Personalized touristic routes implementing semantic web on GIS

Nowadays, when a user is planning a touristic route is very difficult to find out which are the best places to visit. The user has to choose considering his/her preferences due to the great quantity of information it is possible to find in the web and taking into account it is necessary to do a selection, within small time because there is a limited time to do a trip. In Itiner@ project, we aim to implement Semantic Web technology combined with Geographic Information Systems in order to offer personalized touristic routes around a region based on user preferences and time situation. Using ontologies it is possible to link, structure, share data and obtain the result more suitable for user's preferences and actual situation with less time and more precisely than without ontologies. To achieve these objectives we propose a web page combining a GIS server and a touristic ontology. As a step further, we also study how to extend this technology on mobile devices due to the raising interest and technological progress of these devices and location-based services, which allows the user to have all the route information on the hand when he/she does a touristic trip. We design a little application in order to apply the combination of GIS and Semantic Web in a mobile device.

Enterprise semantic Web

This document is a journey through Semantic Web principles and Microsoft SharePoint in order to come to understand some advantages and disadvantages of theirs, and how Semantic Web principles can be blended into an enterprise solution like Microsoft SharePoint.

A semantic model of selective dissemination of information for digital libraries

In this paper we present the theoretical and methodologicalfoundations for the development of a multi-agentSelective Dissemination of Information (SDI) servicemodel that applies Semantic Web technologies for specializeddigital libraries. These technologies make possibleachieving more efficient information management,improving agent–user communication processes, andfacilitating accurate access to relevant resources. Othertools used are fuzzy linguistic modelling techniques(which make possible easing the interaction betweenusers and system) and natural language processing(NLP) techniques for semiautomatic thesaurus generation.Also, RSS feeds are used as “current awareness bulletins”to generate personalized bibliographic alerts.

Definitional verbal patterns for semantic relation extraction

In this paper we present a description of the role of definitional verbal patterns for the extraction of semantic relations. Several studies show that semantic relations can be extracted from analytic definitions contained in machine-readable dictionaries (MRDs). In addition, definitions found in specialised texts are a good starting point to search for different types of definitions where other semantic relations occur. The extraction of definitional knowledge from specialised corpora represents another interesting approach for the extraction of semantic relations. Here, we present a descriptive analysis of definitional verbal patterns in Spanish and the first steps towards the development of a system for the automatic extraction of definitional knowledge.

A method for extracting semantic information from on-line art music discussion forums

In this paper a method for extracting semantic informationfrom online music discussion forums is proposed. The semantic relations are inferred from the co-occurrence of musical concepts in forum posts, using network analysis. The method starts by defining a dictionary of common music terms in an art music tradition. Then, it creates a complex network representation of the online forum by matchingsuch dictionary against the forum posts. Once the complex network is built we can study different network measures, including node relevance, node co-occurrence andterm relations via semantically connecting words. Moreover, we can detect communities of concepts inside the forum posts. The rationale is that some music terms are more related to each other than to other terms. All in all, this methodology allows us to obtain meaningful and relevantinformation from forum discussions.

Using qualia information to identify lexical semantic classes in an unsupervised clustering task

Acquiring lexical information is a complex problem, typically approached by relying on a number of contexts to contribute information for classification. One of the first issues to address in this domain is the determination of such contexts. The work presented here proposes the use of automatically obtained FORMAL role descriptors as features used to draw nouns from the same lexical semantic class together in an unsupervised clustering task. We have dealt with three lexical semantic classes (HUMAN, LOCATION and EVENT) in English. The results obtained show that it is possible to discriminate between elements from different lexical semantic classes using only FORMAL role information, hence validating our initial hypothesis. Also, iterating our method accurately accounts for fine-grained distinctions within lexical classes, namely distinctions involving ambiguous expressions. Moreover, a filtering and bootstrapping strategy employed in extracting FORMAL role descriptors proved to minimize effects of sparse data and noise in our task.

Automatic Lexical Semantic Classification of Nouns

The work we present here addresses cue-based noun classification in English and Spanish. Its main objective is to automatically acquire lexical semantic information by classifying nouns into previously known noun lexical classes. This is achieved by using particular aspects of linguistic contexts as cues that identify a specific lexical class. Here we concentrate on the task of identifying such cues and the theoretical background that allows for an assessment of the complexity of the task. The results show that, despite of the a-priori complexity of the task, cue-based classification is a useful tool in the automatic acquisition of lexical semantic classes.

Semantic web adoption: online tools for web evaluation and metadata extraction

This work briefly analyses the difficulties to adopt the Semantic Web, and in particular proposes systems to know the present level of migration to the different technologies that make up the Semantic Web. It focuses on the presentation and description of two tools, DigiDocSpider and DigiDocMetaEdit, designed with the aim of verifYing, evaluating, and promoting its implementation.

Intersecciones entre visión artificial y mirada artística. Semantic Intersections between Artificial and Artistic Vision.

En el presente artículo se ha desarrollado un sistema capaz de categorizar de forma automática la base de datos de imágenes que sirven de punto de partida para la ideación y diseño en la producción artística del escultor M. Planas. La metodología utilizada está basada en características locales. Para la construcción de un vocabulario visual se sigue un procedimiento análogo al que se utiliza en el análisis automático de textos (modelo 'Bag-of-Words'-BOW) y en el ámbito de las imágenes nos referiremos a representaciones 'Bag-of-Visual Terms' (BOV). En este enfoque se analizan las imágenes como un conjunto de regiones, describiendo solamente su apariencia e ignorando su estructura espacial. Para superar los inconvenientes de polisemia y sinonimia que lleva asociados esta metodología, se utiliza el análisis probabilístico de aspectos latentes (PLSA) que detecta aspectos subyacentes en las imágenes, patrones formales. Los resultados obtenidos son prometedores y, además de la utilidad intrínseca de la categorización automática de imágenes, este método puede proporcionar al artista un punto de vista auxiliar muy interesante.

Personalized touristic routes implementing semantic web on GIS

Nowadays, when a user is planning a touristic route is very difficult to find out which are the best places to visit. The user has to choose considering his/her preferences due to the great quantity of information it is possible to find in the web and taking into account it is necessary to do a selection, within small time because there is a limited time to do a trip. In Itiner@ project, we aim to implement Semantic Web technology combined with Geographic Information Systems in order to offer personalized touristic routes around a region based on user preferences and time situation. Using ontologies it is possible to link, structure, share data and obtain the result more suitable for user's preferences and actual situation with less time and more precisely than without ontologies. To achieve these objectives we propose a web page combining a GIS server and a touristic ontology. As a step further, we also study how to extend this technology on mobile devices due to the raising interest and technological progress of these devices and location-based services, which allows the user to have all the route information on the hand when he/she does a touristic trip. We design a little application in order to apply the combination of GIS and Semantic Web in a mobile device.

Information architecture for the semantic web

L'objectiu és desenvolupar i avaluar una sèrie de components de l'arquitectura de la informació per a la web semàntica. Aquest components són genèrics i permeten als usuaris explorar conjunts de dades semàntiques sense necessitat de conèixer l'estructura ni tenir coneixements tècnics. S'ha desenvolupat seguint una metodologia de disseny centrat en l'usuari

Semantic data integration in a newspaper content management system

A newspaper content management system has to deal with a very heterogeneous information space as the experience in the Diari Segre newspaper has shown us. The greatest problem is to harmonise the different ways the involved users (journalist, archivists...) structure the newspaper information space, i.e. news, topics, headlines, etc. Our approach is based on ontology and differentiated universes of discourse (UoD). Users interact with the system and, from this interaction, integration rules are derived. These rules are based on Description Logic ontological relations for subsumption and equivalence. They relate the different UoD and produce a shared conceptualisation of the newspaper information domain.

A Semantic wiki for quality management in software development projects

Quality management has become a strategic issue for organisations and is very valuable to produce quality software. However, quality management systems (QMS) are not easy to implement and maintain. The authors' experience shows the benefits of developing a QMS by first formalising it using semantic web ontologies and then putting them into practice through a semantic wiki. The QMS ontology that has been developed captures the core concepts of a traditional QMS and combines them with concepts coming from the MPIu'a development process model, which is geared towards obtaining usable and accessible software products. Then, the ontology semantics is directly put into play by a semantics-aware tool, the Semantic MediaWiki. The developed QMS tool is being used for 2 years by the GRIHO research group, where it has manages almost 50 software development projects taking into account the quality management issues. It has also been externally audited by a quality certification organisation. Its users are very satisfied with their daily work with the tool, which manages all the documents created during project development and also allows them to collaborate, thanks to the wiki features.

Building a usable and accessible semantic web interaction platform

Semantic Web applications take off is being slower than expected, at least with respect to “real-world” applications and users. One of the main reasons for this lack of adoption is that most Semantic Web user interfaces are still immature from the usability and accessibility points of view. This is due to the novelty of these technologies, but this also motivates the exploration of alternative interaction paradigms, different from the “traditional” Web or Desktop applications ones. Our proposal is realized in the Rhizomer platform, which explores the possibilities of the object–action interaction paradigm at the Web scale. This paradigm is well suited for heterogeneous resource spaces such as those common in the Semantic Web. Resources, described by metadata, correspond to the objects in the paradigm. Semantic web services, which are dynamically associated to these objects, correspond to the actions. The platform is being put into practice in the context of a research project in order to build an open application for media distribution based on Semantic Web technologies. Moreover, its usability and accessibility have been evaluated in this real setting and compared to similar systems.