Semantic Web and ontology-based applications for digital libraries

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)

<p>Context-aware services are attracting attention of world as the use of web services are rapidly growing. We designed an architecture of context-aware semantic web which provides on demand flexibility and scalability in extracting and mining the research papers from well-known digital libraries i.e. ACM, IEEE and SpringerLink. This paper proposes a context-aware administrations system, which supports programmed revelation and incorporation of setting dependent on Semantic Web administrations. This work has been done using the python programming language with a dedicated library for the semantic web analysis named as “Cubic-Web” on any defined dataset, in our case as we have used a dataset for extracting and studying several publications to measure the impact of context aware semantic web application on the results. We have found the average recall and averge accuracy for all the context aware research journals in our research work. Moreover, as this study is limited journal documents, other future studies can be approached by examining different types of publications using this advance research. An efficient system has been designed considering the parameters of research article meta-data to find out the papers from the web using semantic web technology. Parameters like year of publication, type of publication, number of contributors, evaluation methods and analysis method used in publication. All this data has been extracted using the designed context-aware semantic web technology.</p>

23 - Case studies

Reviewed by: Exploring Digital Libraries: Foundations, Practice, Prospects by Karen Calhoun Judy Jeng Exploring Digital Libraries: Foundations, Practice, Prospects, Karen Calhoun. Chicago: American Library Association, Neal-Schuman, 2014. 352 pages. $85.50 (ISBN 978-1-55570-985-3) Exploring Digital Libraries: Foundations, Practice, Prospects is a well-organized and timely new book. Soon retiring from her position as an assistant university librarian at the University of Pittsburgh, author Karen Calhoun is an experienced librarian, researcher, and writer with strong credentials in metadata management and digital libraries. She takes a broad and international perspective, having interviewed many distinguished scholars and practitioners and incorporated their views. One chapter reports the results of interviews with nine digital library experts on successful projects in their communities. The experts offer insights as to why some digital libraries are long-lived while others fade into memory. Calhoun reviews a vast amount of literature and includes important topics such as the Semantic Web, linked data, and cloud technology. As Calhoun indicates, the Semantic Web, which provides common formats to facilitate the exchange of data, is growing rapidly and applications built upon it are beginning to appear, but its evolution is still in the early stages. Legal issues such as intellectual property rights and licensing terms and conditions, essential for understanding digital libraries, are also reviewed. Exploring Digital Libraries includes a glossary and an extensive list of references. Calhoun begins with an excellent overview of the first decade of progress in digital libraries from 1991 to 2001, identifying and discussing significant outcomes in research and practice, describing accomplishments that set dominant themes, and offering a framework for understanding the interplay of different stakeholders. In the second decade (2002 to 2012), the key challenges Calhoun identifies are interoperability, community engagement, intellectual property rights, and sustainability. Two chapters cover digital repositories and hybrid libraries. The discussion of repositories includes discoverability, usage, current positions and roles, cyber-infrastructure, next-generation systems, and data and e-research support. Regarding hybrid libraries, where traditional and electronic information sources are combined, Calhoun discusses changing information-seeking behaviors and preferences, new collection strategies, and emerging technologies. She states that cloud-based hybrid library systems may offer a more integrated alternative to the current fragmented array of systems, tools, and services. In addition to technical themes, the author explores the social [End Page 653] value of digital libraries, including how perceptions of value have changed, in ways that should aid planning future library services, spaces, and expectations in the networked environment. This discussion flows into a look at the origins and fast-moving nature of the social web, sometimes called Web 2.0, which focuses on user-generated content, networking, and social interaction. Calhoun describes digital libraries’ new role on the social web and raises the possibility of digital libraries as social platforms. She introduces a visual framework that attempts to bring some coherence to the many confusing elements of digital libraries’ evolution toward the social web and discusses the social web’s impact on scholarship. Calhoun ends the chapter by pointing out that libraries have traditionally been collection-centered, with core values different from the social web’s values of engagement and participation. Looking to the future in her final chapter, Calhoun writes, “Most digital libraries continue to operate from a traditional, collections-centered service model. Change will be difficult, especially in the realm of scholarly practices and norms, where the roots of tradition are deep.” (p. 256) She raises the need to rethink what libraries and digital libraries should and can do for society and concludes that “emulating the creativity and pioneering spirit of digital libraries’ first 20 years is the starting point for creating the next grand vision for libraries’ digital future.” (p. 256) Exploring Digital Libraries is a thorough examination of the past, present, and future prospects of digital libraries, and I recommend it to students, scholars, and practicing librarians. Judy Jeng Adjunct Professor, Drexel University, Philadelphia Adjunct Faculty, San Jose State University, California jeng.judy@gmail.com Copyright © 2014 Johns Hopkins University Press

Data warehouses have established themselves as necessary components of an effective Information Technology (IT) strategy for large businesses. In addition to utilizing operational databases data warehouses must also integrate increasing amounts of external data to assist in decision support. An important source of such external data is the Web. In an effort to ensure the availability and quality of Web data for the data warehouse we propose an intermediate data-staging layer called the Meta-Data Engine (M-DE). A major challenge, however, is the conversion of data originating in the Web, and brought in by robust search engines, to data in the data warehouse. The authors therefore also propose a framework, the Semantic Web Application (SEMWAP) framework, which facilitates semi-automatic matching of instance data from opaque web databases using ontology terms. Their framework combines Information Retrieval (IR), Information Extraction (IE), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and ontology techniques to produce a matching and thus provide a viable building block for Semantic Web (SW) Applications.

PurposeThis study aims to ascertain the information professionals’ perceptions and attitudes towards the application of linked data (LD) technologies in libraries in the context of a developing country. It also explores the Pakistani information professionals’ level of familiarity with LD concepts, plans and efforts in its application, along with its potential benefits.Design/methodology/approachAn online questionnaire survey was used to identify the information professionals’ perceived level of familiarity with LD concepts and benefits to implement LD in libraries, and their plans and efforts to adopt LD technologies. A questionnaire was developed to meet the objective of the study and collect data from the purposefully selected professionals (N= 86) working in university libraries in Pakistan. SPSS was used to analyse the data set.FindingsFindings show that LD application in libraries is still not common among Pakistani information professionals. They have a moderate level of understanding with semantic Web (SW) and LD key concepts. The respondents were positive about the potential benefits of implementing LD technology in libraries, such as assisting patrons to discover relevant information, enriching traditional bibliographic records, enhancing the visibility and discoverability of library data and improving the users’ overall search experiences that may foster future developments. Overall, the respondents’ institutions were on different levels of planning – from working on a plan to having a finalized plan. The findings emphasized establishing the SW’s potential in library services.Research limitations/implicationsThere are certain limitations of this study. Firstly, the population is Pakistani information professionals who are purposefully selected. Secondly, the findings reveal that the respondents’ understanding with LD concepts, opinions about LD, plans and efforts to its application along with its potential benefits in libraries are self-perceived and not tested in any way and they were not actually implementing these technologies in their institutions because of a lack of best practices. It is a quantitative study and it will serve as a baseline study, even though there is a need to conduct more in-depth qualitative studies in the information environment to explore the phenomenon.Social implicationsThis study will guide information professionals and policymakers to take initiatives towards the implementation of LD technology in libraries. It may also lead to further research to understand the perceptions of information professionals so that appropriate training and advocacy programmes can be developed to promote LD initiatives in libraries.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first known empirical study in the context of a developing country. It clearly demonstrates the Pakistani information professionals’ perceptions regarding the library LD and associated plans along with potential benefits to implement it.

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!

The quality evaluation of Semantic Web applications (SWAs) in isolation is not enough. The future shall see almost all Web applications being deployed on the cloud and available to us as services, facilitating transparency and reusability. The business model of cloud computing provides services on demand, which are paid as per their use. The Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery model of cloud computing segregates provider’s ownership from customer’s use. Since the concept of quality is crucial to services, therefore, it is plausible to build models for quality assessment of SWAs, which fit in the cloud’s SaaS paradigm. Such applications are referred to Semantic Web application as a service (SWAaaS), in the following text. In our knowledge, there are no quality factors, measures, or frameworks for tracking the quality of SWAaaS. The Semantic Web application quality framework described in Chap. 3 is not profusely appropriate for evaluation of SWAaaS, owing to the distinctive natures of Web application and service. Previously, some ways of assessing quality of SWA and SaaS have been invented, a few of which build on quality features from existing software and Web application quality models, whereas some formulate SaaS quality metrics. few works merely present quality attributes in the context of Service Level Agreement (SLA) and Quality of Service (QoS) parameters. Here, the representative quality factors influencing SWAaaS are recognized after the literature review and a Hierarchical Fuzzy System (HFS) has been developed to assess SWAaaS quality. The quality attributes of HFS have been validated using IEEE 1061 framework. Results of experiments show that our HFS handles multiple quality attributes, and may perform quality-based ranking of SWAs available as services. The hierarchical fuzzy quality model discussed here may serve as a beginning point toward an all-inclusive quality model aimed to facilitate a SWAaaS consumer to choose the best quality service among SWAs available as a service on the cloud. Additionally, HFS may act as a directive to SWAaaS provider for the betterment of quality of SWA that is being provided as a service.

DTD and its instance have been considered the standard for data representation and information exchange format on the current web. However, when coming to the next generation of web, the Semantic Web, the drawbacks of XML and its schema are appeared. They mainly focus on the structure level and lack support for data representation. Meanwhile, some Semantic Web applications such as intelligent information services and semantic search engines require not only the syntactic format of the data, but also the semantic content. These requirements are supported by the Web Ontology Language (OWL), which is one of the recent W3C recommendation. But nowadays the amount of data presented in OWL is small in compare with XML data. Therefore, finding a way to utilize the available XML documents for the Semantic Web is a current challenge research. In this work we present an effective solution for transforming XML document into OWL domain knowledge. While keeping the original structure, our work also adds more semantics for the XML document. Moreover, whole of the transformation processes are done automatically without any outside intervention. Further, unlike previous approaches which focus on the schema level, we also extend our methodology for the data level by transforming specific XML instances into OWL individuals. The results in existing OWL syntaxes help them to be loaded immediately by the Semantic Web applications.

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

Semantic Web research relies on a number of key methodologies such as knowledge representation languages or reasoning algorithms. As a research community, however, we could not progress based on these methodologies exclusively, but require tools and systems that realize our research results as key technologies for the Semantic Web. There would be no Linked Data without repositories to store them, no Semantic Web applications without application programming interfaces to load and edit ontologies, and no semanticsbased user interfaces without reasoners. Consequently, some of these technologies are research enablers in their own rights. Unfortunately, the developers of such software— often researchers themselves—rarely get appropriate credit for their work. Attempts to publish papers describing their software systems frequently provoke reviews and decision letters questioning their ’conceptual contribution’. This criticism may be correct, be it because the conceptual underpinnings have been published previously, or because there may in fact be little conceptual underpinnings apart from excellent software engineering. As a result, developers of key research enabling software often have considerable difficulties publishing their work in high-quality journals. In turn, paradoxically, researchers using these systems within their own work lack a primary citation source for the used software, and may have to settle for a URL, a short demo paper, or for a workshop contribution as citation. These outlets, however, can not provide the rigid quality criteria and visibility compared to journal publications. There is a need for publishing Tools and Systems papers in primary journals. The criteria applied to evaluate such papers have to differ from those applied to classical research articles. Unfortunately, these alternative evaluation criteria are often not spelled out in detail and therefore not consistently taken into account by reviewers and editors. As a consequence, the Semantic Web journal has adopted the Tools and Systems article as one of its regular paper types and provides crisp criteria for their evaluation: Reports on tools and systems—short papers describing mature Semantic Web related tools and systems. These reports should be brief and pointed, indicating clearly the capabilities of the described tool or system. It is strongly encouraged, that the described tools or systems are free, open, and accessible on the Web. If this is not possible, then they have to be made available to the reviewers. For commercial tools and systems, exceptions can be arranged through the editors. These submissions will be reviewed along the following dimensions: (1) Quality, importance, and impact of the described tool or system (convincing evidence must be provided). (2) Clarity, illustration, and readability of the describing paper, which shall convey to the reader both the capabilities and the limitations of the tool. The impact of the described tool or system is indeed decisive. Authors are asked to provide evidence for a substantial number of researchers using their software for research and applications. In exceptional cases, authors may also argue about the potential future impact of their software given that they can provide clear evidence for this. Clearly, software prototypes which were only implemented as proof-of-concepts, or software which is closely tied to a particular (externally funded) project, are out of scope. Originality or novelty—which are decisive dimensions for high-quality research articles—are not mentioned among the evalu-

Because the ultimate purpose of the Semantic Web is to help users locate, organize, and process information, we strongly believe that it should be grounded in the information access method humans are most comfortable with—natural language. However, the Resource Description Framework (RDF), the foundation of the Semantic Web, was designed to be easily processed by computers, not humans. To render RDF friendlier to humans, we propose to augment it with natural language annotations, or metadata written in everyday language. We argue that natural language annotations are not only intuitive and effective, but can also accelerate the pace with which the Semantic Web is being adopted. We demonstrate the use of natural language annotations from within Haystack, an end user Semantic Web platform that also serves as a testbed for our ideas. In addition to a prototype SemanticWeb question answering system, we describe other opportunities for marrying natural language and Semantic Web technology.

Semantic web has emerged as a web of next generation providing has various opportunities to enhance the over all performance of current web. The objective of this paper is to review the literature and to provide a critical evaluation of semantic application in the domains of e-business and telecommunications. Literature review reveals that a simple solution to the current e-business problem is solved by purposing a wrapper layer above the current state of the art technologies. We emphasize that telecommunication is one the strong area of research for semantic web implementation. Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis for using semantic technologies in telecom sector is found effective to make better decision, and business to business integration on the basis of intelligent semantic web services.

Deploying defeasible logic rule bases for the semantic web

The amount of digital cultural heritage data produced by cultural heritage institutions is growing rapidly. Digital cultural heritage repositories have therefore become an efficient and effective way to disseminate and exploit digital cultural heritage data. However, many digital cultural heritage repositories worldwide share technical challenges such as data integration and interoperability among national and regional digital cultural heritage repositories. The result is dispersed and poorly-linked cultured heritage data, backed by non-standardized search interfaces, which thwart users’ attempts to contextualize information from distributed repositories. A recently introduced geospatial semantic web is being adopted by a great many new and existing digital cultural heritage repositories to overcome these challenges. However, no one has yet conducted a conceptual survey of the geospatial semantic web concepts for a cultural heritage audience. A conceptual survey of these concepts pertinent to the cultural heritage field is, therefore, needed. Such a survey equips cultural heritage professionals and practitioners with an overview of all the necessary tools, and free and open source semantic web and geospatial semantic web platforms that can be used to implement geospatial semantic web-based cultural heritage repositories. Hence, this article surveys the state-of-the-art geospatial semantic web concepts, which are pertinent to the cultural heritage field. It then proposes a framework to turn geospatial cultural heritage data into machine-readable and processable resource description framework (RDF) data to use in the geospatial semantic web, with a case study to demonstrate its applicability. Furthermore, it outlines key free and open source semantic web and geospatial semantic platforms for cultural heritage institutions. In addition, it examines leading cultural heritage projects employing the geospatial semantic web. Finally, the article discusses attributes of the geospatial semantic web that require more attention, that can result in generating new ideas and research questions for both the geospatial semantic web and cultural heritage fields.