Designing and configuring context-aware semantic web applications

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore useful Semantic Web technologies and ontology-based applications for digital libraries. It also investigates the perceptions of university librarians and academicians in Pakistan about Semantic Web technologies and their use in digital libraries.Design/methodology/approachAn exploratory research design based on Delphi research strategy was conducted to answer the research questions. Interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of 50 key informants including university librarians and academicians to explore their perceptions about Semantic Web technologies and their use in digital libraries. Thematic analysis of interview data was conducted to obtain results.FindingsThe results of this paper showed that DuraCloud, Semantic information mashup, OntoEdit and resource description framework (RDF) are the various Semantic Web applications which are useful for digital libraries to develop semantic relationships among digital contents and increase their accessibility in the web environment. Findings revealed that Semantic Web provides precise results and meets user information needs in an effective way. Results also showed that next-generation digital libraries use context-awareness technology, intelligent agent software and detecting sensors to analyze user information needs and provide dynamic information services. This paper recommended that librarians should embrace the use of emerging web technologies in libraries and offer library services through the medium of the web.Practical implicationsThis paper envisaged the future of digital library services and Semantic Web applications that can be used to re-structure metadata of digital library. This paper has practical implications for librarians to consider the useful applications of Semantic Web for digital library and enhance the interoperability of metadata among heterogeneous information systems. Practically, results obtained from this paper are highly useful for library schools and LIS teachers to up-date their curriculum by incorporating new contents related to web languages and Semantic Web applications for digital libraries.Originality/valueThis paper identifies various Semantic Web applications which are useful for developing Semantic Digital Libraries.

Semantic Web is the name of the next generation World Wide Web, that has been recently proposed by Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)1. In this new Web architecture, information and Web services will be easily understandable and usable by both humans and computers. The objective is not to make computers understand the human language, but to define a universal model for the expression of the information and a set of inference rules that machines can easily use in order to process and relate the information as if they really understood it (Berners-Lee, 1998). Though, as the current Web provided sharing of documents among previously incompatible computers, the Semantic Web intends to go beyond, allowing stovepipe systems, hardwired computers, and other devices to share contents embedded in different documents. The most known architecture for Semantic Web is based on a stack of related technologies, each one being a whole research area by itself (Berners-Lee, Hendler, & Lassila. 2001; Pereira & Freire, 2005). Accomplishment of the Semantic Web is considered a great challenge, not only due to the complexity of implementation but also because of the vast applicability in several areas. In spite of this, Semantic Web is still one of the most promising research areas among those which aim to define a new architecture for the Web. Semantic Web goes far beyond previous information retrieval and knowledge representation projects, presenting a non-centralized way to represent and contextualize real-world concepts, unambiguously, for several areas of knowledge. Semantic Web-enabled machines will handle information at our communication level. It is clear that the ability to interpret reality is still very primitive, however, Semantic Web points a way towards machine interaction and learning (Pereira et al., 2005). Semantic Web will integrate, interact with, and bring benefits to most human activities. Its full potential will go beyond the Web to real-world machines, providing increased interaction between machines and with humans—smarter phones, radios, and other electronic devices. Semantic Web will bring a different kind of approach in the understanding of reality by the machines and will constitute a mark in the evolution of human knowledge (Pereira et al., 2005).

Semantic Web technologies play an increasingly important role in the integration of heterogeneous biomedical information as well as the generation of meaningful links between biological and clinical information resources, which are at the basis of both, translational and personalized, medicine. A critical component of the emergence of these technologies is the need to represent domain knowledge, e.g. biological and medical knowledge, in the systems that we build in order to facilitate not just the low level integration of resources, but to enable knowledge-driven analysis and reasoning across them. As is true for many other scientific disciplines, in spite of the potential benefits to be gained, we are still far from seeing a widespread adoption of the Semantic Web for the Life Sciences. Part of the problem is of course the large investment of effort needed to develop sufficiently formal representations of enough Life Science knowledge in the form of ontologies and other knowledge bases, but there are also issues with the maturity of the tools and applications that are currently available to those who want to develop and use Semantic Web applications and tools in the Life Sciences. The purpose of the SWAT4LS workshops http://www.swat4ls.org is to create a space for discussions involving experts from the Computing as well as the Life Sciences, filling the gap between the possibilities and the practicalities of the Semantic Web in the Life Sciences domain. The first of these took place in Edinburgh on 28 November 2008 and at its heart was the question as to what is hindering a more rapid adoption of Semantic Web technologies in this domain. To reflect this, the panel discussion at the Edinburgh workshop was held under the heading of If the Semantic Web is so good, why is everybody using OBO for ontologies and PERL for data integration?. The original call for the SWAT4LS 2008 workshop resulted in the total of 40 submissions which were peer reviewed: 8 were accepted as full papers, 4 as poster papers and one as a demo paper. In addition, a number of posters were accepted. The workshop took place at the e-Science Institute in Edinburgh and was attended by about 80 participants. Following the actual workshop, all contributors to SWAT4LS'08 (papers as well as posters) were invited to submit extended versions of their contributions, resulting in the submission of 21 papers, which underwent another complete peer review cycle. Of these, 13 papers were selected and are included in this BMC Bioinformatics supplement. We are delighted with the collection of high quality papers that are the result of this endeavor and are confident that the readers will find them helpful in their own work on Semantic Web technologies for the Life Sciences. We would like to thank all who have contributed to the SWAT4LS 2008 workshop and this BMC Bioinformatics supplement. Specifically, we thank all the authors for their contributions, all the reviewers who served on the program committee for the original workshop call and then again for the submissions for this supplement, the invited speakers (Prof. Michael Krauthammer, Dr. M. Scott Marshall and Prof. Mark D. Wilkinson) and all the participants who made the workshop a memorable event. The support from the e-Science Institute in Edinburgh, which has hosted the workshop and covered some of the costs for our invited speakers, is also gratefully acknowledged. We also thank our sponsors: OMII-UK, LabAge SA, Leaf Bioscience and Textensor Limited for their support., Finally, we thank the staff at BMC Bioinformatics, specifically Ms. Isobel Peters, for their help with editing and processing this supplement. Albert Burger, Paolo Romano, Adrian Paschke and Andrea Splendiani (SWAT4LS Supplement Editors and Co-chairs of SWAT4LS 2008)

Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences: a review of the state of the art

The exponential growth of information on the web far exceeds the capacity of present day information retrieval systems and search engines, making information integration on the web difficult. In order to overcome this, semantic web technologies were proposed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to achieve a higher degree of automation and precision in information retrieval systems. Semantic web, with its promise to deliver machine understanding to the traditional web, has attracted a significant amount of research from academia as well as from industries. Semantic web is an extension of the current web in which data can be shared and reused across the internet. RDF and ontology are two essential components of the semantic web architecture which support a common framework for data storage and representation of data semantics, respectively. Ontologies being the backbone of semantic web applications, it is more relevant to study various approaches in their application, usage, and integration into web services. In this article, an effort has been made to review the research work being undertaken in the area of design and development of ontology supported information systems. This paper also briefly explains the emerging semantic web technologies and standards.

The POWDER protocol is a Semantic Web technology that takes advantage of natural groupings of URIs to annotate all the resources in a regular expression-delineated sub-space of the URI space. POWDER is a mechanism for accreditation, trustmarking and resource discovery, emphasising the publishing of attributed metadata by third parties and trusted authorities. Demonstrating its versatility, it has also been deployed in unforeseen use cases, such as repository compression. In this paper, we present the POWDER protocol, explain its position in the Semantic Web architecture, expose and discuss current implementations and use cases and future directions.

A distributed, end-to-end information integration system that is based on the Semantic Web architecture is of considerable interest to both commercial and government organizations. However, there are a number of challenges that have to be resolved to build such a system given the currently available Semantic Web technologies. We describe here the ISENS prototype system we designed, implemented, and tested (on a small scale) to address this problem. We discuss certain system limitations (some coming from underlying technologies used) and future ISENS development to resolve them and to enable an extended set of capabilities.

Rules and ontologies play a key role in the layered architecture of the Semantic Web, as they are used to ascribe meaning to, and to reason about, data on the Web. While the Ontology Layer of the Semantic Web is quite developed, and the Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a W3C recommendation since a couple of years already, the rules layer is far less developed and an active area of research; a number of initiatives and proposals have been made so far, but no standard as been released yet. Many implementations of rule engines are around which deal with Semantic Web data in one or another way. This article gives a comprehensive, although not exhaustive, overview of such systems, describes their supported languages, and sets them in relation with theoretical approaches for combining rules and ontologies as foreseen in the Semantic Web architecture. In the course of this, we identify desired properties and common features of rule languages and evaluate existing systems against their support. Furthermore, we review technical problems underlying the integration of rules and ontologies, and classify representative proposals for theoretical integration approaches into different categories.

This paper presents a design support system for basic design of ships. The system aims at supporting designers by presenting documents needed for each task according to design processes. In order to construct our system, several approaches were adopted. At first, an analysis of basic design process using UML was made. Authors understood its workflow and extracted a data list to make documents for each step of the workflow. Secondly, Semantic Web architecture was introduced to structuralise ship design documents. By applying Semantic Web technology, users can query to collections of documents as if using relational databases. Authors implemented the system and evaluated it through an example of basic design. The system shows its efficiency in the evaluation.

EUROLAN, which has been held biennially since 1993, is one of the most significant European summer schools in the area of natural language processing. Each of the EUROLAN sessions has focused on an area of timely interest to researchers in the field; this year's EUROLAN involved students in tutorials and hands-on sessions concerned with semantic web technologies as applied to language processing, ontology creation and use, and consideration of the semantic web's potential and limitations.

Semantic mashup of biomedical data

23 - Case studies

This chapter looks at the impact and opportunities of semantic technologies and Web services to business relationships and how social Semantic Web techniques foster e-business and collaborative networks in many dimensions. For this the authors follow the vision to support collaborative services for business relationship management within semantic services. Based on a newly approach for business partner management with ontologies in large business communities, the chapter elaborates the conceptual framework for the design and implementation of collaborative services. The often postulated adaptiveness and intelligence of novel collaborative structures, foremost collaborative networks, require new approaches to deal with the increasing difficulty to cope with the resulting complexity of relational ties in communities and business networks. This research strives to leverage the capabilities to deal with large number of business relationships. The chapter formulates a vision based on three stages developing digital business ecosystems. Semantic Web technologies, mainly modelling business partner profiles (BPP) with ontology, combined with sound techniques of information retrieval and selected concepts and methods of social network analysis build the conceptual framework. On this basis, a newly approach is elaborated which offers support for communication processes and complex interactions of business entities in collaborative spaces.

Our Kunstliche Intelligenz edition from July 2003 focussed on a few novel technologies that can be subsumed by two words: ‘‘Semantic Web’’. Now, 13 years thereafter we would like to feature an update. Semantic Web—reloaded if you wish. The first edition came out a few years after the development of important technologies in this area such as OWL or DL reasoning engines. OWL resulted from a quasi merger between OIL (Ontology Inference Layer, a European proposal) and DAML (DARPA Agent Markup Language, the American counterpart). Examples for DL-reasoning engines are FaCT or RACER, just to name a few. SPARQL, the important query language that is used nowadays to query ontologies wasn’t even around until later, emerging in 2008. The 03/2003 special issue also featured two interviews with key figures from the community: James Hendler, at that time Computer Science Professor and Head of Semantic Web and Agents Research at the University of Maryland and Patrick Hayes, a Senior Research Scientist at IHMC in Pensacola, FL. I re-read the independently created interviews remembering asking them about the future of Semantic Web technologies. One of the questions was: ‘‘What can we expect in the next 2, 5, and 10 years and what are the steps to fulfill these goals?’’ Here is a rundown from what the two experts answered with regard to the expectations in 10 years: James Hendler: ‘‘In ten years we will see this (Semantic Web, editorial office) as a technology that is pervasive, it is just part of the Web.’’ Patrick Hayes answered this question more reluctantly, mentioning that ten years is a long way to think ahead. Nevertheless he said: ‘‘I think, the Semantic Web will be integrated into, a part of, the Web; most people wont see a difference. Looking back, people will wonder how anyone managed to live without intelligent software agents’’. It is up to you— the reader—to find out whether those predictions became reality. The Kunstliche Intelligenz delivers new material in form of this special issue. I think it is fair to say that our guest editors Profs Birte Glimm and Heiner Stuckenschmidt started to work in the areas of Semantic Web technologies around the time of the publication of the first Semantic Web special issue in our journal. Heiner Stuckenschmidt even contributed with an article. One could even argue that they built their career on Semantic Web technologies. We couldn’t think of better Guest-Editors for this special issue. And now it is time to wish you a pleasant reading with the new issue of Kunstliche Intelligenz—Semantic Web Reloaded!

Advent of technologies like semantic web, multi-agent systems, web mining has changed the internet as knowledge provider. Web personalization offers a solution to the information overload problem in current web by providing users a personalized experience, considering their interest, behavior, context and emotions. Semantic web technology is based on use of software agents, ontologies and reasoning to add meaning to web information. An important technology for achieving personalization is the use of independent intelligent software agents. This work reviews, web personalization in the light of semantic web and software agent technology. A comparative study of recent works in the domain of web personalization has been carried out for this purpose. This review highlights ample scope for application of intelligent agents in the web personalization domain for solving many existing issues like personalized content management, user profile learning, modeling and adaptive interactions with users.