Special Issue "Semantic Interoperability and Knowledge Building"

Guest Editor
Dr. Salvatore Flavio Pileggi
Polytechnic University of Valencia, Camino de Vera, 46022 Valencia, Spain
E-Mail: salpi@itaca.upv.es
Interests: Semantic technologies; grid/cloud computing; sensor networks; ambient intelligence; software engineering.

Dear Colleagues,

The Semantic Web would be an evolving extension of current Web model (referred as Syntactic Web) that introduces a semantic layer in which semantics, or meaning of information, are formally defined. Semantics should integrate web-centric standard information infrastructures improving several aspects of interaction among heterogeneous systems: semantic interoperability would improve common interoperability models (basic and functional interoperability) introducing the interpretation of means of data. Semantic interoperability is a concretely applicable interaction model under the assumption of adopting rich data models (commonly called Ontology) composed of concepts within a domain and the relationships among those concepts.

Semantic technologies are partially inverting the common view at actor intelligence: intelligence is not implemented (only) by actors but it is implicitly resident in the knowledge model. In other words, schemas contain information and the “code” to interpret it. They are providing a new understanding of knowledge representation.

This special issue also publishes an extended version of selected contributions from the IWSI (International Workshop on Semantic Interoperability, http://www.icaart.org/workshops.asp#IWSI) and SSW (Semantic Sensor Web, http://www.ic3k.org/SSW.asp) workshops.

Dr. Salvatore Flavio Pileggi
Guest Editor

Submission

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• modeling and representation of knowledge
• ontology development
• Semantic web
• Semantic systems and applications
• Semantic technologies
• Semantic agents and services
• Semantic interaction
• Semantic interoperable architectures and middlewares
• Semantic sensor web
• Semantic analysis and modeling of domains

Type of Paper: Article
Title: Towards Semantic Interoperable Service-Oriented Computational Grids
Authors: Salvatore F. Pileggi ¹, Carlos Fernandez-Llatas ¹ and Jaime Calvo-Gallego ²
Affiliations: ¹ ITACA-TSB, Edificio G8, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, 46022, Valencia, Spain; E-Mail: salpi@itaca.upv.es
² Department of Computing and Automatics, University of Salamanca, Spain; E-Mail: jaime.calvo@usal.es 
Abstract: Computational Grids enable complex ecosystems among users and resources through services and applications. The understanding of Grid solutions is quickly evolving considering the massive migration to cloud solutions appears next to be a fact. Cloud infrastructures could assure a competitive, scalable and sustainable environment for services and applications. Applications involving complex virtual organizations could require a higher level of flexibility that could result by the convergence of migration and virtualization. In this paper, a service-oriented model is proposed: file systems, DBs, computational resources and any other class of resources are available in the "cloud" as services regardless the infrastructures on which they are deployed. Semantics play a critical role in order to assure advanced and open solutions in a technologic context featured by a fundamental lack of standardization. A generic performance evaluation by the end-user perspective is hard to be proposed mainly because real performances are characteristic of concrete architectures. Under the not always realistic assumption that service and application performances are proportional to basic operations, the analysis of performance can be generalized.
Keywords: distributed computing; grid computing; semantic technologies; semantic representation; semantic interoperability; network performance evaluation

Type: Article
Title: Semantic Observation Integration
Authors: Sven Schade, Frank Ostermann, Werner Kuhn and Laura Spinsanti
Abstract: Although the integration of sensor-based information has been a research topic for many years, semantic interoperability has not yet been reached. The advent of user generated content for the geospatial domain, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), makes it even more difficult to establish formal integration systems. This paper proposes a novel approach of integrating conventional sensor information and VGI, which is exploited in the context of detecting forest fire events. In contrast to common logic-based semantic descriptions, we present a formal system using algebraic specifications as a more elegant, illustrative and straight forward solution. We particularly discuss the required ontological commitments and a possible generalization.

Type of Paper: Article
Title: Dynamic Context-based Orchestration for Control of Resource-efficient Manufacturing Processes
Authors: Matthias Loskyll¹, Ines Heck², and Peter Stephan¹
Affiliations: ¹ Innovative Factory Systems, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Kaiserslautern, Germany; E-Mail: {Matthias.Loskyll, Peter.Stephan}@dfki.de
² Technology-Initiative SmartFactoryKL e.V., Kaiserslautern, Germany; E-Mail: heck@smartfactory.de
Abstract: The increasing competition between manufacturers, the shortening of innovation cycles and the growing importance of resource-efficient manufacturing demand a higher versatility of factory automation. Serviceoriented approaches depict a promising possibility to realize new control architectures by encapsulating the functionality of mechatronic devices into services. An efficient discovery, context-based selection and dynamic orchestration of these services are the key features for the creation of highly adaptable manufacturing processes. We describe a semantic service discovery and ad-hoc orchestration system, which is able to react to new process variants and changed contextual information (e.g. requirements on the consumption of resources). Because a standardized vocabulary, especially for the description of mechatronic functionalities, is still missing in the manufacturing domain, the semantic description of services, processes and manufacturing plants as well as the semantic interpretation of contextual information play an important part.

Type of Paper: Article
Title: Plausible Description Logic Programs for Stream Reasoning
Authors: Adrian Groza and Ioan Alfred Letia
Affilitiation: Department of Computer Science, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania, E-Mail: Adrian.Groza@cs.utcluj.ro
Abstract: Stream reasoning is defined as real time logical reasoning on large, noisy, heterogeneous data streams, aiming to support the decision process of large numbers of concurrent querying agents. In this research we exploit non-monotonic rule-based systems for handling inconsistent or  incomplete information and also ontologies to deal with heterogeneity. Data is aggregated from distributed streams in real time and plausible rules fire when new data is available. This study also investigates the advantages of lazy evaluation on data streams.

Type of Paper: Letter
Title: When the social meets semantics: Semantic Social Web (Web 2.5?)
Authors: Salvatore F. Pileggi
Affiliations: ITACA-TSB, Edificio G8, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, 46022, Valencia, Spain; E-Mail: salpi@itaca.upv.es
Abstract: The social trend is progressively becoming the key feature of the current Web understanding. This trend appears unrestrainable since millions of users, directly or indirectly connected through social networks, are able to share and interchange any class of content, information and experience. Social interactions radically changed the user approach as well as the socialization of contents around social objects is providing new unexplored commercial marketplaces and business opportunities. On the other hand, the progressive evolution of the web towards the Semantic Sensor Web (or Web 3.0) is providing a formal representation of the knowledge based on the means of data. When the social meets semantics, the social intelligence can be built in the context of a semantic environment in which user and community profiles as well as any kind of interaction is semantically represented (Semantic Social Web).

Type of Paper: Article
Title: Towards Annotopia - Enabling the Semantic Interoperability of Web-based Annotations
Author: Jane Hunter
Affiliation: School of ITEE, The University of Queensland, St. Lucia, Australia; E-Mail: jane@itee.uq.edu.au
Abstract: This paper will describe a number of recent initiatives that aim to develop a common  model to describe web-based annotations (including the OAC and AO ontologies) - and hence facilitate the discovery, sharing and re-use of annotations. We will discuss the problematic issues and associated decisions that arise when developing such an ontology, including the optimum approach to support persistent identifiers, multiple media types, fragment identifiers, multiple bodies and multiple targets. Using a number of case studies that include digital scholarly editing, 3D museum artifacts and sensor data streams, we evaluate the recently merged OAC/AO model and describe our implementation of an online annotation server that supports the storage, search and retrieval of annotations across multiple applications and disciplines.

Type of Paper: Article
Title: Semantic Legal Policies for Data Integration and Protection Across Super-peer Domains in the Cloud
Author: Yuh-Jong Hu
Affiliation: Department of Computer Science, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan; E-Mail: hu@cs.nccu.edu.tw
Abstract: In the semantic policy infrastructure, a Trusted Legal Domain (TLD), designated as a super-peer domain, is a "legal cage" model to circumscribe the virtual legal boundary of data deployment and usage in the cloud. Semantic legal policies in compliance with the laws are enforced automatically at the super-peer within a super-peer domain to enable Law-as-a-Service (LaaS) for cloud service providers. Users could query data from the law-aware super-peer, where each query is also compliant with the laws. Semantic legal policies are shown as a combination of OWL-DL ontologies and stratified Datalog rules with negation for policy representation and enforcement. A super-peer is a unique law-aware guardian that provides data integration and protection services for its peers within a super-peer domain. In addition, super-peers specify how law compliant legal policies are unified and enforced with each other to achieve data integration and protection across super-peer domains in the cloud.

Type: Article
Title: Semantic Interoperability of Engineering Tools for Automation Systems Engineering
Authors: Thomas Moser, Dietmar Winkler and Stefan Biffl
Abstract: Automation systems engineering projects depend on contributions from several engineering disciplines. These contributions consist of complex artifacts like mechanical, electrical, and software components and plans. While the software tools available for each individual engineering discipline, there is very little work on engineering process automation across semantically heterogeneous engineering tool data models. This paper presents an adaptation of the Engineering Knowledge Base (EKB) concept, a semantic model which extends the Global-as-View concept and explicitly models common engineering concepts and mappings using machine-understandable syntax, for the engineering of automaton systems. The concept is evaluated based on a real-world use case for data exchange and consistency checking between software tools involved in automation systems engineering. Major result is that the EKB concept sufficiently supports the semantic interoperability of tools to enable the automation of engineering processes. Furthermore, the EKB provides the capability to efficiently identify defects across engineering models in several tools.