA) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The rise of the Semantic Web has provided cultural heritage researchers and practitioners with several tools for providing semantically rich representations and interoperability of cultural heritage collections. Although indeed offering a lot of advantages, these tools, which come mostly in the form of ontologies and related vocabularies, do not provide a conceptual model for capturing contextual and environmental dependencies, contributing to long-term digital preservation. This paper presents one of the key outcomes of the PERICLES FP7 project, the Linked Resource Model, for modelling dependencies as a set of evolving linked resources. The adoption of the proposed model and the consistency of its representation are evaluated via a specific instantiation involving the domain of digital video art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes current research into the supply of spatial data to the end user in as close to real time as possible via the World Wide Web. The Spatial Data Infrastructure paradigm has been discussed since the early 1990s. The concept has evolved significantly since then but has almost always examined data from the perspective of the supplier. It has been a supplier driven focus rather than a user driven focus. The current research being conducted is making a paradigm shift and looking at the supply of spatial data as a supply chain, similar to a manufacturing supply chain in which users play a significant part. A comprehensive consultation process took place within Australia and New Zealand incorporating a large number of stakeholders. Three research projects that have arisen from this consultation process are examining Spatial Data Supply Chains within Australia and New Zealand and are discussed within this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose -- This paper aims to introduce a transformation engine which can be used to convert an existing institutional repository installation into a Linked Open Data repository. Design/methodology/approach -- The authors describe how the data that exist in a DSpace repository can be semantically annotated to serve as a Semantic Web (meta)data repository. Findings -- The authors present a non-intrusive, standards-compliant approach that can run alongside with current practices, while incorporating state-of-the art methodologies. Originality/value -- Also, they propose a set of mappings between domain vocabularies that can be (re)used towards this goal, thus offering an approach that covers both the technical and semantic aspects of the procedure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Reporting and sharing experimental metadata- such as the experimental design, characteristics of the samples, and procedures applied, along with the analysis results, in a standardised manner ensures that datasets are comprehensible and, in principle, reproducible, comparable and reusable. Furthermore, sharing datasets in formats designed for consumption by humans and machines will also maximize their use. The Investigation/Study/ Assay (ISA) open source metadata tracking framework facilitates standards-compliant collection, curation, visualization, storage and sharing of datasets, leveraging on other platforms to enable analysis and publication. The ISA software suite includes several components used in increasingly diverse set of life science and biomedical domains; it is underpinned by a general-purpose format, ISA-Tab, and conversions exist into formats required by public repositories. While ISA-Tab works well mainly as a human readable format, we have also implemented a linked data approach to semantically define the ISA-Tab syntax. Results: We present a semantic web representation of the ISA-Tab syntax that complements ISA-Tab's syntactic interoperability with semantic interoperability. We introduce the linkedISA conversion tool from ISA-Tab to the Resource Description Framework (RDF), supporting mappings from the ISA syntax to multiple community-defined, open ontologies and capitalising on user-provided ontology annotations in the experimental metadata. We describe insights of the implementation and how annotations can be expanded driven by the metadata. We applied the conversion tool as part of Bio-GraphIIn, a web-based application supporting integration of the semantically-rich experimental descriptions. Designed in a user-friendly manner, the Bio-GraphIIn interface hides most of the complexities to the users, exposing a familiar tabular view of the experimental description to allow seamless interaction with the RDF representation, and visualising descriptors to drive the query over the semantic representation of the experimental design. In addition, we defined queries over the linkedISA RDF representation and demonstrated its use over the linkedISA conversion of datasets from Nature' Scientific Data online publication. Conclusions: Our linked data approach has allowed us to: 1) make the ISA-Tab semantics explicit and machineprocessable, 2) exploit the existing ontology-based annotations in the ISA-Tab experimental descriptions, 3) augment the ISA-Tab syntax with new descriptive elements, 4) visualise and query elements related to the experimental design. Reasoning over ISA-Tab metadata and associated data will facilitate data integration and knowledge discovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Service-oriented architecture (SOA), workflow, the Semantic Web, and Grid computing are key enabling information technologies in the development of increasingly sophisticated e-Science infrastructures and application platforms. While the emergence of Cloud computing as a new computing paradigm has provided new directions and opportunities for e-Science infrastructure development, it also presents some challenges. Scientific research is increasingly finding that it is difficult to handle 'big data' using traditional data processing techniques. Such challenges demonstrate the need for a comprehensive analysis on using the above-mentioned informatics techniques to develop appropriate e-Science infrastructure and platforms in the context of Cloud computing. This survey paper describes recent research advances in applying informatics techniques to facilitate scientific research particularly from the Cloud computing perspective. Our particular contributions include identifying associated research challenges and opportunities, presenting lessons learned, and describing our future vision for applying Cloud computing to e-Science. We believe our research findings can help indicate the future trend of e-Science, and can inform funding and research directions in how to more appropriately employ computing technologies in scientific research. We point out the open research issues hoping to spark new development and innovation in the e-Science field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Provenance is a critical ingredient for establishing trust of published scientific content. This is true whether we are considering a data set, a computational workflow, a peer-reviewed publication or a simple scientific claim with supportive evidence. Existing vocabularies such as Dublin Core Terms (DC Terms) and the W3C Provenance Ontology (PROV-O) are domain-independent and general-purpose and they allow and encourage for extensions to cover more specific needs. In particular, to track authoring and versioning information of web resources, PROV-O provides a basic methodology but not any specific classes and properties for identifying or distinguishing between the various roles assumed by agents manipulating digital artifacts, such as author, contributor and curator. Results We present the Provenance, Authoring and Versioning ontology (PAV, namespace http://purl.org/pav/): a lightweight ontology for capturing "just enough" descriptions essential for tracking the provenance, authoring and versioning of web resources. We argue that such descriptions are essential for digital scientific content. PAV distinguishes between contributors, authors and curators of content and creators of representations in addition to the provenance of originating resources that have been accessed, transformed and consumed. We explore five projects (and communities) that have adopted PAV illustrating their usage through concrete examples. Moreover, we present mappings that show how PAV extends the W3C PROV-O ontology to support broader interoperability. Method The initial design of the PAV ontology was driven by requirements from the AlzSWAN project with further requirements incorporated later from other projects detailed in this paper. The authors strived to keep PAV lightweight and compact by including only those terms that have demonstrated to be pragmatically useful in existing applications, and by recommending terms from existing ontologies when plausible. Discussion We analyze and compare PAV with related approaches, namely Provenance Vocabulary (PRV), DC Terms and BIBFRAME. We identify similarities and analyze differences between those vocabularies and PAV, outlining strengths and weaknesses of our proposed model. We specify SKOS mappings that align PAV with DC Terms. We conclude the paper with general remarks on the applicability of PAV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collection of volunteered geographic information (VGI) is a user-generated content practice to engage a large number of citizens to collectively create geospatial data. Based on the advent of Web 2.0 and the recent increasing popularity of crowdsourcing approaches, VGI has gained the interest of the geoscience community, because of its ability to complement the collection of geographic information coming from traditional sensing technologies. However, the involvement of a crowd of volunteers, potentially untrained or nonexperts, implies that VGI can be of varying quality. Tracing VGI provenance enables the recording of the collection activity; the information about who gathered what, where and when can then be employed to judge the VGI quality. In this paper, we focus on the adoption of a provenance-based Human Computation approach to aggregate and consolidate VGI. We discuss the representation, inference and publication of Human Computation VGI and its provenance. As more and more of those community-based data collection efforts happen on the Web, we propose the adoption of Semantic Web technologies, through employing an ontological formulation to capture provenance and by following Linked Data principles to publish provenance data on the Web. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – Linked data is gaining great interest in the cultural heritage domain as a new way for publishing, sharing and consuming data. The paper aims to provide a detailed method and MARiMbA a tool for publishing linked data out of library catalogues in the MARC 21 format, along with their application to the catalogue of the National Library of Spain in the datos.bne.es project. Design/methodology/approach – First, the background of the case study is introduced. Second, the method and process of its application are described. Third, each of the activities and tasks are defined and a discussion of their application to the case study is provided. Findings – The paper shows that the FRBR model can be applied to MARC 21 records following linked data best practices, librarians can successfully participate in the process of linked data generation following a systematic method, and data sources quality can be improved as a result of the process. Originality/value – The paper proposes a detailed method for publishing and linking linked data from MARC 21 records, provides practical examples, and discusses the main issues found in the application to a real case. Also, it proposes the integration of a data curation activity and the participation of librarians in the linked data generation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regulations affect every aspect of our lives. Compliance with the regulations impacts citizens and businesses similarly: they have to find their rights and obligations in the complex legal environment. The situation is more complex when languages and time versions of regulations should be considered. To propose a solution to these demands, we present a semantic enrichment approach which aims at (1) decreasing the ambiguousness of legal texts, (2) increasing the probability of finding the relevant legal materials, and (3) utilizing the application of legal reasoners. Our approach is also implemented both as a service for citizens and businesses and as a modeling environment for legal drafters. To evaluate the usefulness of the approach, a case study was carried out in a large organization and applied to corporate regulations and Hungarian laws. The results suggest this approach can support the previous aims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Big Data, Linked Data, Smart Dust, Digital Earth, and e-Science are just some of the names for research trends that surfaced over the last years. While all of them address different visions and needs, they share a common theme: How do we manage massive amounts of heterogeneous data, derive knowledge out of them instead of drowning in information, and how do we make our findings reproducible and reusable by others? In a network of knowledge, topics span across scientific disciplines and the idea of domain ontologies as common agreements seems like an illusion. In this work, we argue that these trends require a radical paradigm shift in ontology engineering away from a small number of authoritative, global ontologies developed top-down, to a high number of local ontologies that are driven by application needs and developed bottom-up out of observation data. Similarly as the early Web was replaced by a social Web in which volunteers produce data instead of purely consuming it, the next generation of knowledge infrastructures has to enable users to become knowledge engineers themselves. Surprisingly, existing ontology engineering frameworks are not well suited for this new perspective. Hence, we propose an observation-driven ontology engineering framework, show how its layers can be realized using specific methodologies, and relate the framework to existing work on geo-ontologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper elaborates on the problem of modeling provenance for both physical and digital objects. In particular it discusses provenance according to OAIS (ISO 14721:2003) and how it relates with the conceptualization of CIDOC CRM ontology (ISO 21127:2006). Subsequently it introduces an extension of the CIDOC CRM ontology, able to capture the modeling and the query requirements regarding the provenance of digital objects. Over this extension the paper provides a number of indicative examples of modeling provenance in various domains. Subsequently, it introduces a number of indicative provenance query templates, and finally it describes an implementation using Semantic Web technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the amount of scholarly communication increases, it is increasingly difficult for specific core scientific statements to be found, connected and curated. Additionally, the redundancy of these statements in multiple fora makes it difficult to determine attribution, quality and provenance. To tackle these challenges, the Concept Web Alliance has promoted the notion of nanopublications (core scientific statements with associated context). In this document, we present a model of nanopublications along with a Named Graph/RDF serialization of the model. Importantly, the serialization is defined completely using already existing community-developed technologies. Finally, we discuss the importance of aggregating nanopublications and the role that the Concept Wiki plays in facilitating it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Capturing trustworthiness, reputation, and reliability of Semantic Web data manipulated by SPARQL requires researchers to represent adequate provenance information, usually modeled as source data annotations and propagated to query results along with a query evaluation. Alternatively, abstract provenance models can capture the relationship between query results and source data by taking into account the employed query operators. The authors argue the benefits of the latter for settings in which query results are materialized in several repositorwies and analyzed by multiple users. They also investigate how relational provenance models can be leveraged for SPARQL queries, and advocate for new provenance models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the authors provide an example workflow—and a simple classification of user questions on the workflow's data products—to combine and interchange contextual metadata through a semantic data model and infrastructure. They also analyze their approach's potential to support enhanced semantic provenance applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]