AKTive Food:semantic web based knowledge conduits for the organic food industry

We present a vision and a proposal for using Semantic Web technologies in the organic food industry. This is a very knowledge intensive industry at every step from the producer, to the caterer or restauranteur, through to the consumer. There is a crucial need for a concept of environmental audit which would allow the various stake holders to know the full environmental impact of their economic choices. This is a di?erent and parallel form of knowledge to that of price. Semantic Web technologies can be used e?ectively for the calculation and transfer of this type of knowledge (together with other forms of multimedia data) which could contribute considerably to the commercial and educational impact of the organic food industry. We outline how this could be achieved as our essential ob jective is to show how advanced technologies could be used to both reduce ecological impact and increase public awareness.

Transition of legacy systems to semantically enabled applications:TAO method and tools

Despite expectations being high, the industrial take-up of Semantic Web technologies in developing services and applications has been slower than expected. One of the main reasons is that many legacy systems have been developed without considering the potential of theWeb in integrating services and sharing resources.Without a systematic methodology and proper tool support, the migration from legacy systems to SemanticWeb Service-based systems can be a tedious and expensive process, which carries a significant risk of failure. There is an urgent need to provide strategies, allowing the migration of legacy systems to Semantic Web Services platforms, and also tools to support such strategies. In this paper we propose a methodology and its tool support for transitioning these applications to Semantic Web Services, which allow users to migrate their applications to Semantic Web Services platforms automatically or semi-automatically. The transition of the GATE system is used as a case study. © 2009 - IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved.

Ontology-based knowledge capture and sharing in enterprise organisations

Despite years of effort in building organisational taxonomies, the potential of ontologies to support knowledge management in complex technical domains is under-exploited. The authors of this chapter present an approach to using rich domain ontologies to support sense-making tasks associated with resolving mechanical issues. Using Semantic Web technologies, the authors have built a framework and a suite of tools which support the whole semantic knowledge lifecycle. These are presented by describing the process of issue resolution for a simulated investigation concerning failure of bicycle brakes. Foci of the work have included ensuring that semantic tasks fit in with users’ everyday tasks, to achieve user acceptability and support the flexibility required by communities of practice with differing local sub-domains, tasks, and terminology.

Ontologies for crisis management:a review of state of the art in ontology design and usability

The growing use of a variety of information systems in crisis management both by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and emergency management agencies makes the challenges of information sharing and interoperability increasingly important. The use of semantic web technologies is a growing area and is a technology stack specifically suited to these challenges. This paper presents a review of ontologies, vocabularies and taxonomies that are useful in crisis management systems. We identify the different subject areas relevant to crisis management based on a review of the literature. The different ontologies and vocabularies available are analysed in terms of their coverage, design and usability. We also consider the use cases for which they were designed and the degree to which they follow a variety of standards. While providing comprehensive ontologies for the crisis domain is not feasible or desirable there is considerable scope to develop ontologies for the subject areas not currently covered and for the purposes of interoperability.

Preface

The Semantic Web has come a long way since its inception in 2001, especially in terms of technical development and research progress. However, adoption by non- technical practitioners is still an ongoing process, and in some areas this process is just now starting. Emergency response is an area where reliability and timeliness of information and technologies is of essence. Therefore it is quite natural that more widespread adoption in this area has not been seen until now, when Semantic Web technologies are mature enough to support the high requirements of the application area. Nevertheless, to leverage the full potential of Semantic Web research results for this application area, there is need for an arena where practitioners and researchers can meet and exchange ideas and results. Our intention is for this workshop, and hopefully coming workshops in the same series, to be such an arena for discussion. The Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC - formerly the European Semantic Web conference) is one of the major research conferences in the Semantic Web field, whereas this is a suitable location for this workshop in order to discuss the application of Semantic Web technology to our specific area of applications. Hence, we chose to arrange our first SMILE workshop at ESWC 2013. However, this workshop does not focus solely on semantic technologies for emergency response, but rather Semantic Web technologies in combination with technologies and principles for what is sometimes called the "social web". Social media has already been used successfully in many cases, as a tool for supporting emergency response. The aim of this workshop is therefore to take this to the next level and answer questions like: "how can we make sense of, and furthermore make use of, all the data that is produced by different kinds of social media platforms in an emergency situation?" For the first edition of this workshop the chairs collected the following main topics of interest: • Semantic Annotation for understanding the content and context of social media streams. • Integration of Social Media with Linked Data. • Interactive Interfaces and visual analytics methodologies for managing multiple large-scale, dynamic, evolving datasets. • Stream reasoning and event detection. • Social Data Mining. • Collaborative tools and services for Citizens, Organisations, Communities. • Privacy, ethics, trustworthiness and legal issues in the Social Semantic Web. • Use case analysis, with specific interest for use cases that involve the application of Social Media and Linked Data methodologies in real-life scenarios. All of these, applied in the context of: • Crisis and Disaster Management • Emergency Response • Security and Citizen Journalism The workshop received 6 high-quality paper submissions and based on a thorough review process, thanks to our program committee, the decision was made to accept four of these papers for the workshop (67% acceptance rate). These four papers can be found later in this proceedings volume. Three out of four of these papers particularly discuss the integration and analysis of social media data, using Semantic Web technologies, e.g. for detecting complex events in social media streams, for visualizing and analysing sentiments with respect to certain topics in social media, or for detecting small-scale incidents entirely through the use of social media information. Finally, the fourth paper presents an architecture for using Semantic Web technologies in resource management during a disaster. Additionally, the workshop featured an invited keynote speech by Dr. Tomi Kauppinen from Aalto university. Dr. Kauppinen shared experiences from his work on applying Semantic Web technologies to application fields such as geoinformatics and scientific research, i.e. so-called Linked Science, but also recent ideas and applications in the emergency response field. His input was also highly valuable for the roadmapping discussion, which was held at the end of the workshop. A separate summary of the roadmapping session can be found at the end of these proceedings. Finally, we would like to thank our invited speaker Dr. Tomi Kauppinen, all our program committee members, as well as the workshop chair of ESWC2013, Johanna Völker (University of Mannheim), for helping us to make this first SMILE workshop a highly interesting and successful event!

Legibility, privacy and creativity:linked data in a surveillance society

This paper looks at the issue of privacy and anonymity through the prism of Scott's concept of legibility i.e. the desire of the state to obtain an ever more accurate mapping of its domain and the actors in its domain. We argue that privacy was absent in village life in the past, and it has arisen as a temporary phenomenon arising from the lack of appropriate technology to make all life in the city legible. Cities have been the loci of creativity for the major part of human civilisation. There is something specific about the illegibility of cities which facilitates creativity and innovation. By providing the technology to catalogue and classify all objects and ideas around us, this leads to a consideration of semantic web technologies, Linked Data and the Internet of Things as unwittingly furthering this ever greater legibility. There is a danger that the over description of a domain will lead to a loss in creativity and innovation. We conclude by arguing that our prime concern must be to preserve illegibility because the survival of some form, any form, of civilisation depends upon it.

Modelling and linking transformations in EPCIS governing supply chain business processes

Supply chains comprise of complex processes spanning across multiple trading partners. The various operations involved generate large number of events that need to be integrated in order to enable internal and external traceability. Further, provenance of artifacts and agents involved in the supply chain operations is now a key traceability requirement. In this paper we propose a Semantic web/Linked data powered framework for the event based representation and analysis of supply chain activities governed by the EPCIS specification. We specifically show how a new EPCIS event type called "Transformation Event" can be semantically annotated using EEM - The EPCIS Event Model to generate linked data, that can be exploited for internal event based traceability in supply chains involving transformation of products. For integrating provenance with traceability, we propose a mapping from EEM to PROV-O. We exemplify our approach on an abstraction of the production processes that are part of the wine supply chain.

Linking design and manufacturing domains via web-based and enterprise integration technologies

The manufacturing industry faces many challenges such as reducing time-to-market and cutting costs. In order to meet these increasing demands, effective methods are need to support the early product development stages by bridging the gap of communicating early design ideas and the evaluation of manufacturing performance. This paper introduces methods of linking design and manufacturing domains using disparate technologies. The combined technologies include knowledge management supporting for product lifecycle management systems, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, aggregate process planning systems, workflow management and data exchange formats. A case study has been used to demonstrate the use of these technologies, illustrated by adding manufacturing knowledge to generate alternative early process plan which are in turn used by an ERP system to obtain and optimise a rough-cut capacity plan. Copyright © 2010 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Natural language processing as a foundation of the semantic Web

The main argument of this paper is that Natural Language Processing (NLP) does, and will continue to, underlie the Semantic Web (SW), including its initial construction from unstructured sources like the World Wide Web (WWW), whether its advocates realise this or not. Chiefly, we argue, such NLP activity is the only way up to a defensible notion of meaning at conceptual levels (in the original SW diagram) based on lower level empirical computations over usage. Our aim is definitely not to claim logic-bad, NLP-good in any simple-minded way, but to argue that the SW will be a fascinating interaction of these two methodologies, again like the WWW (which has been basically a field for statistical NLP research) but with deeper content. Only NLP technologies (and chiefly information extraction) will be able to provide the requisite RDF knowledge stores for the SW from existing unstructured text databases in the WWW, and in the vast quantities needed. There is no alternative at this point, since a wholly or mostly hand-crafted SW is also unthinkable, as is a SW built from scratch and without reference to the WWW. We also assume that, whatever the limitations on current SW representational power we have drawn attention to here, the SW will continue to grow in a distributed manner so as to serve the needs of scientists, even if it is not perfect. The WWW has already shown how an imperfect artefact can become indispensable.

Web-based expert systems:benefits and challenges

Convergence of technologies in the Internet and the field of expert systems have offered new ways of sharing and distributing knowledge. However, there has been a general lack of research in the area of web-based expert systems (ES). This paper addresses the issues associated with the design, development, and use of web-based ES from a standpoint of the benefits and challenges of developing and using them. The original theory and concepts in conventional ES were reviewed and a knowledge engineering framework for developing them was revisited. The study considered three web-based ES: WITS-advisor - for e-business strategy development, Fish-Expert - for fish disease diagnosis, and IMIS - to promote intelligent interviews. The benefits and challenges in developing and using ES are discussed by comparing them with traditional standalone systems from development and application perspectives. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

UncertWeb processing service:making models easer to access on the web

Models are central tools for modern scientists and decision makers, and there are many existing frameworks to support their creation, execution and composition. Many frameworks are based on proprietary interfaces, and do not lend themselves to the integration of models from diverse disciplines. Web based systems, or systems based on web services, such as Taverna and Kepler, allow composition of models based on standard web service technologies. At the same time the Open Geospatial Consortium has been developing their own service stack, which includes the Web Processing Service, designed to facilitate the executing of geospatial processing - including complex environmental models. The current Open Geospatial Consortium service stack employs Extensible Markup Language as a default data exchange standard, and widely-used encodings such as JavaScript Object Notation can often only be used when incorporated with Extensible Markup Language. Similarly, no successful engagement of the Web Processing Service standard with the well-supported technologies of Simple Object Access Protocol and Web Services Description Language has been seen. In this paper we propose a pure Simple Object Access Protocol/Web Services Description Language processing service which addresses some of the issues with the Web Processing Service specication and brings us closer to achieving a degree of interoperability between geospatial models, and thus realising the vision of a useful 'model web'.

Semantic search meets the Web

While semantic search technologies have been proven to work well in specific domains, they still have to confront two main challenges to scale up to the Web in its entirety. In this work we address this issue with a novel semantic search system that a) provides the user with the capability to query Semantic Web information using natural language, by means of an ontology-based Question Answering (QA) system [14] and b) complements the specific answers retrieved during the QA process with a ranked list of documents from the Web [3]. Our results show that ontology-based semantic search capabilities can be used to complement and enhance keyword search technologies.

SemSearch:a search engine for the semantic web

Existing semantic search tools have been primarily designed to enhance the performance of traditional search technologies but with little support for ordinary end users who are not necessarily familiar with domain specific semantic data, ontologies, or SQL-like query languages. This paper presents SemSearch, a search engine, which pays special attention to this issue by providing several means to hide the complexity of semantic search from end users and thus make it easy to use and effective.

Uncertainty analysis in the Model Web

This thesis provides a set of tools for managing uncertainty in Web-based models and workflows.To support the use of these tools, this thesis firstly provides a framework for exposing models through Web services. An introduction to uncertainty management, Web service interfaces,and workflow standards and technologies is given, with a particular focus on the geospatial domain.An existing specification for exposing geospatial models and processes, theWeb Processing Service (WPS), is critically reviewed. A processing service framework is presented as a solutionto usability issues with the WPS standard. The framework implements support for Simple ObjectAccess Protocol (SOAP), Web Service Description Language (WSDL) and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), allowing models to be consumed by a variety of tools and software. Strategies for communicating with models from Web service interfaces are discussed, demonstrating the difficultly of exposing existing models on the Web. This thesis then reviews existing mechanisms for uncertainty management, with an emphasis on emulator methods for building efficient statistical surrogate models. A tool is developed to solve accessibility issues with such methods, by providing a Web-based user interface and backend to ease the process of building and integrating emulators. These tools, plus the processing service framework, are applied to a real case study as part of the UncertWeb project. The usability of the framework is proved with the implementation of aWeb-based workflow for predicting future crop yields in the UK, also demonstrating the abilities of the tools for emulator building and integration. Future directions for the development of the tools are discussed.

Developments in technologies for human-centric mobile computing and applications

With recent expansions in technology, mobile computing continues to play a vital role in all aspects of our lives. Digital technology tools such as Web browsing, media tracking, social media, and emailing have made mobile technology more than just a means of communication but has widespread use in business and social networks. Developments in Technologies for Human-Centric Mobile Computing and Applications is a comprehensive collection of knowledge and practice in the development of technologies in human –centric mobile technology. This book focuses on the developmental aspects of mobile technology; bringing together researchers, educators, and practitioners to encourage readers to think outside of the box.