The portal as information broker

The term information broker is widely used in the area of library and information science to describe a middle agent who deals in information as a commodity, enabling customers to gain more efficient access to quality data. The role of this middle agent is described as “information retrieval and information organisation” (Rugge & Glossbrenner, 1995). The role of the broker is to bring additional organisation to the market by lowering search costs (Palmer & Lindemann, 2003).

Design of information architecture of the web site of the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Tourism of the Universidad Central “Marta Abreu” de Las Villas (Cuba)

The information architecture supports information retrieval by users in Web environment. The design should be center in the information user, favoring usability. The Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Tourism of the Universidad Central "Marta Abreu" de Las Villas, lacks a site that enhances the disclosure of information to its members. Are presented as objectives of the study: 1) conduct a user survey to identify information needs of users, 2) establish guidelines for information architecture for the institution focused on users, 3) designing the information architecture for the institution and 4) designed to evaluate the proposal. Are presented as objectives of the study: 1) to realize a user study to identify the information needs of users, 2) establish guidelines for information architecture for the institution focused on users, 3) to design the information architecture for the institution and 4) to evaluate the proposal designed. To obtain results are used methods in the theoretical and empirical levels. Besides, are use techniques that favored the design and evaluation. Is designed the intranet of the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Tourism. Is evaluated the proposed design for the validation of the results.

Sharing Human-Generated Observations by Integrating HMI and the Semantic Sensor Web

Current “Internet of Things” concepts point to a future where connected objects gather meaningful information about their environment and share it with other objects and people. In particular, objects embedding Human Machine Interaction (HMI), such as mobile devices and, increasingly, connected vehicles, home appliances, urban interactive infrastructures, etc., may not only be conceived as sources of sensor information, but, through interaction with their users, they can also produce highly valuable context-aware human-generated observations. We believe that the great promise offered by combining and sharing all of the different sources of information available can be realized through the integration of HMI and Semantic Sensor Web technologies. This paper presents a technological framework that harmonizes two of the most influential HMI and Sensor Web initiatives: the W3C’s Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces (MMI) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) with its semantic extension, respectively. Although the proposed framework is general enough to be applied in a variety of connected objects integrating HMI, a particular development is presented for a connected car scenario where drivers’ observations about the traffic or their environment are shared across the Semantic Sensor Web. For implementation and evaluation purposes an on-board OSGi (Open Services Gateway Initiative) architecture was built, integrating several available HMI, Sensor Web and Semantic Web technologies. A technical performance test and a conceptual validation of the scenario with potential users are reported, with results suggesting the approach is sound

Two main challenges in service description : Web service tunnel vision and semantic myopia

Through media such as newspapers, letterbox flyers, corporate brochures and television we are regularly confronted with descriptions for conventional (bricks 'n' mortar style) services. These representations vary in the terminology utilised, the depth of the description, the aspects of the service that are characterised and their applicability to candidate service requestors. Existing service catalogues (such as the Yellow Pages) provide little relief for service requestors from the burdensome task of discovering, comparing and substituting services. Add to this environment the rapidly evolving area of web services with its associated surfeit of standards, and the result is a considerably fragmented approach to the description of services. It leaves the reality of the Semantic Web somewhat clouded. --------- Let's consider service description briefly, before discussing our concerns with existing approaches to description. The act of describing is performed prior to advertising. This simple fact provides an interesting paradox as services cannot be described exactly before advertisement. This doesn't mean they can't be described comprehensively. By "exactly", we are referring to the fact that context provided by a service requestor (and their service needs) will alter the description of the service that is presented to the discoverer. For example, a service provider who operates a cinema wants to describe the price of their service. Let's say the advertised price is $15. They also want to state that a pensioner discount and a student discount is available which provides a 50% discount. A customer (i.e. service requestor) uses the cinema web site to purchase tickets online. They find the movie of their choice at a time that suits. However, its not until some context is provided by the requestor that the exact price is determined. The requestor might state that they are a pensioner. The same is applicable for a service requestor who purchases multiple tickets perhaps on behalf of other people. The disconnect between when the service is described and when a requestor provides context introduces challenges to the description process. A service provider would be ill-advised to offer independent descriptions that represent all the permutations possible for a single service. The descriptive effort would be prohibitive.

Dealing with Semantic Heterogeneity Issues on the Web

The Semantic Web is an extension of the traditional Web in which meaning of information is well defined, thus allowing a better interaction between people and computers. To accomplish its goals, mechanisms are required to make explicit the semantics of Web resources, to be automatically processed by software agents (this semantics being described by means of online ontologies). Nevertheless, issues arise caused by the semantic heterogeneity that naturally happens on the Web, namely redundancy and ambiguity. For tackling these issues, we present an approach to discover and represent, in a non-redundant way, the intended meaning of words in Web applications, while taking into account the (often unstructured) context in which they appear. To that end, we have developed novel ontology matching, clustering, and disambiguation techniques. Our work is intended to help bridge the gap between syntax and semantics for the Semantic Web construction

Using SCXML to integrate semantic sensor information into context-aware user interfaces

This paper describes a novel architecture to introduce automatic annotation and processing of semantic sensor data within context-aware applications. Based on the well-known state-charts technologies, and represented using W3C SCXML language combined with Semantic Web technologies, our architecture is able to provide enriched higher-level semantic representations of user’s context. This capability to detect and model relevant user situations allows a seamless modeling of the actual interaction situation, which can be integrated during the design of multimodal user interfaces (also based on SCXML) for them to be adequately adapted. Therefore, the final result of this contribution can be described as a flexible context-aware SCXML-based architecture, suitable for both designing a wide range of multimodal context-aware user interfaces, and implementing the automatic enrichment of sensor data, making it available to the entire Semantic Sensor Web

A Semantic Scraping Model for Web Resources - Applying Linked Data to Web Page Screen Scraping

In spite of the increasing presence of Semantic Web Facilities, only a limited amount of the available resources in the Internet provide a semantic access. Recent initiatives such as the emerging Linked Data Web are providing semantic access to available data by porting existing resources to the semantic web using different technologies, such as database-semantic mapping and scraping. Nevertheless, existing scraping solutions are based on ad-hoc solutions complemented with graphical interfaces for speeding up the scraper development. This article proposes a generic framework for web scraping based on semantic technologies. This framework is structured in three levels: scraping services, semantic scraping model and syntactic scraping. The first level provides an interface to generic applications or intelligent agents for gathering information from the web at a high level. The second level defines a semantic RDF model of the scraping process, in order to provide a declarative approach to the scraping task. Finally, the third level provides an implementation of the RDF scraping model for specific technologies. The work has been validated in a scenario that illustrates its application to mashup technologies

Semantic Heterogeneity Issues on the Web

The Semantic Web is an extension of the traditional Web in which meaning of information is well defined, thus allowing a better interaction between people and computers. To accomplish its goals, mechanisms are required to make explicit the semantics of Web resources, to be automatically processed by software agents (this semantics being described by means of online ontologies). Nevertheless, issues arise caused by the semantic heterogeneity that naturally happens on the Web, namely redundancy and ambiguity. For tackling these issues, we present an approach to discover and represent, in a non-redundant way, the intended meaning of words in Web applications, while taking into account the (often unstructured) context in which they appear. To that end, we have developed novel ontology matching, clustering, and disambiguation techniques. Our work is intended to help bridge the gap between syntax and semantics for the Semantic Web construction.

A core ontological model for semantic sensor web infrastructures

Semantic Sensor Web infrastructures use ontology-based models to represent the data that they manage; however, up to now, these ontological models do not allow representing all the characteristics of distributed, heterogeneous, and web-accessible sensor data. This paper describes a core ontological model for Semantic Sensor Web infrastructures that covers these characteristics and that has been built with a focus on reusability. This ontological model is composed of different modules that deal, on the one hand, with infrastructure data and, on the other hand, with data from a specific domain, that is, the coastal flood emergency planning domain. The paper also presents a set of guidelines, followed during the ontological model development, to satisfy a common set of requirements related to modelling domain-specific features of interest and properties. In addition, the paper includes the results obtained after an exhaustive evaluation of the developed ontologies along different aspects (i.e., vocabulary, syntax, structure, semantics, representation, and context).

Enabling query technologies for the semantic sensor web

Sensor networks are increasingly being deployed in the environment for many different purposes. The observations that they produce are made available with heterogeneous schemas, vocabularies and data formats, making it difficult to share and reuse this data, for other purposes than those for which they were originally set up. The authors propose an ontology-based approach for providing data access and query capabilities to streaming data sources, allowing users to express their needs at a conceptual level, independent of implementation and language-specific details. In this article, the authors describe the theoretical foundations and technologies that enable exposing semantically enriched sensor metadata, and querying sensor observations through SPARQL extensions, using query rewriting and data translation techniques according to mapping languages, and managing both pull and push delivery modes.

A general proposal to multilingual information access based on syntactic-semantic patterns

In the last few years, there has been a wide development in the research on textual information systems. The goal is to improve these systems in order to allow an easy localization, treatment and access to the information stored in digital format (Digital Databases, Documental Databases, and so on). There are lots of applications focused on information access (for example, Web-search systems like Google or Altavista). However, these applications have problems when they must access to cross-language information, or when they need to show information in a language different from the one of the query. This paper explores the use of syntactic-sematic patterns as a method to access to multilingual information, and revise, in the case of Information Retrieval, where it is possible and useful to employ patterns when it comes to the multilingual and interactive aspects. On the one hand, the multilingual aspects that are going to be studied are the ones related to the access to documents in different languages from the one of the query, as well as the automatic translation of the document, i.e. a machine translation system based on patterns. On the other hand, this paper is going to go deep into the interactive aspects related to the reformulation of a query based on the syntactic-semantic pattern of the request.

A web recommendation technique based on probabilistic latent semantic analysis

Web transaction data between Web visitors and Web functionalities usually convey user task-oriented behavior pattern. Mining such type of click-stream data will lead to capture usage pattern information. Nowadays Web usage mining technique has become one of most widely used methods for Web recommendation, which customizes Web content to user-preferred style. Traditional techniques of Web usage mining, such as Web user session or Web page clustering, association rule and frequent navigational path mining can only discover usage pattern explicitly. They, however, cannot reveal the underlying navigational activities and identify the latent relationships that are associated with the patterns among Web users as well as Web pages. In this work, we propose a Web recommendation framework incorporating Web usage mining technique based on Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) model. The main advantages of this method are, not only to discover usage-based access pattern, but also to reveal the underlying latent factor as well. With the discovered user access pattern, we then present user more interested content via collaborative recommendation. To validate the effectiveness of proposed approach, we conduct experiments on real world datasets and make comparisons with some existing traditional techniques. The preliminary experimental results demonstrate the usability of the proposed approach.

Sensing presence (PreSense) ontology : user modelling in the semantic sensor web

Increasingly, people's digital identities are attached to, and expressed through, their mobile devices. At the same time digital sensors pervade smart environments in which people are immersed. This paper explores different perspectives in which users' modelling features can be expressed through the information obtained by their attached personal sensors. We introduce the PreSense Ontology, which is designed to assign meaning to sensors' observations in terms of user modelling features. We believe that the Sensing Presence ( PreSense ) Ontology is a first step toward the integration of user modelling and "smart environments". In order to motivate our work we present a scenario and demonstrate how the ontology could be applied in order to enable context-sensitive services. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.

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.

Sensing presence (PreSense) ontology:user modelling in the semantic sensor web

Increasingly, people's digital identities are attached to, and expressed through, their mobile devices. At the same time digital sensors pervade smart environments in which people are immersed. This paper explores different perspectives in which users' modelling features can be expressed through the information obtained by their attached personal sensors. We introduce the PreSense Ontology, which is designed to assign meaning to sensors' observations in terms of user modelling features. We believe that the Sensing Presence ( PreSense ) Ontology is a first step toward the integration of user modelling and "smart environments". In order to motivate our work we present a scenario and demonstrate how the ontology could be applied in order to enable context-sensitive services. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.