Museum Collections and the Semantic Web

The paper discusses some current trends in the area of development and use of semantic portals for accessing heterogeneous museum collections on the Semantic Web. The presentation is focused on some issues concerning metadata standards for museums, museum collections ontologies and semantic search engines. A number of design considerations and recommendations are formulated.

Digital Libraries and Portals Saving National Cultural Heritage (IMI–BAS Experience)

The current research activities of the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (IMI—BAS) include the study and application of knowledge-based methods for the creation, integration and development of multimedia digital libraries with applications in cultural heritage. This report presents IMI-BAS’s developments at the digital library management systems and portals, i.e. the Bulgarian Iconographical Digital Library, the Bulgarian Folklore Digital Library and the Bulgarian Folklore Artery, etc. developed during the several national and international projects: - "Digital Libraries with Multimedia Content and its Application in Bulgarian Cultural Heritage" (contract 8/21.07.2005 between the IMI–BAS, and the State Agency for Information Technologies and Communications; - FP6/IST/P-027451 PROJECT LOGOS "Knowledge-on-Demand for Ubiquitous Learning", EU FP6, IST, Priority 2.4.13 "Strengthening the Integration of the ICT research effort in an Enlarged Europe" - NSF project D-002-189 SINUS "Semantic Technologies for Web Services and Technology Enhanced Learning". - NSF project IO-03-03/2006 ―Development of Digital Libraries and Information Portal with Virtual Exposition "Bulgarian Folklore Heritage". The presented prototypes aims to provide flexible and effective access to the multimedia presentation of the cultural heritage artefacts and collections, maintaining different forms and format of the digitized information content and rich functionality for interaction. The developments are a result of long- standing interests and work in the technological developments in information systems, knowledge processing and content management systems. The current research activities aims at creating innovative solutions for assembling multimedia digital libraries for collaborative use in specific cultural heritage context, maintaining their semantic interoperability and creating new services for dynamic aggregation of their resources, access improvement, personification, intelligent curation of content, and content protection. The investigations are directed towards the development of distributed tools for aggregating heterogeneous content and ensuring semantic compatibility with the European digital library EUROPEANA, thus providing possibilities for pan- European access to rich digitalised collections of Bulgarian cultural heritage.

Semantic Modelling for Product Line Engineering

The aim of our work is to present solutions and a methodical support for automated techniques and procedures in domain engineering, in particular for variability modeling. Our approach is based upon Semantic Modeling concepts, for which semantic description, representation patterns and inference mechanisms are defined. Thus, model-driven techniques enriched with semantics will allow flexibility and variability in representation means, reasoning power and the required analysis depth for the identification, interpretation and adaptation of artifact properties and qualities.

An Ontology-based Approach to Student Skills in Multiagent e-Learning Systems

The main idea of our approach is that the domain ontology is not only the instrument of learning but an object of examining student skills. We propose for students to build the domain ontology of examine discipline and then compare it with etalon one. Analysis of student mistakes allows to propose them personalized recommendations and to improve the course materials in general. For knowledge interoperability we apply Semantic Web technologies. Application of agent-based technologies in e-learning provides the personification of students and tutors and saved all users from the routine operations.

Using Elements of Semantic Parsing in e-Learning Environments

Possibilities for using semantic parsing to estimate the correspondence of text materials to teaching aims, correspondence of test task to theoretical materials and other problems arising during the distance course designing and educational process itself in e-learning environments.

Automatic Identification of False Friends in Parallel Corpora: Statistical and Semantic Approach

False friends are pairs of words in two languages that are perceived as similar but have different meanings. We present an improved algorithm for acquiring false friends from sentence-level aligned parallel corpus based on statistical observations of words occurrences and co-occurrences in the parallel sentences. The results are compared with an entirely semantic measure for cross-lingual similarity between words based on using the Web as a corpus through analyzing the words’ local contexts extracted from the text snippets returned by searching in Google. The statistical and semantic measures are further combined into an improved algorithm for identification of false friends that achieves almost twice better results than previously known algorithms. The evaluation is performed for identifying cognates between Bulgarian and Russian but the proposed methods could be adopted for other language pairs for which parallel corpora and bilingual glossaries are available.

Pushing the Quality Level in Networked News Business: Semantic-Based Content Retrieval and Composition in International News Publishing

Electronic publishing exploits numerous possibilities to present or exchange information and to communicate via most current media like the Internet. By utilizing modern Web technologies like Web Services, loosely coupled services, and peer-to-peer networks we describe the integration of an intelligent business news presentation and distribution network. Employing semantics technologies enables the coupling of multinational and multilingual business news data on a scalable international level and thus introduce a service quality that is not achieved by alternative technologies in the news distribution area so far. Architecturally, we identified the loose coupling of existing services as the most feasible way to address multinational and multilingual news presentation and distribution networks. Furthermore we semantically enrich multinational news contents by relating them using AI techniques like the Vector Space Model. Summarizing our experiences we describe the technical integration of semantics and communication technologies in order to create a modern international news network.

Interoperability of Cross-Border European Egovernment Services: Some Design Issues

The authors analyse some of the research outcomes achieved during the implementation of the EC GUIDE research project “Creating an European Identity Management Architecture for eGovernment”, as well as their personal experience. The project goals and achievements are however considered in a broader context. The key role of Identity in the Information Society was emphasised, that the research and development in this field is in its initial phase. The scope of research related to Identity, including the one related to Identity Management and Interoperability of Identity Management Systems, is expected to be further extended. The authors analyse the abovementioned issues in the context established by the EC European Interoperability Framework (EIF) as a reference document on interoperability for the Interoperable Delivery of European eGovernment Services to Public Administrations, Business and Citizens (IDABC) Work Programme. This programme aims at supporting the pan-European delivery of electronic government services.

A Semantic-Oriented Architecture of a Functional Module for Personalized and Adaptive Access to the Knowledge in a Multimedia Digital Library

This article presents the principal results of the doctoral thesis “Semantic-oriented Architecture and Models for Personalized and Adaptive Access to the Knowledge in Multimedia Digital Library” by Desislava Ivanova Paneva-Marinova (Institute of Mathematics and Informatics), successfully defended before the Specialised Academic Council for Informatics and Mathematical Modelling on 27 October, 2008.

Semantic Search of Internet Information Resources on Base of Ontologies and Multilinguistic Thesauruses

The approaches to the analysis of various information resources pertinent to user requirements at a semantic level are determined by the thesauruses of the appropriate subject domains. The algorithms of formation and normalization of the multilinguistic thesaurus, and also methods of their comparison are given.

INFRAWEBS Semantic Web Service Development on the Base of Knowledge Management Layer

The paper gives an overview about the ongoing FP6-IST INFRAWEBS project and describes the main layers and software components embedded in an application oriented realisation framework. An important part of INFRAWEBS is a Semantic Web Unit (SWU) – a collaboration platform and interoperable middleware for ontology-based handling and maintaining of SWS. The framework provides knowledge about a specific domain and relies on ontologies to structure and exchange this knowledge to semantic service development modules. INFRAWEBS Designer and Composer are sub-modules of SWU responsible for creating Semantic Web Services using Case-Based Reasoning approach. The Service Access Middleware (SAM) is responsible for building up the communication channels between users and various other modules. It serves as a generic middleware for deployment of Semantic Web Services. This software toolset provides a development framework for creating and maintaining the full-life-cycle of Semantic Web Services with specific application support.

Semantic Description of Web Services and Possibilities of BPEL4WS

The using of the upsurge of semantics web technologies gives a possibility for an increasing of the flexibility, extensibility and consistency of the existent industrial standards for modeling of web services. In the paper the types of semantic description of web services and the degree of their realization in BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) respectively on the abstract and executable level are treated. The methods for using of BPEL4WS for the purposes of semantic web services in the direction of their semi-automatic integration are suggested.

INFRAWEBS BPEL-Based Editor for Creating the Semantic Web Services Description

INFRAWEBS project [INFRAWEBS] considers usage of semantics for the complete lifecycle of Semantic Web processes, which represent complex interactions between Semantic Web Services. One of the main initiatives in the Semantic Web is WSMO framework, aiming at describing the various aspects related to Semantic Web Services in order to enable the automation of Web Service discovery, composition, interoperation and invocation. In the paper the conceptual architecture for BPEL-based INFRAWEBS editor is proposed that is intended to construct a part of WSMO descriptions of the Semantic Web Services. The semantic description of Web Services has to cover Data, Functional, Execution and QoS semantics. The representation of Functional semantics can be achieved by adding the service functionality to the process description. The architecture relies on a functional (operational) semantics of the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) and uses abstract state machine (ASM) paradigm. This allows describing the dynamic properties of the process descriptions in terms of partially ordered transition rules and transforming them to WSMO framework.

Paronyms for Accelerated Correction of Semantic Errors

* Work done under partial support of Mexican Government (CONACyT, SNI), IPN (CGPI, COFAA) and Korean Government (KIPA Professorship for Visiting Faculty Positions). The second author is currently on Sabbatical leave at Chung-Ang University.

Computer-aided System of Semantic Text Analysis of a Technical Specification

The given work is devoted to development of the computer-aided system of semantic text analysis of a technical specification. The purpose of this work is to increase efficiency of software engineering based on automation of semantic text analysis of a technical specification. In work it is offered and investigated the model of the analysis of the text of the technical project is submitted, the attribute grammar of a technical specification, intended for formalization of limited Russian is constructed with the purpose of analysis of offers of text of a technical specification, style features of the technical project as class of documents are considered, recommendations on preparation of text of a technical specification for the automated processing are formulated. The computer-aided system of semantic text analysis of a technical specification is considered. This system consists of the following subsystems: preliminary text processing, the syntactic and semantic analysis and construction of software models, storage of documents and interface.