AKT EPrints Archive http://eprints.aktors.org/oai2.xml 2.0 hg@ecs.soton.ac.uk 0001-01-01 no YYYY-MM-DD oai_dc http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/oai_dc.xsd http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/oai_dc/

oai:aktors.org:8 2002-01-22

Large scale acquisition and maintenance from the web without source access Leonard, Thomas Glaser, Hugh AKT Showcase Papers Knowledge acquisition Although different web sites structure their pages differently, the pages within a single site are often generated from a database and have a regular layout from which it is possible to extract information automatically. Dome is a visual tool for manipulating tree-structured docu-ments. It can import and export in XML or HTML formats, making it ideal for harvesting information from web pages. Editing is performed using a direct manipulation interface and the operations are recorded for later playback. The knowledge extracted from a web page may be updated by replaying the recorded sequence when the source page changes. The same sequence can be applied to other pages with a similar format, and facilities are provided to batch process a large collection of pages in one operation. In this paper we describe how Dome may be used to extract knowledge from web sites in such a way that the extraction process may be reliably replayed. 2001-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/8/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/8/01/Leonard-Glaser.pdf

oai:aktors.org:10 2002-02-14

MyPlanet: an ontology-driven Web-based personalised news service Kalfoglou, Yannis Domingue, John Motta, Enrico Vargas-Vera, Maria Buckingham Shum, Simon AKT Showcase Papers Knowledge retrieval Knowledge publishing In this paper we present myPlanet, an ontology-driven personalised Web-based service. We extended the existing infrastructure of the PlanetOnto news publishing system. Our concerns were mainly to provide lightweight means for ontology maintenance and ease the access to repositories of news items, a rich resource for information sharing. We reason about the information being shared by providing an ontology-driven interest-profiling tool which enable users to specify their interests. We also developed ontology-driven heuristics to find news items related to users' interests. This paper argues for the role of ontology-driven personalised Web-based services in information sharing. 2001-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/10/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/10/02/ontoIS01final.pdf

oai:aktors.org:11 2002-02-14

Template-driven information extraction for populating ontologies Vargas-vera, Maria Domingue, John Kalfoglou, Yannis Motta, Enrico Buckingham Shum, Simon AKT Showcase Papers Knowledge acquisition Knowledge modelling We address the integration of information extraction(IE) and ontologies. In particular, using an ontology to aid the IE process, and using the IE results to help populate the ontology. We perform IE by means of domain specific templates and the lightweight use of Natural Language Processing(NLP) techniques. Our main goal is to learn information from texts by the use of templates and in this way to alleviate the main bottleneck in creating knowledge-base systems that is "the extraction of knowledge". Our domain of study is "KMi Planet", a Web-based news server for communication of stories between members in our institute. The main goals of our system are to classify an incoming story, obtain the relevant objects within the story, deduce the relationships between them, and to populate the ontology. Furthermore, we aim to do this with minimal help from the user. 2001-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/11/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/11/01/vargas01.pdf

oai:aktors.org:12 2002-02-14

Supporting ontology-driven document enrichment within communities of practice Domingue, John Motta, Enrico Buckingham Shum, Simon Vargas-vera, Maria Kalfoglou, Yannis AKT Showcase Papers Knowledge publishing Knowledge modelling Formative work by Lave and Wenger has articulated how practices emerge through the interplay of informal processes with symbolic codifications and artifacts. In this paper, we describe how ontologies can serve as symbolic tools within a community of practice supporting communication and knowledge sharing. We show that when a community's perspective on an issue is stable, it opens the possibility for introducing knowledge services, based on an ontology co-constructed by knowledge engineers with stakeholders. Using a case study we describe our approach, ontology-driven document enrichment, looking at how ontology construction and population can be supported by Web based technologies 2001-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/12/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/12/01/kcap01_john_final.pdf

oai:aktors.org:13 2002-02-14

On the integration of technologies for capturing and navigating knowledge with ontology-driven services Kalfoglou, Yannis Domingue, John Carr, Leslie Motta, Enrico Vargas-Vera, Maria Buckingham Shum, Simon Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing Nowadays, many distinct communities are researching for knowledge capturing, modelling, and navigation. Moreover, advances in Internet technology makes it possible to perform most of these task on heterogeneous and distributed environments such as the Web. These advances though, have raised the need for knowledge services to accommodate the ever increasing number of Web users. To provide such a service one needs to combine key technologies for different aspects of knowledge management: capturing, modelling, navigating. This should be tightly integrated with the intented service. We describe such an integration effort in this paper. Our domain is a Web-based news repository and we aimed to provide personalised ontology-driven services on the top of it. We used knowledge capturing technologies to populate the underlying ontologies, knowledge modelling techniques to provide reasoning capabilities for the ontology-driven service, and navigating technologies to overlay Web pages with the ontology driven service 2001-04-01 Departmental Technical Report http://eprints.aktors.org/13/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000013/01/kmi-tr-106.pdf

oai:aktors.org:14 2002-02-15

Identifying Communities of Practice: Analysing Ontologies as Networks to Support Community Recognition O'Hara, Dr Kieron Alani, Dr Harith Shadbolt, Prof Nigel Knowledge retrieval Communities of practice are seen as increasingly important for creating, sharing and applying organisational knowledge. Yet their informal nature makes them difficult to identify and manage. In this paper we set out ONTOCOPI, a system that applies network analysis techniques to an ontology to target the problem of identifying such communities. 2002-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/14/ msword http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000014/01/OHara-ontocopi-paper.doc

oai:aktors.org:17 2002-02-22

I-X and <I-N-CA>: an Architecture and Related Ontology for Mixed-initiative Synthesis Tasks Tate, Prof Austin Knowledge reuse Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing Knowledge modelling Knowledge maintenance I-X is a research programme with a number of different aspects intended to create a well-founded approach to allow humans and computer systems to cooperate in the creation or modification of some product such as a plan, design or physical entity – i.e. it supports synthesis tasks. The I-X approach involves the use of shared models for task directed cooperation between human and computer agents who are jointly exploring (via some processes) a range of alternative options for the synthesis of an artifact such as a design or a plan (termed a product). The <I-N-CA> (Issues – Nodes – Critical and Auxiliary Constraints) ontology is used to represents a product as a set of constraints on the space of all possible products in the application domain. The modular I-X systems integration architecture encourages the creation of systems as components which handle “Issues” related to the design and its requirements, selects “Nodes” as the principal entities to be incorporated into the design, and checks or maintains a set of constraints of various types. 2001-09-01 Other http://eprints.aktors.org/17/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/17/02/2001-puk-ix-inca.pdf msword http://eprints.aktors.org/17/03/2001-puk-ix-inca.doc

oai:aktors.org:24 2002-02-22

A New Authoring Methodology for Large-Scale Hypermedia Applications Heath, Dr Ian Wills, Dr Gary Crowder, Dr Richard Hall, Prof Wendy Ballantyne, Mr Jim AKT Showcase Papers Knowledge modelling As the amount of information technology increases, managing information resources, so that the correct people can find the information easily, becomes a critical issue. Hypermedia systems are considered one solution to this problem as they provide a means for representing higher level relationships between the underlying information. However, the amount of information available electronically is increasing at an accelerated rate. Using standard hypermedia authoring techniques, the effort required managing and maintaining large-scale hypermedia systems is enormous. Hypermedia authoring in the large requires new methodologies if it is going to be feasible. This paper presents a new model for building and structuring large-scale hypermedia applications. It describes a case study that explored the delivery of hypermedia information in an industrial environment on a small scale. Models and techniques developed for that case study were then refined and augmented so they could support the construction of large-scale hypermedia systems. In order to support such endeavours a new linking model is presented that allows the author to explicitly represent abstract concepts contained within the underlying information and interconnect them in some meaningful manner. An example usage of this linking technique is then presented. 2000-11-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/24/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/24/01/newmethodology.pdf

oai:aktors.org:37 2002-02-15

ONTOCOPI: Methods and Tools for Identifying Communities of Practice Alani, Dr Harith O'Hara, Dr Kieron Shadbolt, Prof Nigel Knowledge retrieval Knowledge modelling The paper describes ONTOCOPI, a tool for identifying communities of practice (COPs) by analysing ontologies of the relevant working domain. COP identification is currently a resource-heavy process largely based on interviews. ONTOCOPI attempts to uncover informal COP relations by spotting patterns in the formal relations represented in ontologies, traversing the ontology from instance to instance via selected relations. Experiments to determine particular COPs from an academic ontology are described, showing how the alteration of threshold settings, temporal settings, and the weights applied to the ontology’s relations affect the composition of the identified COP. 2002-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/37/ msword http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000037/01/Alani-IIP-paper.doc

oai:aktors.org:40 2002-02-21

notes of 13th Nov 2001 Walker, Michael AKT Working Paper The following is at its core a discussion and attempt to circumscribe the problem of knowledge management, and is followed by an attempt to understand how technology can be made to address this end. 2001-11-01 Other http://eprints.aktors.org/40/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000040/02/notes_of_Nov_13th_2001.pdf

oai:aktors.org:43 2002-02-20

Issues for an Ontology for Knowledge Valuation O'Hara, Dr Kieron Shadbolt, Prof Nigel AKT Showcase Papers Knowledge maintenance This paper examines the application of inference-supporting ontologies to the issue of knowledge valuation. Knowledge, like customer goodwill or a brand, is an intangible asset for a firm; that is, a non-physical, non-financial claim to future wealth. Intangibles are notoriously difficult to value, but there are a number of reasons why we should try. A series of factors affecting the value of knowledge are discussed, and an ontology that could be used to express some of these is sketched. Such an ontology could be imported by e-business models, to help understand how an organisation’s knowledge adds value to its operations, and therefore to enable informed management of its knowledge assets. 2001-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/43/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/43/01/ohara-ijcai.pdf

oai:aktors.org:44 2002-02-22

Managing Knowledge Capture: Economic, Technological and Methodological Considerations O'Hara, Dr Kieron Shadbolt, Prof Nigel Knowledge maintenance This paper examines the process of managing knowledge capture from within an organization, i.e. the process of making tacit knowledge explicit. Any knowledge management decision to capture tacit knowledge needs to be informed by the costs incurred and benefits produced. These costs and benefits vary radically depending on properties of the domain, the organization, the knowledge to be captured and the importance of excluding others from the benefits of the knowledge. The picture is further complicated by the difficulties involved in valuing knowledge. We survey these factors, and seek to integrate such considerations into standard knowledge management methodologies (using CommonKADS as an example), and into methodologies for the qualitative valuation of intangible assets. 2001-01-01 Departmental Technical Report http://eprints.aktors.org/44/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/44/01/valuation-methods.pdf

oai:aktors.org:45 2002-02-22

Dealing with Dependencies between Content Planning and Surface Realisation in a Pipeline Generation Architecture Bontcheva, Dr Kalina Wilks, Prof Yorick AKT Showcase Papers The majority of existing language generation systems have a pipeline architecture which offers efficient sequential execution of modules, but does not allow decisions about text content to be revised in later stages. However, as exemplified in this paper, in some cases choosing appropriate content can depend on text length and formatting, which in a pipeline architecture are determined after content planning is completed. Unlike pipelines, interleaved and revision-based architectures can deal with such dependencies but tend to be more expensive computationally. Since our system needs to generate acceptable hypertext explanations reliably and quickly, the pipeline architecture was modified instead to allow additional content to be requested in later stages of the generation process if necessary. 2001-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/45/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/45/01/updated-ijcai01.pdf

oai:aktors.org:47 2002-03-06

Knowledge Sharing and Inconsistency Checking on Multiple Enterprise Models Chen-Burger, Dr. Yun-Heh AKT Showcase Papers Knowledge modelling Knowledge maintenance The approach of Multi-Perspective Enterprise Modelling is now more commonly accepted and used in practice as a way to manage knowledge than ever before. However, the concept of applying multiple modelling languages to describe the same domain may still sound frightening to many. In addition to the cost, time and complexity involved, problems such as knowledge sharing between multiple models and achieving and maintaining integrity between them are also important. We argue that Multi-Perspective Enterprise Modelling is helpful and in some situations necessary. This paper gives examples of how formal methods, such as logical languages, can provide assistance in making such an approach more appealing and transparent. We suggest that the MPM approach is valuable in representing, understanding and analysing a complex domain, but that much automated support is needed. 2001-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/47/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/47/01/formal.pdf

oai:aktors.org:48 2002-03-06

Rapid Knowledge Construction: A Case Study in Corporate Contingency Planning Using Collaborative Hypermedia Selvin, A M Buckingham Shum, S J AKT Showcase Papers Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing Knowledge modelling Many knowledge management (KM) efforts revolve around managing documents in a repository or enabling better real-time communication. An ideal approach would combine these with the ability to create knowledge content that can be either formal or informal in nature, in a rapid, real-time manner. We will call this Rapid Knowledge Construction (RKC). This paper describes the concepts underpinning our approach to RKC, and provides a case study of the approach in an industry context. The Compendium approach, which has been applied in projects in both industry and academic settings, facilitates the rapid creation of the content of a KM repository, by combining collaborative hypermedia, group facilitation techniques, and an analytical methodology rooted in knowledge acquisition and structured analysis. Compendium addresses key challenges for the successful introduction of KM technologies into work practice: (i) customization for different use contexts; (ii) integration of formal and informal communication; (iii) integration of both prescribed and ad hoc representations; (iv) validation and cross-referencing of the repository ‘on the fly’ at the point of entry; (v) conversion of organizational documents/emails into a hypertext database, and (vi) conversion of hypertext databases into organizational document formats. 2002-03-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/48/ coverimage http://eprints.aktors.org/48/02/kmi-tr-92-cover.jpg pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/48/03/kmi-tr-92.pdf

oai:aktors.org:51 2002-03-13

APECKS: Using and Evaluating a Tool for Ontology Construction with Internal and External KA Support Tennison, Dr Jeni O'Hara, Dr Kieron Shadbolt, Prof Nigel Knowledge acquisition This paper describes APECKS, an experimental tool for collaborative ontology construction. APECKS takes a different line to most ontology servers, in that it is designed for use by domain experts, possibly in the absence of a knowledge engineer, and its aim is to foster and support debate about domain ontologies. To that end, it does not enforce ideals of consistency or correctness, and instead allows different conceptualisations of a domain to coexist. The system architecture and lifecycle are introduced, and three extensive scenarios are outlined, showing how APECKS supports ontology construction, learning, ontology comparison and discussion. APECKS has also been used by several subjects during an evaluation experiment, and the results of this experiment are described. A particular factor about APECKS is that, as well as providing internal KA support, it is designed to interface with web-accessible KA tools, thereby allowing theoretically unlimited KA support for users. The prototype used WebGrid-II as external KA support, and the issues involved in integrating APECKS and WebGrid are discussed in detail. 2002-01-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/51/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000051/01/ijhcs-tennisonetal.pdf

oai:aktors.org:57 2002-04-17

An Expressive Constraint Language for Semantic Web Applications Gray, Prof Peter Hui, Dr Kit Preece, Dr Alun Knowledge modelling We present a framework for semantic web applications based on constraint interchange and processing. At the core of the framework is a well-established semantic data model (P/FDM) with an associated expressive constraint language (Colan). To allow data instances to be transported across a network, we map our data model to the RDF Schema specification. To allow constraints to be transported, we define a Constraint Interchange Format (CIF) in the form of an RDF Schema for Colan, allowing each constraint to be defined as a resource in its own right. We show that, because Colan is essentially a syntactically-sugared form of first-order logic, and P/FDM is based on the widely-used extended ER model, our CIF is actually very widely applicable and reusable. Finally, we outline a set of services for constraint fusion and solving, which are particularly applicable to business-to-business e-commerce applications. All of these services can be accessed using the CIF. 2001-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/57/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000057/01/preece.pdf

oai:aktors.org:58 2002-04-12

Constraints as Mobile Specifications in E-Commerce Applications Hui, Dr Kit-ying Gray, Prof Peter M. D. Kemp, Dr Graham J. L. Preece, Dr Alun D. Knowledge reuse We show how quantified constraints expressed in a sub-language of first-order logic, against a shared data model that is free to evolve, provide an excellent way of transporting domain-specific semantics along with the data. In this form it can be processed automatically by various intelligent components, instead of requiring human intervention, as it would do if expressed in natural language. It can also be combined with other contraints, by algebraic transformation against common data model, and then passed to an appropriate solver. These techniques have been tested in a classic e-business application scenario: configuring a product from parts selected from e-vendors' catalogues, whilst conforming to requirements specific to the parts, expressed as mobile constraints. 2001-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/58/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000058/01/hui-ds9-2001.pdf

oai:aktors.org:60 2002-04-19

Capturing knowledge of user preferences: ontologies in recommender systems Middleton, Mr Stuart E De Roure, Prof David C Shadbolt, Prof Nigel R AKT Showcase Papers Knowledge retrieval Tools for filtering the World Wide Web exist, but they are hampered by the difficulty of capturing user preferences in such a dynamic environment. We explore the acquisition of user profiles by unobtrusive monitoring of browsing behaviour and application of supervised machine-learning techniques coupled with an ontological representation to extract user preferences. A multi-class approach to paper classification is used, allowing the paper topic taxonomy to be utilised during profile construction. The Quickstep recommender system is presented and two empirical studies evaluate it in a real work setting, measuring the effectiveness of using a hierarchical topic ontology compared with an extendable flat list. 2001-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/60/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/60/01/Capturing_knowledge_of_user_preferences%2C_ontologies_in_recommender_systems1.pdf

oai:aktors.org:64 2002-05-09

The Internet: A Tool for Democratic Pluralism? O'Hara, Dr Kieron Knowledge maintenance No abstract 2002-01-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/64/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000064/01/SaC-review.pdf

oai:aktors.org:68 2002-05-28

Artequakt: Generating Tailored Biographies with Automatically Annotated Fragments from the Web Kim, Miss Sanghee Alani, Dr Harith Hall, Prof Wendy Lewis, Dr Paul Millard, Dr David Shadbolt, Prof Nigel Weal, Dr Mark AKT Showcase Papers Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing The Artequakt project seeks to automatically generate narrative biographies of artists from knowledge that has been extracted from the Web and maintained in a knowledge base. An overview of the system architecture is presented here and the three key components of that architecture are explained in detail, namely knowledge extraction, information management and biography construction. Conclusions are drawn from the initial experiences of the project and future progress is detailed. 2002-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/68/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/68/01/Artequakt-camera-ready.pdf

oai:aktors.org:71 2002-05-28

Exploiting Synergy between Ontologies and Recommender Systems Middleton, Mr Stuart Alani, Dr Harith Shadbolt, Prof Nigel De Roure, Prof Dave AKT Showcase Papers Knowledge acquisition Knowledge maintenance Recommender systems learn about user preferences over time, automatically finding things of similar interest. This reduces the burden of creating explicit queries. Recommender systems do, however, suffer from cold-start problems where no initial information is available early on upon which to base recommendations. Semantic knowledge structures, such as ontologies, can provide valuable domain knowledge and user information. However, acquiring such knowledge and keeping it up to date is not a trivial task and user interests are particularly difficult to acquire and maintain. This paper investigates the synergy between a web-based research paper recommender system and an ontology containing information automatically extracted from departmental databases available on the web. The ontology is used to address the recommender systems cold-start problem. The recommender system addresses the ontology’s interest-acquisition problem. An empirical evaluation of this approach is conducted and the performance of the integrated systems measured. 2002-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/71/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/71/01/Quickstep-Ontocopi.pdf

oai:aktors.org:72 2002-05-29

Initiating Organizational Memories Using Ontology Network Analysis Kalfoglou, Dr Yannis Alani, Dr Harith O'Hara, Dr Kieron Shadbolt, Prof Nigel AKT Showcase Papers Knowledge publishing Knowledge maintenance One of the important problems in organizational memories is their initial set-up. It is difficult to choose the right information to include in an organizational memory, and the right information is also a prerequisite for maximizing the uptake and relevance of the memory content. To tackle this problem, most developers adopt heavy-weight solutions and rely on a faithful continuous interaction with users to create and improve its content. In this paper, we explore the use of an automatic, light-weight solution, drawn from the underlying ingredients of an organizational memory: ontologies. We have developed an ontology-based network analysis method which we applied to tackle the problem of identifying communities of practice in an organization. We use ontology-based network analysis as a means to provide content automatically for the initial set-up of an organizational memory. 2002-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/72/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000072/01/kalfoglou_et_al_ecai_kmom02.pdf

oai:aktors.org:76 2002-06-29

Managing Reference: Ensuring Referential Integrity of Ontologies for the Semantic Web Alani, Dr Harith Dasmahapatra, Dr Srinandan Gibbins, Dr Nicholas Glaser, Hugh Harris, Steve Kalfoglou, Dr Yannis O'Hara, Dr Kieron Shadbolt, Prof Nigel Knowledge acquisition Knowledge maintenance The diversity and distributed nature of the resources available in the semantic web poses significant challenges when these are used to help automatically build an ontology. One persistent and pervasive problem is that of the resolution or elimination of coreference that arises when more than one identifier is used to refer to the same resource. Tackling this problem is crucial for the referential integrity, and subsequently the quality of results, of any ontology-based knowledge service. We have built a coreference management service to be used alongside the population and maintenance of an ontology. An ontology based knowledge service that identifies communities of practice (CoPs) is also used to maintain the heuristics used in the coreference management system. This approach is currently being applied in a large scale experiment harvesting resources from various UK computer science departments with the aim of building a large, generic web-accessible ontology. 2002-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/76/ ps http://eprints.aktors.org/76/01/ManagingReference-EKAW02.ps

oai:aktors.org:77 2003-02-18

Alice: Assisting Online Shoppers through Ontologies and Novel Interface Metaphors Domingue, Dr John Martins, Dr Maria Tan, Dr Jaicheng Stutt, Dr Arthur Pertusson, Mr Helgi AKT Showcase Papers Knowledge modelling In this paper we describe some results of the Alice project. Alice is an ontology based e-commerce project which aims to support online users in the task of shopping. Ontologies describing customers, products, typical shopping tasks and the external context form the basis for the Alice architecture. We also exploit two novel interface metaphors originally developed for navigating databases: the Guides metaphor and Dynamic Queries. The Guides metaphor was developed at Apple to reduce the cognitive load on learners navigating a large hypermedia database. Within Alice we use the Guides metaphor to allow online shoppers to classify themselves. We discuss the link between Alice Guides and Kozinet’s notion of e-tribes or Virtual Communities of Consumption. Our second interface metaphor Dynamic Queries (coupled with Starfield displays) allow users to very quickly find relevant items by displaying the results of queries, posed via specialised slider widgets, within 100 milliseconds. We have constructed a tool, Quiver, which constructs Dynamic Query interfaces on-the-fly as the result of queries to knowledge models stored on the Alice server. 2002-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/77/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/77/01/alice-ekaw-camera-ready-final.pdf

oai:aktors.org:78 2002-07-12

A Grammar-Driven Knowledge Acquisition Tool that incorporates Constraint Propagation White, Dr Simon Sleeman, Prof Derek Knowledge acquisition To acquire knowledge that is fit for a specific purpose, it is very desirable to have a structured, declarative expression of the knowledge that is needed. This paper introduces a stand-alone knowledge acquisition tool, called COCKATOO (Constraint-Capable Knowledge Acquisition Tool), which uses constraint technology to specify the knowledge it requires. The language in which these speci-fications are given is based on the meta-language notation of context-free grammars. However, we also took the op-portunity to build a tool that is both more flexible and pow-erful by augmenting context-free grammars with the ex-pressiveness of constraints. COCKATOO was imple-mented using the SCREAMER+ declarative constraints package. 2001-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/78/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/78/01/KCAP2001-final.PDF

oai:aktors.org:84 2002-09-06

Information Flow based ontology mapping Kalfoglou, Dr Yannis Schorlemmer, Dr Marco AKT Showcase Papers Knowledge reuse Knowledge modelling Knowledge maintenance As ontologies become ever more important for semantically-rich information exchange and a crucial element for supporting knowledge sharing in a large distributed environment, like the Web, the demand for sharing them increases accordingly. One way of achieving this ambitious goal is to provide mechanised ways for mapping and merging ontologies. This has been the focus of recent research in knowledge engineering. However, we observe a dearth of mapping methods that are based on a strong theoretical ground, are easy to replicate in different settings, and use semantically-rich mechanisms for performing ontology mapping. In this paper, we aim to fill in these gaps with a method we propose for Information-Flow-based ontology mapping. Our method draws on the proven theoretical ground of Information Flow and channel theory, and we provide a systematic and mechanised methodology for deploying it on a distributed environment to perform ontology mapping among a variety of different ontologies. We applied our method at a large-scale experiment of mapping five ontologies modelling Computer Science departments in five UK Universities. We elaborate on a theory for ontology mapping, analyse the mechanised steps of applying it, and assess its ontology mapping results. 2002-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/84/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/84/01/odbase02-final.pdf

oai:aktors.org:89 2003-01-14

Formal Support for Adaptive Workflow Systems in a Distributed Environment Chen-Burger, Dr. Yun-Heh Stader, Ms. Jussi Knowledge reuse Knowledge modelling To achieve more widespread application, Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) need to be developed to operate in dynamic environments where they are expected to ensure that users are supported in performing flexible and creative tasks while maintaining organisational norms. In order to cope with these demands, the systems must provide knowledge about the business process itself and the organisational context in that these processes operate. It, however, is not an easy task to provide the appropriate and sufficient knowledge at the right level of abstraction that supports a workflow system at all stages of operation in a dynamic environment and for different types of users. At the same time, Enterprise Modelling (EM) methods are well recognised for their value in describing complex domains in an organised but usually informal structure. In particular, business process modelling techniques provide rich conceptualisations that tend to describe the type of information required by the adaptive workflow systems. However, because of their lack of formal structure the use of Enterprise Models that have been developed is limited. We propose the use of a formal language within a three-layered framework. This language helps to turn the information contained in an informal Enterprise Model into the kind of formal model required by an adaptive Workflow System. In its current state of development, FBPML (Fundamental Business Process Modelling Language) covers business processes, organisational structure, agents and their capabilities as well as execution logic that gives direct instructions to a workflow engine. We assist modelling efforts of Enterprise Modellers by giving them a visual modelling language, underpinned by a formal representation, that is expressive and easy to use and that lets them specify the information required by a workflow engine. In this paper, we present our formal enterprise modelling language, FBPML. We show how adaptive workflow systems, like those developed at AIAI (e.g. the Task Based Process Manager, AKT Workflow and I-X system), can take advantage of Enterprise Models represented in FBPML to provide effective support to users in real business environments. 2003-01-01 Book Chapter http://eprints.aktors.org/89/ ps http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000089/01/chen-burger-2003.ps

oai:aktors.org:90 2003-02-07

GATE: A Framework and Graphical Development Environment for Robust NLP Tools and Applications Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition In this paper we present GATE, a framework and graphical development environment which enables users to develop and deploy language engineering components and resources in a robust fashion. The GATE architecture has enabled us not only to develop a number of successful applications for various language processing tasks (such as Information Extraction), but also to build and annotate corpora and carry out evaluations on the applications generated. The framework can be used to develop applications and resources in multiple languages, based on its thorough Unicode support. 2002-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/90/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/90/01/acl-main.pdf

oai:aktors.org:91 2003-02-07

Using Human Language Technology for Automatic Annotation and Indexing of Digital Library Content Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition In this paper we show how we used robust human language technology, such as our domain-independent and customisable named entity recogniser, for automatic content annotation and indexing in two digital library applications. Each of these applications posed a unique challenge: one required adapting the language processing components to the non-standard written conventions of 18th century English, while the other presented the challenge of processing material in multiple modalities. This reusable technology could also form the basis for the creation of computational tools for the study of cultural heritage languages, such as Ancient Greek and Latin. 2002-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/91/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/91/01/ecdl.pdf

oai:aktors.org:92 2003-02-07

Adapting A Robust Multi-Genre Named Entity System for Automatic Content Extraction Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition Many current information extraction systems tend to be designed with particular applications and domains in mind. With the increasing need for robust language engineering tools which can handle a variety of language processing demands, we have used the GATE architecture to design MUSE - a system for named entity recognition and related tasks. In this paper, we address the issue of how this general-purpose system can be adapted for particular applications with minimal time and effort, and how the set of resources used can be adapted dynamically and automatically. We focus specifically on the challenges of the ACE (Automatic Content Extraction) entity detection and tracking task, and preliminary results show promising figures. 2002-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/92/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/92/01/aimsa.pdf

oai:aktors.org:93 2003-02-07

A Light-weight Approach to Coreference Resolution for Named Entities in Text Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition This paper presents a lightweight approach to pronoun resolution in the case when the antecedent is named entity. It falls under the category of the so-called "knowledge poor" approaches that do not rely extensively on linguistic and domain knowledge. We provide a practical implementation of this approach as a component of the General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE). The results of the evaluation show that even such shallow and inexpensive approaches provide acceptable performance for resolving the pronoun anaphors of named entities in texts. 2002-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/93/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/93/01/DAARC2002.pdf

oai:aktors.org:94 2003-02-07

Developing Reusable and Robust Language Processing Components for Information Systems using GATE Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition In this paper we present GATE, an architecture and a graphical development environment which enables users to develop and deploy HLT applications in a robust fashion. GATE also provides reusable, extendable, and customisable language processing modules (e.g., part of speech tagger, named entity recognition grammars), which combined with the extensive document format support (e.g., XML, HTML), form a useful toolset for building HLT-augmented information systems. 2002-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/94/ ps http://eprints.aktors.org/94/01/nlis.ps

oai:aktors.org:96 2003-02-07

Hypertext in the Semantic Web Kampa, Dr Simon Miles-Board, Mr Timothy Carr, Dr Leslie Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing The Semantic Web extends the current state of the Web with well-defined meaning. We advocate the use of ontological hypertext as an application of the Semantic Web to provide a principled and structured approach to navigating the resources on the Web. This paper demonstrates how we have applied this concept to two real-world scenarios. 2001-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/96/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/96/01/sp.pdf

oai:aktors.org:97 2003-02-07

Linking with Meaning: Ontological Hypertext for Scholars Kampa, Dr Simon Miles-Board, Mr Timothy Carr, Dr Leslie Hall, Prof Wendy Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing The links in ontological hypermedia are defined according to the relationships between real-world objects. An ontology that models the significant objects in a scholar’s world can be used toward producing a consistently interlinked research literature. Currently the papers that are available online are mainly divided between subject- and publisher-specific archives, with little or no interoperability. This paper addresses the issue of ontological interlinking, presenting two experimental systems whose hypertext links embody ontologies based on the activities of researchers and scholars. 2001-03-01 Departmental Technical Report http://eprints.aktors.org/97/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000097/01/lwm.pdf

oai:aktors.org:98 2003-02-14

The Semantics of Semantic Annotation Bechhofer, Mr Sean Goble, Prof Carol Carr, Dr Leslie Kampa, Dr Simon Hall, Prof Wendy Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing Knowledge modelling Semantic metadata will play a significant role in the provision of the Semantic Web. Agents will need metadata that describes the content of resources in order to perform operations, such as retrieval, over those resources. In addition, if rich semantic metadata is supplied, those agents can then employ reasoning over the metadata, enhancing their processing power. Key to this approach is the provision of annotations, both through automatic and human means. The semantics of these annotations, however, in terms of the mechanisms through which they are interpreted and presented to the user, are sometimes unclear. In this paper, we identify a number of candidate interpretations of annotation, and discuss the impact these interpretations may have on Semantic Web applications. 2002-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/98/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/98/01/annotation.pdf

oai:aktors.org:100 2003-02-14

Conceptual Linking: Ontology-based Open Hypermedia Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing This paper describes the attempts of the COHSE project to define and deploy a Conceptual Open Hypermedia Service. Consisting of -an ontological reasoning service which is used to represent a sophisticated conceptual model of document terms and their relationships; -a Web-based open hypermedia link service that can offer a range of different link-providing facilities in a scalable and non-intrusive fashion; and integrated to form a conceptual hypermedia system to enable documents to be linked via metadata describing their contents and hence to improve the consistency and breadth of linking of WWW documents at retrieval time (as readers browse the documents) and authoring time (as authors create the documents). 2001-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/100/ html http://eprints.aktors.org/100/01/ConceptualLinking.html

oai:aktors.org:105 2003-02-20

Automatic Ontology-Based Knowledge Extraction from Web Documents Alani, Harith Kim, Sanghee Millard, David Weal, Mark Hall, Wendy Lewis, Paul Shadbolt, Nigel Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing To bring the Semantic Web to life and provide advanced knowledge services, we need efficient ways to access and extract knowledge from Web documents. Although Web page annotations could facilitate such knowledge gathering, annotations are rare and will probably never be rich or detailed enough to cover all the knowledge these documents contain. Manual annotation is impractical and unscalable, and automatic annotation tools remain largely undeveloped. Specialized knowledge services therefore require tools that can search and extract specific knowledge directly from unstructured text on the Web, guided by an ontology that details what type of knowledge to harvest. An ontology uses concepts and relations to classify domain knowledge. Other researchers have used ontologies to support knowledge extraction,1,2 but few have explored their full potential in this domain. The Artequakt project links a knowledge-extraction tool with an ontology to achieve continuous knowledge support and guide information extraction.//au: rewrite okay?// The extraction tool searches online documents and extracts knowledge that matches the given classification structure. It provides this knowledge in a machine-readable format that will be automatically maintained in a knowledge base (KB). Users could further enhance knowledge extraction using a lexicon-based term expansion mechanism that provides extended ontology terminology. 2003-02-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/105/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/105/01/IEEE-Artequakt.pdf

oai:aktors.org:106 2003-02-20

Initiating Organizational Memories using Ontology-based Network Analysis as a Bootstrapping Tool Alani, Harith Kalfoglou, Yannis O'Hara, Kieron Shadbolt, Nigel Knowledge retrieval An important problem for many kinds of knowledge systems is their initial set-up. It is difficult to choose the right information to include in such systems, and the right information is also a prerequisite for maximizing the uptake and relevance. To tackle this problem, most developers adopt heavyweight solutions and rely on a faithful continuous interaction with users to create and improve content. In this paper, we explore the use of an automatic, lightweight ontology-based solution to the bootstrapping problem, in which domain-describing ontologies are analysed to uncover significant yet implicit relationships between instances. We illustrate the approach by using such an analysis to provide content automatically for the initial set-up of an organizational memory. 2002-01-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/106/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/106/01/ExpertUpdate-Soton-final.pdf

oai:aktors.org:116 2003-02-27

Melita: Active Document Enrichment using Adaptive Information Extraction from Text Ciravegna, Dr. Fabio Dingli, Mr. Alexiei Petrelli, Dr. Daniela Knowledge acquisition The traditional process of document annotation for knowledge identification and extraction in the Semantic Web (SW) is complex and time consuming, as it requires human manual annotation. There is currently a strong interest in Text Mining technologies (and in particular in Human Language-based Technologies), for reducing the burden of text annotation e.g. for Knowledge Management [Maybury2001]. In this poster we present Melita, an annotation interface that uses Adaptive Information Extraction from texts (IE) for reducing the burden of text annotation. In Melita, adaptation starts with the definition of a scenario, including a tag set for annotation (possibly organized as an ontology) and a corpus of texts to be annotated. Annotations are inserted by first selecting a tag from the ontology and then identifying the text area to annotate with the mouse. Differently from similar annotation tools [Day1997, Cunningham2001], Melita actively supports corpus annotation using Amilcare, an adaptive Information Extraction (IE) tool based on the (LP)2 algorithm [Ciravegna2001]. 2002-01-01 Conference Poster http://eprints.aktors.org/116/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/116/01/iswc02.pdf

oai:aktors.org:118 2003-02-27

Adaptive Information Extraction from Text by Rule Induction and Generalisation Ciravegna, Dr. Fabio Knowledge acquisition (LP)2 is a covering algorithm for adaptive Information Extraction from text (IE). It induces symbolic rules that insert SGML tags into texts by learning from examples found in a userdefined tagged corpus. Training is performed in two steps: initially a set of tagging rules is learned; then additional rules are induced to correct mistakes and imprecision in tagging. Induction is performed by bottom-up generalization of examples in the training corpus. Shallow knowledge about Natural Language Processing (NLP) is used in the generalization process. The algorithm has a considerable success story. From a scientific point of view, experiments report excellent results with respect to the current state of the art on two publicly available corpora. From an application point of view, a successful industrial IE tool has been based on (LP)2. Real world applications have been developed and licenses have been released to external companies for building other applications. This paper presents (LP)2, experimental results and applications, and discusses the role of shallow NLP in rule induction. 2001-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/118/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/118/01/IJCAI01.pdf

oai:aktors.org:120 2003-02-27

(LP)2, an Adaptive Algorithm for Information Extraction from Web-related Texts Ciravegna, Dr. Fabio First Doctoral Symposium (LP)2 is an algorithm for adaptive Information Extraction from Web-related text that induces symbolic rules by learning from a corpus tagged with SGML tags. Induction is performed by bottom-up generalisation of examples in a training corpus. Training is performed in two steps: initially a set of tagging rules is learned; then additional rules are induced to correct mistakes and imprecision in tagging. Shallow NLP is used to generalise rules beyond the flat word structure. Generalization allows a better coverage on unseen texts, as it limits data sparseness and overfitting in the training phase. In experiments on publicly available corpora the algorithm outperforms any other algorithm presented in literature and tested on the same corpora. Experiments also show a significant gain in using NLP in terms of (1) effectiveness (2) reduction of training time and (3) training corpus size. In this paper we present the machine learning algorithm for rule induction. In particular we focus on the NLP-based generalisation and the strategy for pruning both the search space and the final rule set. 2001-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/120/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/120/01/Atem01.pdf

oai:aktors.org:122 2003-02-27

User Involvement in Adaptive Information Extraction: Position Paper Ciravegna, Dr. Fabio Petrelli, Dr. Daniella Knowledge acquisition In the last years, research on adaptive Information Extraction from text (IE) has largely focused on algorithms and systems adaptable to new Web-related applications/ scenarios by users with analyst’s knowledge, i.e. knowledge on the domain/scenario only, [Kushme rick 1997], [Califf 1998], [Muslea 1998], [Freitag 1999], [Soderland 1999], [Freitag 2000], [Ciravegna 2001]. Successful comme rcial products have been created and there is an increasing interest on IE in the Internet market. The more the focus is on the user, the more the need for user-specific tools arises. Most of the current approaches are based on an adaptation phase in which the user provides a set of texts with the relevant information highlighted or with associated filled templates. Tagging is just one part of the adaptation task, though, in building real world applications. Adaptation as a one-way process (from tagged examples to rules) is unlikely to provide optimized results for specific users, as different uses will require different types of results (e.g., high recall in some cases, high precision in others). There is the necessity, we believe, to fully support users during the whole adaptation process so to maximize effectiveness and appropriateness of the final application, and to minimize the burden of system adaptation. In this paper we discuss requirements for user involvement in application development in Amilcare, a system for adaptive IE. 2001-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/122/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/122/01/udie.pdf

oai:aktors.org:123 2003-02-27

User-System Cooperation in Document Annotation based on Information Extraction Ciravegna, Dr. Fabio Dingli, Mr. Alexiei Petrelli, Dr. Daniella Wilks, Prof. Yorick Knowledge acquisition The process of document annotation for the Semantic Web is complex and time consuming, as it requires a great deal of manual annotation. Information extraction from texts (IE) is a technology used by some very recent systems for reducing the burden of annotation. The integration of IE systems in annotation tools is quite a new development and there is still the necessity of thinking the impact of the IE system on the whole annotation process. In this paper we initially discuss a number of requirements for the use of IE as upport for annotation. Then we present and discuss a model of interaction that addresses such issues and Melita, an annotation framework that implements a methodology for active annotation for the Semantic Web based on IE. Finally we present an experiment that quantifies the gain in using IE as support to human annotators. 2002-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/123/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/123/01/ekaw2002.pdf

oai:aktors.org:124 2003-02-27

S-CREAM Semi-automatic CREAtion of Metadata Handschuh, Dr. Siegfried Staab, Dr. Steffen Ciravegna, Dr. Fabio Knowledge acquisition Richly interlinked, machine-understandable data constitute the basis for the Semantic Web. We provide a framework, S-CREAM,that allows for creation of metadata and is trainable for a speci¯c domain. Annotating web documents is one of the major techniques for creating metadata on the web. The implementation of S-CREAM, Ont-O-Mat supports now the semi-automatic annotation of web pages. This semi- automatic annotation is based on the information extraction component Amilcare. Ont-O-Mat extract with the help of Amilcare knowledge structure from web pages through the use of knowledge extraction rules. These rules are the result of a learning-cycle based on already annotated pages. 2002-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/124/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/124/01/ekaw2002scream-sub.pdf

oai:aktors.org:125 2003-02-27

User-Centred Onlology Learning for Knowledge Management Brewster, Mr. Christopher Ciravegna, Dr. Fabio Wilks, Prof. Yorick Knowledge acquisition Automatic ontology building is a vital issue in many fields where they are currently built manually. This paper presents a user-centred methodology for ontology construction based on the use of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. In our approach, the user selects a corpus of texts and sketches a preliminary ontology (or selects an existing one) for a domain with a preliminary vocabulary associated to the elements in the ontology (lexicalisa-tions). Examples of sentences involving such lexicalisation (e.g. ISA relation) in the corpus are automatically retrieved by the system. Retrieved examples are validated by the user and used by an adaptive Information Extraction system to generate patterns that discover other lexicalisations of the same objects in the ontology, possibly identifying new concepts or relations. New instances are added to the existing ontology or used to tune it. This process is repeated until a satisfactory ontology is obtained. The methodology largely automates the on-tology construction process and the output is an ontology with an associated trained leaner to be used for further ontology modifications. 2002-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/125/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/125/01/brewster_nldb02.pdf

oai:aktors.org:126 2003-02-27

Challenges in Information Extraction from Text for Knowledge Management Ciravegna, Dr. Fabio Knowledge acquisition Nowadays, most knowledge is stored in an unstructured textual format. We can’t query it in simple ways, thus automatic systems can’t use the contained knowledge and humans can’t easily manage it. The traditional knowledge management process for knowledge engineers has been to manually identify and extract knowledge—a complex and time-consuming process that requires a great deal of manual input. As an example consider the collection of interviews to experts (protocols) and their analysis by knowledge engineers in order to codify, model and extract the knowledge of an expert in a particular domain. In this context, information extraction from texts is one of the most promising areas of human language technology for KM applications. 2001-11-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/126/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/126/01/challenges.pdf

oai:aktors.org:127 2003-02-27

Using HLT for Acquiring, Retrieving and Publishing Knowledge in AKT: Position Paper Bontcheva, Dr. Kalina Brewster, Mr. Christopher Ciravegna, Dr. Fabio Cunningham, Dr. Hamish Guthrie, Dr. Louise Gaizauskas, Dr. Rob Wilks, Prof. Yorick Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing AKT is a major research project applying a variety of technologies to knowledge management. Knowledge is a dynamic, ubiquitous resource, which is to be found equally in an expert's head, under terabytes of data, or explicitly stated in manuals. AKT will extend knowledge management technologies to exploit the potential of the semantic web, covering the use of knowledge over its entire lifecycle, from acquisition to maintenance and deletion. In this paper we discuss how HLT will be used in AKT and how the use of HLT will affect different areas of KM, such as knowledge acquisition, retrieval and publishing. 2001-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/127/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/127/01/HLT_for_KM.pdf

oai:aktors.org:129 2003-02-27

Techniques for Automated Taxonomy Building: Towards Ontologies for Knowledge Management Brewster, Mr. Christopher Knowledge acquisition Ontologies have become widely accepted as the main method for representing knowledge in Knowledge Management (KM) applica-tions. Given the continuous and rapid change and dynamic nature of knowledge in all fields, automated methods for construct-ing ontologies are of great importance. All ontologies or taxonomies currently in use have been hand built and require consider-able manpower to keep up to date. Taxono-mies are less logically rigorous than ontolo-gies, and in this paper we consider the re-quirements for a system which automatically constructed taxonomies. There are a number of potentially useful methods for construct-ing hierarchically organised concepts from a collection of texts and there are a number of automatic methods which permit one to as-sociate one word with another. The impor-tant issue for the successful development of this research area is to identify techniques for labelling the relation between two candi-date terms, if one exists. We consider a number of possible approaches and argue that the majority are unsuitable for our re-quirements. 2002-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/129/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/129/01/BrewsterCLUK02.pdf

oai:aktors.org:130 2003-02-27

Knowledge Maintenance and the Frame Problem Brewster, Mr. Christopher Knowledge maintenance Knowledge maintenance is a major challenge for both knowledge management and the Semantic Web. Operating over the Semantic Web, there will be a network of collaborating agents, each with their own ontologies or knowledge bases. Change in the knowledge state of one agent may need to be propagated across a number of agents and their associated ontologies. The challenge is to decide how to propagate a change of knowl-edge state. The effects of a change in knowledge state cannot be known in advance, and so an agent cannot know who should be informed unless it adopts a simple ‘tell everyone – every-thing’ strategy. This situation is highly reminis-cent of the classic Frame Problem in AI. We argue that for agent-based technologies to suc-ceed, far greater attention must be given to creat-ing an appropriate model for knowledge update. In a closed system, simple strategies are possible (e.g. ‘sleeping dog’ or ‘cheap test’ or even com-plete checking). However, in an open system where cause and effect are unpredictable, a co-herent cost-benefit based model of agent interac-tion is essential. Otherwise, the effectiveness of every act of knowledge update/maintenance is brought into question. 2003-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/130/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/130/01/Brewster_CLUK03.pdf

oai:aktors.org:132 2003-02-27

Design Issues for Agent-based Resource Locator Systems Wills, Dr Gary Alani, Dr Harith Ashri, Mr Ronald Kalfoglou, Dr Yannis Kim, Dr Sanghee AKT Showcase Papers Knowledge retrieval Knowledge publishing Knowledge modelling While knowledge is viewed by many as an asset, it is often difficult to locate particular items within a large electronic corpus. This paper presents an agent based framework for the location of resources to resolve a specific query, and considers the associated design issue. Aspects of the work presented complements current research into both expertise finders and recommender systems. The essential issues for the proposed design are scalability, together with the ability to learn and adapt to changing resources. As knowledge is often implicit within electronic resources, and therefore difficult to locate, we have proposed the use of ontologies, to extract the semantics and infer meaning to obtain the results required. We explore the use of communities of practice, applying ontology-based networks, and e-mail message exchanges to aid the resource discovery process. 2002-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/132/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000132/02/pakm02-gbw-final.pdf

oai:aktors.org:135 2003-02-27

Knowledge Life Cycle Management over a Distributed Architecture Schorlemmer, Dr Marco Potter, Dr Stephen Robertson, Dr David Sleeman, Prof Derek Knowledge maintenance In order to address problems stemming from the dynamic nature of distributed systems, there is a need to be able to express the often neglected notions of the evolution and change of the knowledge components of such systems. This need becomes more pressing when one considers the potential of the Internet for distributed knowledge-based problem solving --- and the pragmatic issues surrounding knowledge integrity. In this paper, we introduce a formal calculus for describing transformations in the `life cycles' of knowledge components, along with ideas about the nature of distributed environments in which the ideas underpinning the calculus can be realised. The formality and level of abstraction of this language encourage the analysis of knowledge histories and allows useful properties about this knowledge to be inferred. These ideas are illustrated through the discussion of a particular case-study in knowledge evolution. 2002-01-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/135/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/135/01/klcm.pdf

oai:aktors.org:136 2003-02-27

Enabling Services for Distributed Environments: Ontology Extraction and Knowledge-Base Characterisation Sleeman, Prof Derek Robertson, Dr David Potter, Dr Stephen Schorlemmer, Dr Marco Knowledge reuse Existing knowledge base resources have the potential to be valuable components of the Semantic Web and similar knowledge-based environments. However, from the perspective of these environments, these resources are often undercharacterised, lacking the ontological and structural characterisation that would enable them to be exploited fully. In this paper we discuss two currently independent services, both integrated with their environment via a brokering mechanism. The first of these services is an ontology extraction tool, which can be used to identify ontological knowledge implicit in a knowledge base. The second service involves characterising a given knowledge base in terms of the topic it addresses and the structure of its knowledge. This characterisation should permit a knowledge base to be located and assessed as a potential candidate for re-use in a more intelligent and flexible manner. The discussion of some related research into brokering systems illustrates the roles that these services can play in distributed knowledge architectures as precursors to problem-directed transformation and reuse of knowledge resources. 2002-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/136/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/136/01/oekbc.pdf

oai:aktors.org:137 2003-02-27

Duality in Knowledge Sharing Schorlemmer, Dr Marco Knowledge reuse I propose a formalisation of knowledge sharing scenarios that aims at capturing the crucial role played by an existing duality between ontological theories to be merged and particular situations to be linked. I use diagrams in the Chu category and cocones and colimits over these diagrams to account for the reliability and optimality of knowledge sharing systems and show the advantage of this approach by re-analysing a system that shares knowledge between a probabilistic logic program and Bayesian belief networks. 2002-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/137/ ps http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000137/01/duality.ps

oai:aktors.org:138 2003-02-27

Automated Support for Composition of Transformational Components in Knowledge Engineering Schorlemmer, Dr Marco Robertson, Dr David Potter, Dr Stephen Knowledge maintenance The knowledge engineering world provides a rich source of software components for transforming formally expressed knowledge on a large scale, such as induction systems, knowledge base refiners and ontology merging tools. Although most of these systems have been designed as stand-alone components, there is interest in making them accessible on the Web, with the ultimate goal in mind that a knowledge engineer should be able, with a small amount of intellectual effort, to locate and assemble sequences of these components to perform complex transformations on large repositories of knowledge. The sorts of transformations used in knowledge engineering are not always trustworthy: some may not preserve the semantics of the knowledge transformed; some may not be able to perform a given transformation reliably under all circumstances. Therefore, it is crucial to have ways of inspecting the key properties we expect to be preserved by each transformational component and of describing how these properties change as new transformations are applied. We present initial experiments on a large-scale knowledge engineering problem and show how an abstract characterisation of knowledge-transformation steps, accompanied by a customisable editor, can allow a high degree of automation in this task. With such an editor we can analyse and represent sequences of general transformation steps and check if properties such as subsumption, completeness and soundness are preserved during different stages of the transformation, by analysing the structure of these sequences. 2002-01-01 Departmental Technical Report http://eprints.aktors.org/138/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/138/01/asctcke.pdf

oai:aktors.org:150 2003-03-01

Visualizing Argumentation: Software Tools for Collaborative and Educational Sense-Making Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing Knowledge modelling Computer Supported Argument Visualization is attracting attention across education, science, public policy and business. More than ever, we need sense-making tools to help negotiate understanding in the face of multi-stakeholder, ill-structured problems. In order to be effective, these tools must support human cognitive and discursive processes, and provide suitable representations, services and user interfaces. Visualizing Argumentation is written by practitioners and researchers for colleagues working in collaborative knowledge media, educational technology and organizational sense-making. It will also be of interest to theorists interested in software tools which embody different argumentation models. Particular emphasis is placed on the usability and effectiveness of tools in different contexts. Among the key features are: * Case studies covering educational, public policy, business and scientific argumentation * Resources on the companion website: www.VisualizingArgumentation.info "The old leadership idea of "vision" has been transformed in the face of wicked problems in the new organizational landscape. In this excellent book we find a comprehensive yet practical guide for using visual methods to collaborate in the construction of shared knowledge. This book is essential for managers and leaders seeking new ways of navigating complexity and chaos in the workplace." Charles J. Palus, Ph.D, Center for Creative Leadership, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA 2003-01-01 Book http://eprints.aktors.org/150/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/150/01/Flyer_Visualizing_Argumentation.pdf coverimage http://eprints.aktors.org/150/02/book_cover.gif

oai:aktors.org:151 2003-03-01

Semantically Marked Up... Now What? Buckingham Shum, Simon Domingue, John Motta, Enrico Knowledge retrieval Knowledge publishing "Wired...now what?",was the challenge from Apple's Mark Miller to educationalists as the Internet took off. A new infrastructure was being laid, but even now we still barely know how to use it effectively for learning. We can expect a similar scenario to unfold for the semantic web. Currently, the semantic web community is necessarily preoccupied with infrastructure design (e.g., knowledge representation languages for the web, scaling issues,standardising terminologies and agent interoperability). But once this infrastructure is in place, more persistent questions will remain concerning the technology's relationship to the people expected to use it. Specifically, we ask: How can the semantic web be used to support people in knowledge-intensive work? "Semantically marked up...now what?", is therefore a worthwhile question to balance prevailing discussion. 2001-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/151/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/151/02/SemWebNowWhat.pdf

oai:aktors.org:152 2003-03-01

A Spreading Activation Framework for Ontology-enhanced Adaptive Information Access within Organisations Hasan, Dr Md Maruf Knowledge retrieval AKT Submitted Knowledge maintenance This research investigates a unique Indexing Structure and Navigational Interface which integrates (1) ontology-driven knowledge-base (2) statistically derived indexing parameters, and (3) experts' feedback into a single Spreading Activation Framework to harness knowledge from heterogeneous knowledge assets. Within an organisation, organisational ontologies capture precise knowledge about organisational entities: people, projects, activities, information sources and so on. We extract useful entities and their relationships from an ontology-driven knowledge base. We also process collections of documents (archives) accumulated in heterogeneous information-bases within an organisation and derive indexing parameters. This information is then mapped to a weighted graph (spreading activation network). The network contains three distinct sets of nodes representing documents, ontological entities and statistically derived entities. Document nodes are connected to both ontology-driven entities and statistically derived entities, and vice-versa with relevant weights. Retrieval is performed by spreading query-based activation into the network and selecting the most-activated nodes. Experts as well as users in the organisation either navigate the network using associative relations among nodes or with specific queries. Expert’s feedback is captured and the network weights are continuously adapted. This framework essentially combines precise knowledge (ontology-driven), non-precise knowledge (statistically driven) and Expert’s feedback (adaptation and refining) into a single framework for effective information retrieval and navigation. 2003-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/152/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/152/01/1SSS103MHasan.pdf

oai:aktors.org:155 2003-03-01

Compendium: Making Meetings into Knowledge Events Selvin, A Buckingham Shum, S Sierhuis, M Conklin, J Zimmermann, B Palus, C Drath, W Horth, D Domingue, J Motta, E Li, G AKT Showcase Papers Knowledge reuse Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing Knowledge modelling Knowledge maintenance In this paper, we describe the Compendium methodology and suite of tools. Compendium is the result of over a decade's research and development at the intersection of collaborative modeling, organizational memory, computer-supported argumentation and meeting facilitation. We claim that Compendium offers innovative strategies for tackling several of the key challenges in managing knowledge: · improving communication between disparate communities tackling ill-structured problems · real time capture and integration of hybrid material (both predictable/formal, and unexpected/informal) into a reusable group memory · transforming the resulting resource into the right representational formats for different stakeholders. Our starting point is the face-to-face meeting, potentially the most pervasive knowledge-based activity in working life, but also one of the hardest to do well. Meetings in Compendium's perspective: 1. are untapped knowledge-intensive events: often they are unfocused, but they can be improved with facilitated tools that help participants express and visualize views in a shared, common display; 2. can be more tightly woven into the fabric of work: they are preceded and followed by much other communication and the generation of associated artifacts. Weaving the process and products of meetings into this broader web of activity must therefore be a priority. Firstly, we introduce the core elements of Compendium's approach to mediating face-to-face meetings (now used in a variety of large scale projects). We have found that a combination of facilitation with visual hypertext tools can improve potentially unproductive or explosive meetings between multiple stakeholders with competing priorities. Diverse perspectives can be captured, structured and integrated in a way that all participants collectively own as a trace of their discussions. In the process this constructs a structured, group memory which shows where the same concepts have been discussed in different contexts, why decisions were made, and allows one to harvest related concepts from multiple meetings. Secondly, we describe how these 'conversational maps' can be integrated with pre/post-meeting activities and documents. Compendium's maps are designed to support the granular representation of concepts (as hypertext database objects) so that they can be spatially organized, recombined and reused in multiple contexts. We are developing ways to convert material in conventional applications such as written documents, emails and spreadsheets into concept maps, so that their contents can be analysed in new ways, and integrated with other maps. Conversely, we have placed great emphasis on generating alternate documents directly from maps, since one of the most common purposes of meetings is to advance a project deliverable of some sort, typically, an organizational document of an established genre, using established notations and stylistic conventions. We automatically transform visual maps to file formats for other applications, so that other user communities can immediately benefit from the meeting's collective work. This is illustrated in a number of ways: · Transforming maps into formal notations (eg. data flow diagrams), and requirements documents following established formats · Using maps as a collaborative knowledge-elicitation interface, generating input for knowledge-based applications and simulations · From synchronous to asynchronous interaction: transforming maps created in real time into web-based interactive discussion-documents to solicit wider, asynchronous input · Ontology-based formalization: in domains where it is possible to work with formal knowledge models, discussion-documents can be annotated with links to ontologies · Engaging with visual, emotional knowledge: using maps to capture collaborative sense-making using images to express intuitions and metaphors. To conclude, Compendium excels in enabling groups to collectively elicit, organize and validate information required by a particular community for a particular purpose. In order to integrate this with pre/post-meeting processes and artifacts, these maps can be generated by, and transformed into, other document formats, enabling asynchronous discussions around the contents of maps, and other forms of computation and analysis. In our experiences to date, the domain independence of Compendium's mapping technique for meetings, combined with its interoperability with domain-specific applications, provides a powerful platform for knowledge construction and negotiation. 2001-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/155/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/155/01/kmi-tr-103.pdf

oai:aktors.org:156 2003-03-01

CoAKTinG: Collaborative Advanced Knowledge Technologies in the Grid Buckingham Shum, S DeRoure, D Eisenstadt, M Shadbolt, N Tate, A CoAKTinG Knowledge acquisition Grid infrastructures coupled with semantic web linkage and reasoning open up intriguing new possibilities for scientific collaboration. In this short paper, we outline the research agenda and collaboration technologies under development within the CoAKTinG project: Collaborative Advanced Knowledge Technologies in the Grid. CoAKTinG will provide tools to assist scientific collaboration by integrating intelligent meeting spaces, ontologically annotated media streams from online meetings, decision rationale and group memory capture, meeting facilitation, issue handling, planning and coordination support, constraint satisfaction, and instant messaging/presence. Their integration is illustrated through an extended use scenario. 2002-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/156/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/156/01/CoAKTinG-WACE2002.pdf

oai:aktors.org:157 2003-03-01

JIME: An Interactive Journal for Interactive Media Buckingham Shum, S Sumner, T AKT Showcase Papers Knowledge publishing How can new media positively transform scholarly practices? In this article, we describe the Journal of Interactive Media in Education (JIME: www-jime.open.ac.uk). JIME's peer review process is designed to promote multidisciplinary dialogue through the use of a purpose-designed Web document-discussion interface. This innovative peer review model and the resulting 'enriched' digital documents illustrate some of the possibilities for promoting knowledge construction and preserving intellectual products in digital scholarly publications. We present JIME's technical infrastructure, editorial policy, and peer review process, and discuss how these features are used to support the journal's goals. Finally, we conclude by considering what aspects of our approach might be suitable for eJournals in other disciplines. 2001-01-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/157/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/157/01/kmi-tr-99.pdf

oai:aktors.org:162 2003-03-01

Informal Semantics for the FBPML Data Language Chen-Burger, Dr. Yun-Heh Knowledge modelling FBPML is a merging and adaptation of two recognised process modelling languages (PML): PSL [7] and IDEF3 [8]. PSL provides formal semantics for commonly shared process modelling concepts as well as theories such as situation calculus that support the use of such concepts. As it is designed to be an interchange language between different process languages, it covers the core concepts in PML, but does not provide visual notations or model development methods. IDEF3 is originated from manufacturing environment and is one of the richest methods available in the process modelling community. It provides visual notations and a rich modelling method. Nevertheless, its semantic is informal and its models therefore may be open to interpretation. It is therefore useful to combine the two different methods, i.e. to gain advantages from the rich modelling method from IDEF3 and provide it with a formal semantics and necessary theories from PSL, so that reasoning mechanism and formal analysis may be carry out on those models. FBPML is such a modelling language. 2002-10-01 Departmental Technical Report http://eprints.aktors.org/162/ msword http://eprints.aktors.org/162/01/fbpml-dl.doc

oai:aktors.org:163 2003-03-01

Enterprise Modelling: A Declarative Approach for FBPML Chen-Burger, Dr. Yun-Heh Tate, Prof. Austin Robertson, Dr. Dave Knowledge acquisition Knowledge modelling Enterprise Modelling (EM) methods are well-recognised for their value in describing complex, informal domains in an organised structure. EM methods are used in practice, particularly during the early stages of software system development, e.g. during the phase of business requirements elicitation. The built model, however, has not always provided direct input to software system development. Despite the provision of adequate training to understand and use EM methods, informality is often seen in enterprise models and presents a major obstacle. This paper focuses on one type of EM methods: business process modelling (BPM) methods. We advocate the use of a BPM language within a three-layer framework. The BPM language merges two main and complimentary business process representations, IDEF3 and PSL, to introduce a Fundamental Business Process Modelling Language (FBPML) that is designed for simplicity of use and under-pinned by rich formality that may be used directly to support software and workflow system development. 2002-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/163/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/163/01/fbpml.pdf

oai:aktors.org:164 2003-03-01

Knowledge Based Multi-Perspective Framework For Enterprise Modelling Chen-Burger, Dr. Yun-Heh Knowledge acquisition Knowledge modelling Multi-perspective modelling MPM techniques allow the presentation and analysis of complex organisational knowledge from different points of view, thus allowing the knowledge to be used for different purposes. This paper describes the multi-perspective modelling approach that has been adopted as a part of the Air Operation Enterprise Modelling (AOEM) project. Three models have been developed: a Business Model to describe the concepts and processes that are used in the context of air operations, a Role Activity and Communication Model to identify actors involved and the operations and interactions between them, and a Domain-Model to provide a taxonomic structure to capture all concepts that are important to the air operation. To assist the Multi-Perspective modelling efforts, a formal framework has been proposed which uses Domain-Model as a light-weight ontology to provide communication of domain knowledge between models which was carried out under the AKT (Advanced Knowledge Technologies) project. This paper shows how the underlying formal method provides the basis for the automation of communication and translation for semi-formal enterprise modelling methods. We also demonstrate how the light-weight ontology Domain-Model can be used as a foundation to provide error-checking and partial quality assurance of multiple models. We suggest that the MPM approach is valuable in representing, understanding and analysing a complex domain, but that much automated support is still needed. 2001-02-01 Departmental Technical Report http://eprints.aktors.org/164/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/164/01/KB-MPM.pdf

oai:aktors.org:165 2003-03-01

Sharing and Checking Organisation Knowledge Chen-Burger, Dr. Yun-Heh Knowledge acquisition Knowledge modelling The approach of Multi-Perspective Enterprise Modelling is now more commonly accepted and used in practice as a way to manage organisational knowledge than ever before. However, the concept of applying multiple modelling languages to describe the same domain may still sound frightening to many. In addition to the cost, time and complexity involved, problems such as knowledge sharing between multiple models and achieving and maintaining integrity between them are also important. We argue that Multi-Perspective Enterprise Modelling is helpful and in some situations necessary. This paper gives examples of how formal methods, such as logical languages, can provide assistance in making such an approach more appealing and transparent. We suggest that the MPM approach is valuable in representing, understanding and analysing a complex domain, such organisational knowledge, but that much automated support is needed. 2002-01-01 Book Chapter http://eprints.aktors.org/165/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/165/01/kluwer-e-print.pdf

oai:aktors.org:167 2003-03-04

Agent-based Semantic Web Services Gibbins, Dr Nicholas Harris, Mr Stephen Shadbolt, Professor Nigel Knowledge retrieval Knowledge publishing The Web Services world consists of loosely-coupled distributed systems which adapt to ad-hoc changes by the use of service descriptions that enable opportunistic service discovery. At present, these service descriptions are semantically impoverished, being concerned with describing the functional signature of the services rather than characterising their meaning. In the Semantic Web community, the DAML Services effort attempts to rectify this by providing a more expressive way of describing Web services using ontologies. However, this approach does not separate the domain-neutral communicative intent of a message considered in terms of speech acts) from its domain-specific content, unlike similar developments from the multi-agent systems community. In this paper, we describe our experiences of designing and building an ontologically motivated Web Services system for situational awareness and information triage in a simulated humanitarian aid scenario. In particular, we discuss the merits of using techniques from the multi-agent systems community for separating the intentional force of messages from their content, and the implementation of these techniques within the DAML Services model. 2003-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/167/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/167/01/p455-gibbins.pdf

oai:aktors.org:169 2003-03-24

Knowledge Acquisition for Knowledge Management: Position Paper Brewster, Mr Christopher Ciravegna, Dr. Fabio Wilks, Prof. Yorick Knowledge acquisition Knowledge is only of value when it can be used effectively and efficiently. The management of knowledge is a key element in extracting its value. In this position paper we have outlined how we are addressing the issue of automating the Knowledge Acquisition process in order to reduce both required time and cost of KA, and subjectivity in the resulting ontology. Overall we believe, this will make knowledge management not only more acceptable in a commercial environment but also contribute to the overall productivity of the economy. 2001-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/169/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/169/01/KA-IJCAI_2001.pdf

oai:aktors.org:171 2003-03-28

Mining Web Sites Using Unsupervised Adaptive Information Extraction Ciravegna, Dr. Fabio Dingli, Mr. Alexeie Guthrie, Mr. David Wilks, Prof. Yorick Knowledge acquisition Adaptive Information Extraction systems (IES) are currently used by some Semantic Web (SW) annotation tools as support to annotation (Handschuh et al., 2002; Vargas-Vera et al., 2002). They are generally based on fully supervised methodologies requiring fairly intense domain-specific annotation. Unfortunately, selecting representative examples may be difficult and annotations can be incorrect and require time. In this paper we present a methodology that drastically reduce (or even remove) the amount of manual annotation required when annotating consistent sets of pages. A very limited number of user-defined examples are used to bootstrap learning. Simple, high precision (and possibly high recall) IE patterns are induced using such examples, these patterns will then discover more examples which will in turn discover more patterns, etc. 2003-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/171/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/171/01/eacl2003.pdf

oai:aktors.org:172 2003-04-11

Identifying Communities of Practice through Ontology Network Analysis Alani, Harith Dasmahapatra, Srinandan O'Hara, Kieron Shadbolt, Nigel Knowledge retrieval Communities of practice—groups of individuals interested in a particular job, procedure, or work domain—informally swap insights on work-related tasks, often through quick chats by the water cooler. They act as corporate memories, transfer best practice, provide mechanisms for situated learning, and act as foci for innovation. Increasingly, organizations are harnessing communities of practice to carry out important knowledge management functions. However, a significant first step is identifying the community, which often doesn’t designate itself as such, and its members, who don’t know they belong! So, this step involves determining which people in a community of practice have common interests in particular practices or functions and producing sets or clusters of related individuals. Community identification traditionally demands heavy resources and often includes extensive interviewing. In this article, we describe Ontocopi (Ontology-Based Community of Practice Identifier), a tool to help identify communities. Ontocopi lets you infer the informal relations that define a community of practice from the presence of more formal relations. For instance, if A and B have no formal relation but they have both authored papers with C (formal relation), they might share interests (informal relation). Because Ontocopi works in this way, we cannot claim without qualification that it identifies communities of practice. Significant informal relations might have little or no connection to the formal ones. Here, we refer to the networks uncovered by Ontocopi as COPs and to informal social networks as communities of practice. We work under the assumption that COPs are sometimes decent proxies for communities of practice. 2003-03-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/172/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000172/01/x2alani.lo.pdf

oai:aktors.org:186 2003-06-23

Socrates, Trust and the Internet O'Hara, Dr Kieron AKT In Progress Knowledge maintenance Socrates, one of the world’s greatest philosophers, never wrote anything, and confined all his philosophy to spoken debate. The important issues for Socrates were trust and control: he felt the radical decontextualisation that resulted from the portability and stasis of written forms would obscure the author’s intentions, and allow the misuse of the written outside of the local context. Trust has once more become a central problem, both politically and epistemologically, but since Socrates’ day, various technologies have undermined his distinction, making the relationship between trustworthiness and linguistic mode more complex. In this paper, I review the state of the art in Internet technologies, showing (a) how developers and authors attempt to establish trust in their websites or e-commerce processes, and (b) how new work in dynamic content creation further blurs the spoken/written and global/local distinctions. 2003-08-01 Other http://eprints.aktors.org/186/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/186/01/trust-ohara-kansaigaidai.pdf

oai:aktors.org:234 2003-07-10

A hybrid approach to extend DLbased reasoning with concrete domains Hu, Bo Compatangelo, Ernesto Arana, Ines Knowledge reuse Knowledge modelling We propose a new hybrid approach which extends the expressive power of DL languages by incorporating concrete domains.Without modifying the DL inference algorithms,our approach uses the results of other non-DL inferential engines to reason about terminological knowledge.Constraints involving concrete domains are reasoned and replaced with equivalent concept restrictions exclusively based on the expressive power of the DL languages selected as the DL-based inferential engines.Meanwhile, We outline a system architecture that can support such an approach, which involves a homogeneous knowledge representation and hybrid reasoning. 2001-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/234/ ps http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000234/01/su

oai:aktors.org:235 2003-07-10

K-ShaRe: Knowledge Sharing and Reuse in AKT. Compatangelo, Ernesto Sleeman, Derek Knowledge reuse This paper clarifies the major aims and objectives of knowledge sharing and reuse proposed to the AKT consortium, denoted as K¡ShaRe (and pronounced key-share). Firstly, we outline the regions of the knowledge modelling space which we will focus on, discussing some principles underpinning the K¡ShaRe vision such as the choice of abstraction, type and representation levels. Secondly, we introduce the notion of levels of competence in knowledge management, detailing the major functionalities at each level, with particular emphasis on sharing and reuse reuse functionalities. We present simple examples of each functionality, discussing their mutual links and providing hints for their implementation. Finally, we summarise some relevant features of an intelligent knowledge management environment currently under development. This environment, called ConcepTool, will provide support for knowledge reuse as well as for other knowledge lifecycle activities. 2001-01-01 Departmental Technical Report http://eprints.aktors.org/235/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000235/01/Comp-Slee_AUCS-TR0103.pdf

oai:aktors.org:236 2003-07-10

A Constraint-Based Approach to the Description & Detection of Fitness-for-Purpose. Sleeman, Derek White, Simon Knowledge maintenance This paper introduces the notion of fitness-for-purpose, presents a tractable, approximate approach to the recognition of fitness-for-purpose, and describes a working implementation using constraint programming. The property of fitness-for-purpose states whether running a software component with a supplied set of inputs can satisfy a given goal. Our interest is to assess whether a chosen problem solver, together with one or more knowledge bases, can satisfy a given problem-solving goal. In general, this is an intractable problem. We therefore introduce an effective, practical, approximation to fitness-for-purpose based on the plausibility of the goal. We believe that constraint programming provides a natural approach to the implementation of such approximations. We took the Common LISP constraints library SCREAMER and extended its symbolic capabilities to suit our purposes. 2002-01-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/236/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000236/01/p128-etai-final.pdf

oai:aktors.org:237 2003-07-10

Coordinated reasoning with inference fusion. Knowledge reuse Knowledge modelling We discuss a new approach which uses inference fusion,i.e. the cooperative reasoning from distributed heterogeneous inference systems, in order to extend the scope of deductions based on description logics. More specifically, our approach integrates results from a description logics reasoner with results from a constraint solver. Inference fusion (i) processes heterogeneous input knowledge,generating suitable homogeneous input knowledge for each specialised reasoner; (ii) passes control to each reasoner, collecting their results and making them available to the other reasoner for further inferencing; (iii) combines the results of the two reasoners. We outline the main features of inference fusion by way of a small example. 2002-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/237/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000237/01/Meis-Comp_ICTAI-2002.url.pdf

oai:aktors.org:238 2003-07-10

Detecting Mismatches Among Experts' Ontologies Acquired through Knowledge Elicitation Hameed, Adil Sleeman, Derek Preece, Alun Knowledge reuse We have constructed a set of ontologies modelled on conceptual structures elicited from several domain experts. Protocols were collected from various experts who advise on the selection/specification and purchase of PCs. These protocols were analysed from the perspective of both the processes and the domain knowledge to reflect each expert’s inherent conceptualisation of the domain. We are particularly interested in analysing discrepancies within and among such experts’ ontologies, and have identified a range of ontology mismatches. A systematic approach to the analysis has been developed; subsequently we shall develop software tools to support this process. 2002-01-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/238/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000238/01/p135-kbs.pdf

oai:aktors.org:239 2003-07-10

EER-ConcepTool: a "reasonable" environment for schema and ontology sharing. Knowledge reuse We propose a system which supports knowledge sharing through the articulation of the overlapping components in two or more schemas or ontologies. EER-CONCEPTOOL uses Description Logics (DLs) to formalise and capture some relevant features of knowledge described using an Enhanced Entity-Relationship (EER) model. We describe how DL-based reasoning can provide a relevant part of the semiautomated deductive support needed to specify the articulation (i.e. the shared content) of two EER knowledge bases.We also show how a more effective level of support can be provided by the EER-CONCEPTOOL architecture, which combines DL-based deductions with lexical analysis and heuristic inferences. We illustrate the approach to knowledge articulation in our system by way of an example. 2002-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/239/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000239/01/Meis-Comp_ICTAI-2002.pdf

oai:aktors.org:240 2003-07-10

EER-CONCEPTOOL: conceptual analysis of EER schemas and ontologies Compatangelo, Ernesto Meisel, Helmut Knowledge modelling We have developed an intelligent knowledge management environment called EER-ConcepTool, which analyses conceptual schemas and ontologies. In this paper, we show how analysis supports knowledge modelling and validation at the conceptual level through a combination of di®erent logicbased and heuristic reasoning services. We highlight how EER-ConcepTool overcomes some typical drawbacks of current intelligent analysers, outlining how it can be used to provide enhanced support to knowledge modelling.Knowledge in EER-ConcepTool is represented using a formal,expressive entity-relationship model. This knowledge model includes entity identifiers, relationship attributes and a full range of participatory cardinality constraints. It also allows multiple inheritance, disjointness and full coverage assertions for entities and relationships.EER-ConcepTool provides a complete set of automated services (e.g. consistency, classification, explicitation and propagation of constraints, linguistic correlation) to analyse schemas and application ontologies based on the above knowledge model. During analysis, EER-ConcepTool can ignore selected portions of the expressive power of this model in order to increase the number and the generality of its deductions.We show how this feature can be used to provide a simple mechanism which explains schema inconsistencies. 2002-01-01 Departmental Technical Report http://eprints.aktors.org/240/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000240/01/Meis-Comp_ICTAI-2002.url.pdf

oai:aktors.org:241 2003-07-10

Intelligent support to knowledge sharing through the articulation of class schemas. Knowledge reuse We propose a disciplined approach which enhances the role and the extent of semantic reasoning in semi-automated support to knowledge sharing.We adopt a Description Logic (DL) to formalise a class-centred, enhanced entity-relationship knowledge model. In this way, we benefit from the specialised epistemological reasoning services available in DL-based inferential engines. Epistemological deductions are combined with heuristic and linguistic inferences. They are used to propose a semantic articulation of overlapping components in conceptual schemas. This approach to knowledge sharing has been implemented as a support functionality in our intelligent knowledge management environment CONCEPTOOL. 2002-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/241/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000241/01/Meis-Comp_ICTAI-2002.url.pdf

oai:aktors.org:242 2003-07-10

Mobile Constraints for Semantic Web Applications Gray, Peter Hui, Kit Preece, Alun Knowledge reuse Knowledge modelling We present a framework for semantic web applications based on constraint interchange and processing.At the core of the framework is a well-established semantic data model (P/FDM)with an associated expressive constraint language(Colan).To allow data instances to be transported across a network, we map our data model to the RDF Schema specification.To allow constraints to be transported, we define a Constraint Interchange Format(CIF) in the form of an RDF Schema for Colan, allowing each constraint to be defined as a resource in its own right.We show that, because Colan is essentially a syntactically-sugared form of first-order logic, and P/FDM is based on the widely used extended ER model, our CIF is actually very widely applicable and reusable.Finally, we outline a set of services for constraint fusion and solving, which are particularly applicable to business-to-business e-commerce applications.These services are accessible using the CIF. 2002-01-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/242/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000242/01/iip2002.pdf

oai:aktors.org:244 2003-07-10

Reconciling Experts' Ontologies for the Semantic Web Knowledge reuse Knowledge maintenance Just as the World Wide Web in its current form has become the defacto medium for sharing information and data resources, the emerging Semantic Web will certainly become the common fabric and the enabling factor for knowledge sharing and collaboration. In addition to (re)using existing knowledge repositories, there will be a need to share and reuse knowledge with several collaborating experts. Ontologies can be the facilitating technology for this purpose. However, it would be necessary to reconcile separately developed ontologies and evolve a consensus among them before the underlying knowledge can be shared or reused. To illustrate how significant it is to maintain and manage heterogeneity between ontologies, we present 3 interesting scenarios that can contribute to the Semantic Web. 2002-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/244/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000244/01/p131-sardinia.pdf

oai:aktors.org:248 2003-07-10

K-ShaRe: an architecture for sharing heterogeneous conceptualisations. Compatangelo, Ernesto Meisel, Helmut Knowledge reuse Knowledge modelling We propose an architecture for the development of an intelligent knowledge management environment based on description logics. This environment addresses the problem of heterogeneous reasoning underpinning knowledge analysis,sharing, and reuse. We explicitly focus on selectively variable expressive power, hybrid reasoning about expressive knowledge, and heuristic lexical reasoning, with major emphasis on reasoning at the conceptual level.We outline the usage of emulators in semantic analysis, describing how conceptual reasoning jointly extends and constrains how the description logic is used for the purpose of semantic reasoning. Most critical portions of the K¡ShaRe architecture have been either implemented as part of our CONCEPTOOL support system or as standalone functionalities. 2002-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/248/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000248/01/Meis-Comp_ICTAI-2002.url.pdf

oai:aktors.org:249 2003-07-10

Language engineering tools for collaborative corpus annotation Cunningham, Dr Hamish Tablan, Mr Valentin Bontcheva, Dr Kalina Dimitrov, Mr Marin Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition A vital step towards the creation of distributed corpora is the provision of tools for collaborative corpus annotation, in order to enable researchers to collaborate on annotating corpora regardless of their physical location. This problem can be decomposed in two major tasks: (i) provide users with access to distributed corpora; and (ii) provide visualisation and editing tools that require no installation effort and are easy to use. In this paper we will present the new collaborative corpus annotation facilities, recently developed as part of the GATE language engineering tools and infrastructure. These facilities have been used to build OLLIE - a client-server application that allows users to use the collaborative corpus annotation facilities in their own Web browse 2003-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/249/ msword http://eprints.aktors.org/249/01/distrib-ollie-cl03.doc

oai:aktors.org:250 2003-07-10

Semantic Web Enabled, Open Source Language Technology Bontcheva, Dr Kalina Kiryakov, Mr Atanas Cunningham, Dr Hamish Popov, Mr Borislav Dimitrov, Mr Marin Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition This paper motivates the need for Semantic Web enabled language technology tools and introduces a set of freely available, customisable components which integrate data about language with Semantic Web data in the form of ontologies. We also argue for a closer integration between Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Semantic Web tools and infrastructures and present an integrated platform for knowledge and information management, that uses RDF to encode and store language data and resources. 2003-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/250/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/250/01/bontcheva-etal-final.pdf

oai:aktors.org:251 2003-07-10

Experiments with geographic knowledge for information extraction Manov, Mr Dimitar Kiryakov, Mr Atanas Popov, Mr Borislav Bontcheva, Dr Kalina Maynard, Dr Diana Cunningham, Dr Hamish Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition Here we present work on using spatial knowledge in conjunction with information extraction (IE). Considerable volume of location data was imported in a knowledge base (KB) with entities of general importance used for semantic annotation, indexing, and retrieval of text. The Semantic Web knowledge representation standards are used, namely RDF(S). An extensive upper-level ontology with more than two hundred classes is designed. With respect to the locations, the goal was to include the most important categories considering public and tasks not specially related to geography or related areas. The locations data is derived from number of publicly available resources and combined to assure best performance for domainindependent named-entity recognition in text. An evaluation and comparison to high performance IE application is given 2003-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/251/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/251/01/paper03.pdf

oai:aktors.org:252 2003-10-05

The Semantic Web: A New Opportunity and Challenge for Human Language Technology Bontcheva, Dr Kalina Cunningham, Dr Hamish Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing This position paper motivates the need for Semantic Web enabled Human Language Technology (HLT) tools and discusses the major outstanding challenges in this area. It introduces the idea of a ``language loop" and shows how HLT can be used to bridge the gap between the current web of language and the Semantic Web. We also argue for a closer integration between HLT and Semantic Web tools and infrastructures. 2003-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/252/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/252/01/paper03.pdf

oai:aktors.org:253 2003-07-11

Knowledge Management using Business Process Modeling and Workflow Techniques Kuo, Ms. Hsiang-Ling Chen-Burger, Dr. Yun-Heh Robertson, Dr. Dave Knowledge acquisition Knowledge modelling The paper describes formalisation and automation of a business process modelling language FBPML. 2003-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/253/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000253/01/2003-hsiang-ijcai-ws.pdf

oai:aktors.org:254 2003-07-11

Delivering Intelligent Planning Information to Mobile Devices Users in Collaborative Environments Lino, Ms. Natasha Queiroz Tate, Prof. Austin Siebra, Mr. Clauirton Chen-Burger, Dr. Yun-Heh Knowledge acquisition Knowledge modelling Delivering Intelligent Planning Information to Mobile Devices Users in Collaborative Environments 2003-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/254/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/254/01/2003-natasha-ijcai-ws.pdf

oai:aktors.org:255 2003-07-16

Formal Knowledge Management in Distributed Environments Schorlemmer, Dr Marco Potter, Dr Stephen Robertson, Dr David Sleeman, Prof Derek Knowledge maintenance In order to address problems stemming from the dynamic nature of distributed systems, there is a need to be able to express the often neglected notions of the evolution and change of the knowledge components of such systems. This need becomes more pressing when one considers the potential of the Internet for distributed knowledge-based problem solving --- and the pragmatic issues surrounding knowledge integrity and trust this raises. In this paper, we introduce a formal calculus for describing transformations in the `lifecycles' of knowledge components, along with ideas about the nature of distributed environments in which the ideas underpinning the calculus can be realised. The formality and level of abstraction of this language encourages the analysis of knowledge histories and allows useful properties about this knowledge to be inferred. These ideas are illustrated through the discussion of a particular case-study in knowledge evolution. 2002-06-01 Conference Poster http://eprints.aktors.org/255/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/255/01/fkmde2.pdf

oai:aktors.org:259 2004-09-24

Ontology Extraction for Distributed Environments Sleeman, Derek Robertson, David Potter, Stephen Schorlemmer, Marco Knowledge reuse Existing knowledge base resources have the potential to be valuable components of the Semantic Web and similar knowledge-based environments. However, from the perspective of these environments, these resources are often under-characterised, lacking the ontological characterisation that would enable them to be exploited fully. In this chapter we discuss a technique which can be applied to identify ontological knowledge implicit in a knowledge base. Based on this technique, a tool has been implemented which allows this knowledge to be extracted, thereby promoting the re-use of the resource. A discussion of some complementary research into brokering services within distributed knowledge architectures serves to illustrate the sort of environment in which such re-use might be enacted. 2003-01-01 Book Chapter http://eprints.aktors.org/259/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/259/01/oede.pdf

oai:aktors.org:260 2003-07-16

Using Information-Flow Theory to Enable Semantic Interoperability Schorlemmer, Dr Marco Kalfoglou, Dr Yannis Knowledge reuse We observe an ever growing need for integration in today's research agendas across a variety of organisations. The proliferation of ontologies and other similar knowledge-rich and labour-intensive structures as well as their exposure to a distributed environment like the Web, and eventually its successor, the Semantic Web, justifies the need. Although a plethora of solutions have been proposed and used, there are many issues which remain unclear. The most striking one is the antithesis in the availability of solutions for semantic integration as opposed to the abundance of techniques and methods for syntactic integration. In this paper we make the first step towards semantic integration by proposing a mathematically sound application of channel theory to enable semantic interoperability of separate ontologies representing similar domains. 2003-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/260/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000260/01/ios35.pdf

oai:aktors.org:262 2003-07-17

Facilitated Hypertext for Collective Sensemaking: 15 Years on from gIBIS Conklin, Dr Jeff Selvin, Dr Albert Buckingham Shum, Dr Simon Sierhuis, Dr Maarten AKT Showcase Papers Knowledge reuse Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing Knowledge modelling Hypertext research in the mid-1980s on representing argumentation for design rationale (DR) foreshadowed what are now dominant concerns in knowledge management: representing, codifying and manipulating semiformal concepts, the use of formalisms to mediate collective sensemaking, and the construction of group memory. With the benefit of 15 years' hindsight, we can see the failure of so many DR systems to be adopted as symptomatic of the more general problem of fostering new kinds of 'literacy' in real working environments. Pursuing Engelbart's goal of "augmenting human intellect", we describe the Compendium approach to collective sensemaking, which demonstrates the impact that a facilitator can have on the learning and adoption problems that plagued earlier DR systems. We also describe how conventional documents and modelling notations can be morphed into and out of Compendium's 'native hypertext' in order to support other modes of working across diverse communities of practice. 2003-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/262/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/262/01/LAP2003-Keynote.pdf

oai:aktors.org:263 2003-07-18

An Expert System for Evaluating the ‘Knowledge Potential’ of Databases Potter, Dr Stephen Aitken, Dr Stuart Knowledge reuse Data Mining techniques can, under favourable conditions, extract valuable knowledge from an organisation's databases. However, the precise nature of these favourable conditions is poorly articulated, and as a result organisations run the risk of instigating costly and time-consuming data mining episodes upon inappropriate or irrelevant data. In response to this problem, the authors have applied expert systems technologies to the task of predicting the extent to which a given database contains knowledge that is both valuable and susceptible to mining. It is intended that this system will form a component of a `knowledge auditing' method for appraising an organisation's (existing and potential) knowledge resources. This paper describes this application, along with some of the particular issues surrounding its implementation, testing and delivery to prospective users. 2001-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/263/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000263/01/ES2001_paper.pdf

oai:aktors.org:265 2003-08-26

Magpie – towards a semantic web browser Dzbor, Dr Martin Domingue, Dr John Motta, Prof Enrico Knowledge acquisition Abstract. Web browsing involves two tasks: finding the right web page and then making sense of its content. So far, research has focused on supporting the task of finding web resources through ‘standard’ information retrieval mecha-nisms, or semantics-enhanced search. Much less attention has been paid to the second problem. In this paper we describe Magpie, a tool which supports the in-terpretation of web pages. Magpie offers complementary knowledge sources, which a reader can call upon to quickly gain access to any background knowl-edge relevant to a web resource. Magpie automatically associates an ontology-based semantic layer to web resources, allowing relevant services to be invoked within a standard web browser. Hence, Magpie may be seen as a step towards a semantic web browser. The functionality of Magpie is illustrated using exam-ples of how it has been integrated with our lab’s web resources. 2003-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/265/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/265/01/iswc03-p47-dzbor-domingue-motta.pdf

oai:aktors.org:267 2003-09-18

Towards a semantic extraction of named entities Maynard, Dr Diana Bontcheva, Dr Kalina Cunningham, Dr Hamish Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition In this paper, we discuss the new challenges posed by the progression from information extraction to content extraction, as demonstrated by the ACE program. We explore whether traditional IE approaches are sufficient, and describe the adaptation of a generic IE system to this kind of application. Results suggest that a deeper level of processing is necessary to achieve excellent results in all areas, although rule-based systems can still produce results of a reasonable quality with a small amount of adaptation. In particular, the task of entity detection and tracking on texts of varying genre and quality is one of the most challenging. 2003-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/267/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/267/01/maynard.pdf

oai:aktors.org:268 2003-09-18

GATE: A Unicode-based Infrastructure Supporting Multilingual Information Extraction Bontcheva, Dr Kalina Maynard, Dr Diana Tablan, Mr Valentin Cunningham, Dr Hamish Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing NLP infrastructures with comprehensive multilingual support can substantially decrease the overhead of developing Information Extraction (IE) systems in new languages by offering support for different character encodings, language-independent components, and clean separation between linguistic data and the algorithms that use it. This paper will present GATE -- a Unicode-aware infrastructure that offers extensive support for multilingual Information Extraction with a special emphasis on low-overhead portability between languages. GATE has been used in many research and commercial projects at Sheffield and elsewhere, including Information Extraction in Bulgarian, Romanian, Russian, and many other languages. 2003-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/268/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/268/01/iesl03.pdf

oai:aktors.org:269 2003-09-24

Automatic Extraction and Generation of Knowledge from Web Documents Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing A large amount of digital information available is written as text documents in the form of web pages, reports, papers, emails, etc. Extracting the knowledge of interest from such documents in a timely fashion is therefore crucial. This paper provides an update on the Artequakt system which uses natural language tools to automatically extract knowledge about artists from multiple documents based on a predefined ontology. The ontology represents the type and form of knowledge to extract. This knowledge is then used to generate tailored biographies. Partial evaluation of some of the system’s components is also presented 2003-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/269/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000269/01/Alani-HLT03-final.pdf

oai:aktors.org:270 2003-09-24

Web based Knowledge Extraction and Consolidation for Automatic Ontology Population Alani, Harith Kim, Sanghee Millard, David Weal, Mark Hall, Wendy Lewis, Paul Shadbolt, Nigel Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing The Web is probably the largest and richest information repository available today. Search engines are the common access routes to this valuable source. However, the role of these search engines is often limited to the retrieval of lists of potentially relevant documents. The burden of analysing the returned documents and identifying the knowledge of interest is therefore left to the user. The Artequakt system aims to deploy natural language tools to automatically ex-tract and consolidate knowledge from web documents and populate a given ontology, which dictates the type and form of knowledge to extract. Artequakt focuses on the domain of artists, and uses the harvested knowledge to generate tailored biographies. This paper describes the latest devel-opments of the system and discusses the problem of knowl-edge consolidation. 2003-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/270/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000270/01/Alani-SEMANNOT-camera-ready.pdf

oai:aktors.org:271 2003-09-24

Generating Adaptive Hypertext Content from the SemanticWeb Millard, David Alani, Harith Kim, Sanghee Weal, Mark Lewis, Paul Hall, Wendy De Roure, David Shadbolt, Nigel Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing Accessing and extracting knowledge from online documents is crucial for the realisation of the SemanticWeb and the provision of advanced knowledge services. The Artequakt project is an ongoing investigation tackling these issues to facilitate the creation of tailored biographies from information harvested from the web. In this paper we will present the methods we currently use to model, consolidate and store knowledge extracted from the web so that it can be re-purposed as adaptive content. We look at how Semantic Web technology could be used within this process and also how such techniques might be used to provide content to be published via the Semantic Web. 2003-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/271/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000271/01/artequaktsw.pdf

oai:aktors.org:272 2003-09-24

TGVizTab: An Ontology Visualisation Extension for Protégé Alani, Harith Knowledge modelling Ontologies are gaining a lot of interest and many are being developed to provide a variety of knowledge services. There is an increasing need for tools to graphically and interactively visualise such modelling structures to enhance their clarification, verification and analysis. Protégé 2000 is one of the most popular ontology modelling tools currently available. This paper introduces TGVizTab; a new Protégé plugin based on TouchGraph technology to graphically visualise Protégé’s ontologies. 2003-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/272/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000272/01/Alani-VIKE-camera-ready.pdf

oai:aktors.org:273 2003-10-05

3store: Efficient Bulk RDF Storage Harris, Stephen Gibbins, Dr Nicholas Knowledge retrieval Knowledge maintenance The development and deployment of practical Semantic Web applications requires technologies for the storage and retrieval of RDF data that are robust and scalable. In this paper, we describe the 3store RDF storage and query engine developed within the Advanced Knowledge Technologies project, and discuss the design rationale and optimisations behind it which enable the efficient handling of large RDF knowledge bases. 2003-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/273/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/273/01/psss03-swh.pdf ps http://eprints.aktors.org/273/02/psss03-swh.ps

oai:aktors.org:278 2004-01-14

Experience in using RDF in Agent-mediated Knowledge Architectures Hui, Kit Chalmers, Stuart Gray, Peter Knowledge reuse Knowledge modelling We report on experience with using RDF to provide a rich content language for use with FIPA agent toolkits,and on RDFS as a metadata language. We emphasise their utility for programmers working in agent applications and their value in Agent-Oriented Software Engineering. Agent applications covered include Intelligent Information Agents, and agents forming Virtual Organisations. We believe our experience vindicates more direct use of RDF, including use of RDF triples,in programming knowledge architectures for a variety of applications. 2003-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/278/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/278/01/SS103KHui.pdf

oai:aktors.org:279 2004-01-18

Multi-Agent Dialogue Protocols Walton, Dr Christopher AKT Submitted In this paper we propose a new agent communication language which separates agent dialogue from any specific agent reasoning technology. This language is intended to address a number of perceived shortcomings with the mentalistic model of agent communication on which the FIPA-ACL standard is founded. Our language expresses inter-agent dialogue through the use of agent protocols, and is intended to be independent of the technology used for message delivery. In this paper we specify the syntax of our communication language, together with an operation semantics which defines an implementation of the language. Our language specification is derived from process calculus and thus forms a sound basis for the verification of our agent protocols. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/279/ ps http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000279/01/shortmap.ps.gz

oai:aktors.org:280 2004-01-18

OntoManager:A Workbench Environment to facilitate Ontology Management and Interoperability Hameed, Adil Sleeman, Derek Preece, Alun Knowledge reuse The prime motivation for our research is to enable sharing and reuse of domain knowledge through the engineering and management of ontologies. We contend that there is a need to reconcile ontologies by harmonising mismatches and discrepancies that are present among them. This is a necessary task before any stakeholders can begin to share and/or reuse the underlying knowledge (re)sources. Our key objective is to detect and resolve these mismatches in a consistent and verifiable manner. We have evaluated the state-of-the-art in ontology management tools and selected the best-in-class techniques and methods. We propose implementing a workbench that will integrate these tools and enable interoperability between them in order to facilitate the management of ontologies. 2002-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/280/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/280/01/p132_ekaw2002.pdf

oai:aktors.org:285 2004-02-24

Facilitating DL-based hybrid reasoning with inference fusion. Hu, Bo Arena, Ines Compatangelo, Ernesto Knowledge reuse Knowledge modelling We present an extension to DL-based taxonomic reasoning by means of the proposed inference fusion, i.e. the dynamic combination of inferences from distributed heterogeneous reasoners. Our approach integrates results from a DL-based system with results from a constraint solver under the direction of a global reasoning coordinator. Inference fusion is performed by (i) processing heterogeneous input knowledge, producing suitable homogeneous input knowledge for each specialised reasoner; (ii)activating each reasoner when necessary, collecting its results and passing them to the other reasoner if appropriate; (iii) combining the results of the two reasoners. We discuss the benefits of our approach and demonstrate our ideas by proposing a language (DL(D)=S) and a reasoning system (Concor) which uses knowledge bases written in DL(D)=S and supports hybrid reasoning. We illustrate our ideas with an example. 2003-01-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/285/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/285/01/Hu-Aran-Comp_KBSJ-2003.pdf

oai:aktors.org:286 2004-02-24

Inference fusion: a hybrid approach to taxonomic reasoning Knowledge reuse Knowledge modelling We present a hybrid way to extend taxonomic reasoning using inference fusion, i.e. the dynamic combination of inferences from distributed heterogeneous reasoners. Our approach integrates results from a DL-based taxonomic reasoner with results from a constraint solver. Inference fusion is carried out by (i) parsing heterogeneous input knowledge, producing suitable homogeneous subset of the input knowledge for each specialised reasoner; (ii) processing the homogeneous knowledge, collecting the reasoning results and passing them to the other reasoner if appropriate; (iii) combining the results of the two ontological reasoning and demonstrate our ideas by proposing reasoners. We discuss the benefits of our a hybrid modelling languages, DL(D)=S, and illustrating its use by means of examples. 2003-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/286/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000286/01/Hu-Comp-Aran_FLAIRS-2003.pdf

oai:aktors.org:289 2004-02-24

Infusion: hybrid reasoning system with Description Logics. Knowledge reuse Knowledge modelling We discuss a new approach which uses inference fusion, i.e. the cooperative reasoning from distributed heterogeneous inference systems, in order to extend the expressive and deductive powers of existing Description Logic (DL) based systems. More specifically, our approach integrates results from a DL reasoner with results from a constraint solver. Inference fusion (i) fragments heterogeneous input knowledge to generate suitable homogeneous input knowledge for the DL and constraint reasoners; (ii) passes control to each reasoner, retrieving the results and making them available to the other reasoner for further inferencing; (iii)dynamically combines the results of the two reasoners to present the overall conclusion. We also outline the main features of inference fusion by way of a small example. 2003-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/289/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000289/01/Hu-Comp-Aran_AIA-2003.pdf

oai:aktors.org:291 2004-03-18

FCA in Knowledge Technologies: Experiences and Opportunities Kalfoglou, Dr Yannis Dasmahaptra, Dr Srinandan Chen-Burger, Dr Jessica AKT Showcase Papers Knowledge reuse Knowledge acquisition Knowledge modelling Managing knowledge is a difficult and slippery enterprise. A wide variety of technologies have to be invoked in providing support for knowledge requirements, ranging from the acquisition, modelling, maintenance, retrieval, reuse and publishing of knowledge. Any toolset capable of providing support for these would be valuable as its effects would percolate down to all the application domains structured around the domain representation. Given the generic structure of the lattice building algorithms in Formal Concept Analysis, we undertook a set of experiments to examine its potential utility in knowledge technologies. We elaborate on our experiences and speculate on the opportunities lying ahead for a larger uptake of Formal Concept Analysis approaches. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/291/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000291/01/kalfoglou_etal_icfca04.pdf

oai:aktors.org:295 2004-04-02

Model Checking Multi-Agent Web Services Walton, Dr Christopher AKT Submitted In this paper we address the verification of communication between agents participating in multi-agent web service systems. Our approach is founded on the application of model-checking techniques to protocols which express interactions between a group of agents in the form of a dialogue. We outline a web service architecture which supports the construction of multi-agent systems using web services technology. We then define a lightweight protocol language which can express a wide range of inter-agent dialogues, and we use the SPIN model checker to verify properties of this language. Our initial results show this approach has a satisfactory success rate in the detection of failures. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/295/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/295/01/wsmodel.pdf

oai:aktors.org:296 2004-05-19

CS AKTiveSpace: Building a Semantic Web Application Glaser, Hugh Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing Knowledge modelling Knowledge maintenance Slides from the presentation at ESWS2004 2004-05-01 Other http://eprints.aktors.org/296/ ppt http://eprints.aktors.org/296/01/esws2004.ppt

oai:aktors.org:297 2004-05-28

Learning To Harvest Information for the Semantic Web Ciravegna, Prof Fabio Chapman, Sam Dingli, Alexiei Wilks, Prof Yorick Knowledge acquisition In this paper we describe a methodology for harvesting information from large distributed repositories (e.g. large Web sites) with minimum user intervention. The methodology is based on a combination of information extraction, information integration and machine learning techniques. Learning is seeded by extracting information from structured sources (e.g. databases and digital libraries) or a user-defined lexicon. Retrieved information is then used to partially annotate documents. Annotated documents are used to bootstrap learning for simple Information Extraction (IE) methodologies, which in turn will produce more annotation to annotate more documents that will be used to train more complex IE engines and so on. In this paper we describe the methodology and its implementation in the Armadillo system, compare it with the current state of the art, and describe the details of an implemented application. Finally we draw some conclusions and highlight some challenges and future work. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/297/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/297/01/esws2004.pdf

oai:aktors.org:298 2004-05-28

Magpie: Browsing and Navigating on the Semantic Web Domingue, Dr John Dzbor, Dr Martin Motta, Prof Enrico Knowledge reuse AKT Submitted Knowledge publishing We describe several advanced functionalities of Magpie – a tool that assists users with interpreting the web resources. Magpie is an extension to the Internet Explorer that automatically creates a semantic layer for web pages using a user-selected ontology. Semantic layers are annotations of a web page, with a set of applicable semantic services attached to the annotated items. We argue that the ability to generate different semantic layers for a web resource is vital to support the interpretation of web pages. Moreover, the assignment of semantic web services to the entities allows users to browse their neighbourhood semantically. At the same time, the Magpie suite offers trigger functionality based on the patterns of an automatically updated semantic log. The benefits of such an approach are illustrated by a semantically enriched browsing history management. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/298/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/298/01/domingue-dzbor-motta-iui2004.pdf

oai:aktors.org:299 2004-05-28

Collaborative Semantic Web Browsing with Magpie Domingue, Dr John Dzbor, Dr Martin Motta, Prof Enrico Knowledge reuse AKT Submitted Knowledge modelling Web browsing is often a collaborative activity. Users involved in a joint information gathering exercise will wish to share knowledge about the web pages visited and the contents found. Magpie is a suite of tools supporting the interpretation of web pages and semantically enriched web browsing. By automatically associating an ontology-based semantic layer to web resources, Magpie allows relevant services to be invoked as well as remotely triggered within a standard web browser. In this paper we describe how Magpie trigger services can provide semantic support to collaborative browsing activities. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/299/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/299/01/ESWS-domingue-dzbor-motta-final.pdf

oai:aktors.org:300 2004-06-01

Design as interactions of problem framing and problem solving Dzbor, Dr Martin Zdrahal, Dr Zdenek Knowledge reuse AKT Submitted Knowledge acquisition This paper introduces a model of framing in design. The model takes into account a reflective nature of designing, and it is based on the interplay between two conceptually distinct knowledge sources – an explicit specification of a problem and a solution to it. The approach is novel in the former investigated aspect that is presented as a semi-formal operation of framing, i.e. interpretation of a problem using selected conceptual primitives. We argue that the interpretation of design problems lacks a similar rigorous investigation as problem solving received in both design theory and methodology. Furthermore, two design schemas of frame refinement and problem re-framing are discussed and exemplified. 2002-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/300/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/300/01/ECAI02-dzbor-zdrahal.pdf

oai:aktors.org:301 2004-06-08

Identifying inconsistent CSPs by Relaxation Nordlander, Tomas Eric Brown, Dr Ken Sleeman, Prof Derek AKT Submitted How do we identify inconsistent CSPs quickly? This paper presents relaxation as one possible method; showing how we can generate relaxed CSPs which are easier to prove inconsistent. We examine different relaxation strategies based on constraint graph properties, and we show that removing constraints of low tightness is an efficient strategy which is also simple to implement. 2003-10-01 Departmental Technical Report http://eprints.aktors.org/301/ ps http://eprints.aktors.org/301/01/Technical_Report_TR0304.pdf

oai:aktors.org:304 2004-06-04

Evolving GATE to Meet New Challenges in Language Engineering Bontcheva, Dr Kalina Tablan, Mr Valentin Maynard, Dr Diana Cunningham, Dr Hamish Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing In this paper we present recent work on GATE, a widely-used framework and graphical development environment for creating and deploying Language Engineering components and resources in a robust fashion. The GATE architecture has facilitated the development of a number of successful applications for various language processing tasks (such as Information Extraction, dialogue and summarisation), the building and annotation of corpora and the quantitative evaluations of LE applications. The focus of this paper is on recent developments in response to new challenges in Language Engineering: Semantic Web, integration with Information Retrieval and data mining, and the need for machine learning support. 2004-01-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/304/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000304/01/jnle-final.pdf

oai:aktors.org:305 2004-06-04

Examining the Use of Conceptual Graphs in Adaptive Web-Based Systems that Aid Terminology Learning Bontcheva, Dr Kalina Dimitrova, Dr Vania Knowledge publishing This paper discussed the use of Conceptual Graphs (CGs) for implementing tasks employed in web-based educational systems that aid terminology learning. Specifically, we focus on two critical issues in intelligent tutoring - student diagnosis and generation of adaptive explanations. Both tasks are demonstrated in terminological domains where learners have to familiarize themselves with concepts in a specific subject area (e.g. computing, finance, chemistry). Based on CG reasoning, robust and computationally tractable algorithms for student modelling and adaptive explanation generation are defined. Two intelligent systems are presented - STyLE-OLM and HYLITE+. STyLE-OLM is an interactive learner modelling system that extracts extended models of the learners' cognition. HYLITE+ is a natural language generation system that generates adaptive Web pages based on a learner model(LM). The two systems are complementary and have been implemented separately. However, considered together they cover most of the key tasks in adaptive web-based educational hypermedia that aid learning technical terminology. Based on evaluative studies of STyLE-OLM and HYLITE+, the use of CGs for interactive open student modelling and adaptive concept explanations is examined. The applicability of CGs in adaptive web-based systems that aid learning technical terminology is discussed. 2004-01-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/305/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000305/01/bontcheva-dimitrova-final.pdf

oai:aktors.org:306 2004-06-04

Multimedia Indexing through Multisource and Multilingual Information Extraction; the MUMIS project Saggion, Dr Horacio Cunningham, Dr Hamish Bontcheva, Dr Kalina Maynard, Dr Diana Hamza, Ms Oana Wilks, Professor Yorick Knowledge retrieval Knowledge publishing We describe our work on information extraction from multiple sources for the Multimedia Indexing and Searching Environment, a project aiming at developing technology to produce formal annotations about essential events in multimedia programme material. The creation of a composite index from multiple and multi-lingual sources is a unique aspect of this project. The domain chosen for tuning the software components and testing is football. Our information extraction system is based on the use of finite state machinery pipelined with full semantic analysis and discourse interpretation. 2004-01-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/306/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000306/01/nldb2002-journal.pdf

oai:aktors.org:307 2004-06-04

Background and Foreground Knowledge in Dynamic Ontology Construction: Viewing Text as Knowledge Maintenance Brewster, Mr. Christopher Ciravegna, Prof. Fabio Wilks, prof. Yrick Knowledge acquisition Knowledge maintenance Ontologies have become a key component in the Semantic Web and Knowledge management. One accepted goal is to construct ontologies from a domain specific set of texts. An ontology reflects the background knowledge used in writing and reading a text. However, a text is an act of knowledge maintenance, in that it re-enforces the background assumptions, alters links and associations in the ontology, and adds new concepts. This means that background knowledge is rarely expressed in a machine interpretable manner. When it is, it is usually in the conceptual boundaries of the domain, e.g. in textbooks or when ideas are borrowed into other domains. We argue that a partial solution to this lies in searching external resources such as specialized glossaries and the internet. We show that a random selection of concept pairs from the Gene Ontology do not occur in a relevant corpus of texts from the journal Nature. In contrast, a significant proportion can be found on the internet. Thus, we conclude that sources external to the domain corpus are necessary for the automatic construction of ontologies. 2003-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/307/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/307/01/Brewster_KM%26SW03.pdf

oai:aktors.org:308 2004-06-04

Rapid customization of an Information Extraction system for surprise languages Maynard, Dr Diana Tablan, Mr Valentin Bontcheva, Dr Kalina Cunningham, Dr Hamish Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition N/A 2004-01-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/308/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000308/01/surprise.pdf

oai:aktors.org:309 2004-06-04

A Light-weight Approach to Coreference Resolution for Named Entities in Text Dimitrov, Mr Marin Bontcheva, Dr Kalina Cunningham, Dr Hamish Maynard, Dr Diana Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition This paper presents a lightweight approach to pronoun resolution in the case when the antecedent is named entity. It falls under the category of the so-called "knowledge poor" approaches that do not rely extensively on linguistic and domain knowledge. We provide a practical implementation of this approach as a component of the General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE). The results of the evaluation show that even such shallow and inexpensive approaches provide acceptable performance for resolving the pronoun anaphors of named entities in texts. 2004-01-01 Book Chapter http://eprints.aktors.org/309/ msword http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000309/01/DAARC2002.doc

oai:aktors.org:310 2004-06-04

Automatic Report Generation from Ontologies: the MIAKT approach Bontcheva, Dr Kalina Wilks, Professor Yorick Knowledge publishing This paper presented an approach for automatic generation of reports from domain ontologies encoded in Semantic Web standards like OWL. The paper identifies the challenges that need to be addressed when generating text from RDF and OWL and demonstrates how the ontology is used during the different stages of the generation process. The main contribution is in showing how NLG tools that take Semantic Web ontologies as their input can be designed to minimises the portability effort, while offering better output than template-based ontology verbalisers. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/310/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/310/01/bontcheva-nldb04.pdf

oai:aktors.org:311 2004-06-04

Open-source Tools for Creation, Maintenance, and Storage of Lexical Resources for Language Generation from Ontologies Bontcheva, Dr Kalina Knowledge publishing This paper describes reusable, open-source tools for creation, maintenance, storage, and access of Language Resources (LR) needed for generating natural language texts from ontologies. One advantage of these tools is that they provide a user-friendly interface for NLG LR manipulation. They also provide unified models for accessing NLG lexicons and mappings between lexicons and ontologies. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/311/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/311/01/bontcheva-lrec04.pdf

oai:aktors.org:312 2004-06-04

Automatic Language-Independent Induction of Gazetteer Lists Maynard, Dr Diana Bontcheva, Dr Kalina Cunningham, Dr Hamish Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition Adaptation of existing Information Extraction (IE) systems to new languages and domains is the focus of much current research, but progress is often hindered by the lack of available resources to enable developers to get a new system up and running fast. It has previously been shown that a good set of gazetteer lists can have a vital role here, but creation of lists for a new language or domain can be time-consuming and laborious. In this paper we demonstrate a tool for inducing gazetteer lists from a small set of annotated corpora and creating a baseline IE system. We also describe an extension to this, using bootstrapping techniques in order to generate much larger volumes of noisy training texts. High quality results have been achieved in this way on Hindi, Chinese and Arabic. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/312/ ps http://eprints.aktors.org/312/01/gazcollector.ps

oai:aktors.org:313 2005-09-30

Web Services Architecture for Language Resources Dalli, Mr Angelo Tablan, Mr Valentin Bontcheva, Dr Kalina Wilks, Professor Yorick Broeder, Daan Brughman, Hennie Wittenburgh, Peter Knowledge retrieval Knowledge publishing N/A 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/313/

oai:aktors.org:314 2004-06-04

Designing Adaptive Information Extraction for the Semantic Web in Amilcare Ciravegna, Professor Fabio Wilks, Professor Yorick AKT Submitted A crucial aspect of creating the Semantic Web (SW) is to enable users to create machinereadableWeb content. Emphasis in the research community has till now been put on building tools for manual annotation of documents (e.g. [18]), but only recently has the problem of producing automatic or semi-automatic methods for annotating documents become an issue [17, 27]. The main problem with manual annotation is that it is a difficult, slow, time-consuming and tedious process that involves high costs and very often a large number of errors as well (up to 25% in some cases [24]). The latter is especially true in case of user with no experience of document annotation (naive annotators), while it slightly improves with expert annotators (about 15%). Manual annotation of documents by naive Web users is quite unlikely to be correct or even performed at all. Information Extraction from texts (IE) is an automatic method for locating important facts in electronic documents for successive use, e.g. for document annotation or for information storing (such as populating an ontology with instances). IE can provide support in document annotation either in an automatic way (unsupervised extraction of information) or semi-automatic way (e.g. as support for human annotators in locating relevant facts in documents, via information highlighting). In this paper we present Amilcare, an adaptive IE system designed as support to document annotation in the SW framework. Amilcare is currently used at a number of sites and has been integrated in a number of SW annotation systems. 2003-01-01 Book Chapter http://eprints.aktors.org/314/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/314/01/AmilcareAnnotation.pdf

oai:aktors.org:316 2004-06-04

Ontology-driven Question Answering in AquaLog Lopez KMi, Miss Vanessa Motta KMi, Professor Enrico Knowledge publishing The semantic web vision is one in which rich, ontology-based semantic markup is widely available, both to enable sophisticated interoperability among agents and to support human web users in locating and making sense of information. The availability of semantic markup on the web also opens the way to novel, sophisticated forms of question answering. AquaLog is a portable question-answering system which takes queries expressed in natural language and an ontology as input and returns answers drawn from one or more knowledge bases (KBs), which instantiate the input ontology with domain-specific information. AquaLog makes use of the GATE NLP platform, string metrics algorithms, WordNet and a novel ontology-based relation similarity service to make sense of user queries with respect to the target knowledge base. Fi-nally, although AquaLog has primarily been designed for use with semantic web lan-guages, it makes use of a generic plug-in mechanism, which means it can be easily in-terfaced to different ontology servers and knowledge representation platforms. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/316/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000316/01/AquaLog_nldb.pdf

oai:aktors.org:317 2004-06-06

Semantic Services in e-Learning: an Argumentation Case Study Moreale, Miss E. Vargas-Vera, Dr M. Knowledge publishing This paper outlines an e-Learning services architecture offering semantic-based services to students and tutors, in particular ways to browse and obtain information through web services. Services could include registration, authentication, tutoring systems, smart question answering for students' queries, automated marking systems and a student essay service. These services - which might be added incrementally to the portal - could be integrated with various ontologies such as ontologies of educational organisations, students and courses. In this paper, we describe a few scenarios in the e-learning domain and illustrate the role of a few services. We also describe in some detail a service doing semantic annotation of argumentation in student essays for allowing visualisation of argumentation and providing useful feedback to students. 2004-10-01 Journal (On-line/Unpaginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/317/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000317/01/SemanticServicesInE-Learning_Moreale_Vargas-Vera.pdf

oai:aktors.org:318 2004-06-06

Genre Analysis and the Automated Extraction of Arguments from Student Essays Moreale, Miss E. Vargas-Vera, Dr M. Knowledge acquisition A full understanding of text is out of reach of current human language technology. However, a shallow Natural Language Processing (NLP) approach can be used to provide automated help in the assessment of essays: our approach uses genre, cue phrases and a set of patterns. Cue phrases, with their associated semantics, are used in conjunction with patterns to identify categories of argumentation partly derived from research in metadiscourse in the academic paper genre. In this paper, we describe an approach for automated extraction of arguments from student essays as a basis for their assessment in a formative as well as a summative sense. We introduce our own essay argumentation schema and show how we arrived at this categorisation. We also introduce "student essay viewer", a tool that allows tutors and students to visualise argumentation in a student essay and may therefore be useful in aiding assessment and providing feedback to students. 2003-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/318/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000318/01/CAA-2003_Moreale_Vargas-Vera.pdf

oai:aktors.org:319 2004-06-06

A Question-Answering System Using Argumentation Moreale, Miss E. Vargas-Vera, Dr M. Knowledge retrieval Abstract. This paper presents a novel approach to question answering: the use of argumentation techniques. Our question answering system deals with argumentation in student essays: it sees an essay as an answer to a question and gauges its quality on the basis of the argumentation found in it. Thus, the system looks for expected types of argumentation in essays (i.e. the expectation is that the kind of argumentation in an essay is correlated to the type of question). Another key feature of our work is our proposed categorisation for argumentation in student essays, as opposed to categorisation of argumentation in research papers, where - unlike the case of student essays - it is relatively well-known which kind of argumentation can be found in specific sections 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/319/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000319/01/kmi-tr-132.pdf

oai:aktors.org:320 2004-06-06

Indexing Student Essays Paragraphs Using LSA Over an Integrated Ontological Space Burek, Mr G.G Vargas-Vera, Dr M. Moreale, Miss E. Knowledge retrieval A full understanding of text is out of reach of current human language technology. However, a shallow Natural Language Processing (NLP) approach can be used to provide automated help in the evaluation of essays. The main idea of this paper is that Latent Semantic Indexing (LSA) can be used in conjunction with ontologies and First order Logic (FOL) to locate segments relevant to a question in a student essay. Our test bed, in a first instance, is a set of ontologies such the AKT reference ontology (describing academic life), Newspaper and a Koala ontology (concerning koalas' habitat) 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/320/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000320/01/kmi-tr-142.pdf

oai:aktors.org:321 2004-06-06

AQUA- Ontology-Based Question Answering System Vargas-Vera, Dr M. Motta, Dr E. Knowledge retrieval This paper describes AQUA, an experimental question answering system. AQUA combines Natural Language Processing (NLP), Ontologies, Logic, and Information Retrieval technologies in a uniform framework. AQUA makes intensive use of an ontology in several parts of the question answering system. The ontology is used in the refinement of the initial query, the reasoning process, and in the novel similarity algorithm. The similarity algorithm, is a key feature of AQUA. It is used to find similarities between relations used in the translated query and relations in the ontological structures. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/321/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000321/01/kmi-tr-131.pdf

oai:aktors.org:322 2004-06-06

AQUA: An Ontology-Driven Question Answering System Vargas-Vera, Dr M. Motta, Dr E. Domingue, Dr J. Knowledge retrieval The use of the web has become popular and also the need of services that could exploit the vast amount of information in it. Therefore, there is a need for automated question answering systems. These kind of systems should allow users to ask questions in everyday language and receive an answer quickly and with a context which allows the user to validate the answer. Current search engines can return ranked list of documents but they do not deliver answers to users. 2003-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/322/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000322/02/SS803MVargas-Vera.pdf

oai:aktors.org:323 2004-06-08

Constraint Relaxation Techniques to Aid the Reuse of Knowledge Bases and Problem Solvers Nordlander, Tomas Eric Brown, Dr Ken Sleeman, Prof Derek Knowledge reuse Effective re-use of knowledge bases requires the identification of plausible combinations of both problem solvers and knowledge bases, which can be an expensive task. Can we identify impossible combinations quickly? The capabilities of combinations can be represented using constraints, and we propose using constraint relaxation to help eliminate impossible combinations. If a relaxed constraint representation of a combination is inconsistent then we know that the original combination is inconsistent as well. We examine different relaxation strategies based on constraint graph properties, and we show that removing constraints of low tightness is an efficient strategy which is also simple to implement. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/323/ ps http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000323/01/Constraint_Relaxation_Techniques_to_Aid_the_Reuse_of_Knowledge_Bases_and_Problem_Solvers_-_T._Nordlander%2C_K._Brown%2C_%26_D._Sleeman_-__AI-2003.pdf

oai:aktors.org:324 2004-06-08

Identifying Inconsistent CSPs by Relaxation Knowledge reuse MUSKRAT (Multistrategy Knowledge Refinement and Acquisition Toolbox) [1] aims to unify problem solving, knowledge acquisition and knowledge-base refinement in a single computational framework. Given a set of Knowledge Bases (KBs) and Problem Solvers (PSs), the MUSKRAT-Advisor investigates whether the available KBs will fulfil the requirements of the selected PS for a given problem. We would like to reject impossible combinations of KBs and PSs quickly. We propose to represent combinations of KBs and PSs as CSPs. If a CSP is not consistent, then the combination does not fulfil the requirements. The problem then becomes one of quickly identifying inconsistent CSPs. To do this, we propose to relax the CSPs: if we can prove that the relaxed version is inconsistent then we know that the original CSP is also inconsistent. It is not obvious that solving relaxed CSPs is any easier. In fact, phase transition research (e.g. [2]) seems to indicate the opposite when the original CSP is inconsistent. We have experimented with randomly generated CSPs [3], where the tightness of the constraints in a problem varies uniformly. We have shown that careful selection of the constraints to relax can save up to 70% of the search time. We have also investigated practical heuristics for relaxing CSPs. Experiments show that the simple strategy of removing constraints of low tightness is effective, allowing us to save up to 30% of the time on inconsistent problems without introducing new solutions. In the constraints area, future work will look at extending this approach to more realistic CSPs. The focus will be on scheduling problems, which are likely to involve non-binary and global constraints, and constraint graphs with particular properties (e.g. [4]). We will also investigate more theoretical CSP concepts, including higher consistency levels and problem hardness. Success in this research will allow us to apply constraint satisfaction and relaxation techniques to the problem of knowledge base reuse. 2003-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/324/ ps http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000324/01/Identifying_Inconsistent_CSPs_by_Relaxation_by_Tomas_Nordlander%2C_Ken_Brown_and_Derek_Sleeman_CP-2003.pdf

oai:aktors.org:325 2004-08-13

IRS-II: A Framework and Infrastructure for Semantic Web Services Motta, Professor Enrico Domingue, Dr John Cabral, Liliana Gaspari, Mauro AKT Submitted In this paper we describe IRS-II (Internet Reasoning Service) a framework and implemented infrastructure, whose main goal is to support the publication, location, composition and execution of heterogeneous web services, augmented with semantic descriptions of their functionalities. IRS-II has three main classes of features which distinguish it from other work on semantic web services. Firstly, it supports one-click publishing of standalone software: IRS-II automatically creates the appropriate wrappers, given pointers to the standalone code. Secondly, it explicitly distinguishes between tasks (what to do) and methods (how to achieve tasks) and as a result supports capability-driven ser-vice invocation; flexible mappings between services and problem specifications; and dynamic, knowledge-based service selection. Finally, IRS-II services are web service compatible – standard web services can be trivially published through the IRS-II and any IRS-II service automatically appears as a standard web service to other web service infrastructures. In the paper we illus-trate the main functionalities of IRS-II through a scenario involving a distrib-uted application in the healthcare domain. 2003-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/325/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/325/01/irs-iswc-03.pdf

oai:aktors.org:326 2004-08-13

Approaches to Semantic Web Services: An Overview and Comparisons Cabral, L. Domingue, J. Motta, E. Payne, T. Hakimpour, F. AKT Submitted The next Web generation promises to deliver Semantic Web Services (SWS); services that are self-described and amenable to automated discovery, composition and invocation. A prerequisite to this, however, is the emergence and evolution of the Semantic Web, which provides the infrastructure for the semantic interoperability of Web Services. Web Services will be augmented with rich formal descriptions of their capabilities, such that they can be utilized by applications or other services without human assistance or highly constrained agreements on interfaces or protocols. Thus, Semantic Web Services have the potential to change the way knowledge and business services are consumed and provided on the Web. In this paper, we survey the state of the art of current enabling technologies for Semantic Web Services. In addition, we characterize the infrastructure of Semantic Web Services along three orthogonal dimensions: activities, architecture and service ontology. Further, we examine and contrast three current approaches to SWS according to the proposed dimensions. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/326/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/326/01/cabralESWS04.pdf

oai:aktors.org:327 2004-06-11

CS AKTiveSpace: Building a Semantic Web Application Glaser, Hugh Alani, Harith Carr, Les Chapman, Sam Ciravegna, Fabio Dingli, Alexiei Gibbins, Nicholas Harris, Stephen schraefel, m.c. Shadbolt, Nigel Knowledge reuse Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing Knowledge modelling Knowledge maintenance In this paper we reflect on the lessons learned from deploying the award winning [1] Semantic Web application, CS AKTiveSpace. We look at issues in service orientation and modularisation, harvesting, and interaction design for supporting this 10million-triple-based application. We consider next steps for the application, based on these lessons, and propose a strategy for expanding and improving the services afforded by the application. 2004-01-01 Book Chapter http://eprints.aktors.org/327/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/327/01/esws2004chalenge.pdf

oai:aktors.org:330 2004-06-17

Characterisation of Knowledge Bases Sleeman, Prof. Derek Zhang, Mr. Yi Vasconcelos, Dr. Wamberto Knowledge reuse The process of determining the principal topic of a Knowledge base (KB), and whether it conforms to a set of user-defined constraints, are important steps in the reuse of Knowledge Bases. We refer to these steps as the process of characterization of a Knowledge Base. Identify-Knowledge-Base (IKB) is a tool, which suggests the principal topic(s) addressed by the Knowledge Base. It matches concepts extracted from a particular knowledge base against some reference taxonomy, where the taxonomy can be pre-stored or extracted from ontologies which are either stored on the local machine or are assessable through the WWW. The 'most specific' super-concept subsuming these concepts is said to be the principal topic of the knowledge base. Additionally, a series of filters, which check if a KB has particular characteristics have been implemented. This paper describes both the Identify-Knowledge Base system and these filters. Some empirical studies of IKB and the filters with a range of problems are also reported. 2003-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/330/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/330/01/AI-2003.pdf

oai:aktors.org:332 2004-06-17

Ontology Reconciliation Hameed, Adil Preece, Alun Sleeman, Derek Knowledge modelling Ontologies are being applied very successfully in supporting information and knowledge exchange between people and organisations. However, for many reasons, different people and organisations will tend to use different ontologies. Therefore, in order to exchange information and knowledge, either everyone must adopt the same ontology — an unlikely scenario — or it must be possible to reconcile different ontologies. This chapter examines the issues and techniques in the reconciliation of ontologies. First, it examines the reasons why people and organizations will tend to use different ontologies, and why the pervasive adoption of common ontologies is unlikely. It then reviews alternative architectures for multiple-ontology systems on a large scale. A comparative analysis is provided of a number of frameworks, which analyse types of mismatches between ontologies. The process of ontology reconciliation is outlined. Finally, some existing software tools that support reconciliation are surveyed, and areas are identified where further work is necessary. 2003-01-01 Book Chapter http://eprints.aktors.org/332/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/332/01/p139.pdf

oai:aktors.org:333 2004-06-17

Refiner++: A Knowledge Acquisition and Refinement Tool Knowledge acquisition Knowledge maintenance Refiner+ is an algorithm than detects inconsistencies in a set of examples (cases) and suggests ways in which these inconsistencies might be removed. The domain expert is required to specify which category each case belongs to. Refiner+ infers a description for each of the categories and reports any inconsistencies that exist in the dataset. An inconsistency is when a case matches a category other than the one in which the expert has classified it. Refiner++ is a new Java implementation of the (LISP-based) Refiner+ algorithm. The original algorithm was modified in several respects. Refiner++ was designed to be an application that would allow a domain expert to enter data, manipulate it and examine it without the need for a knowledge engineer to act as an intermediary. At the time of writing, the Refiner++ system has been presented to three experts to use on problems in their domains: anaesthetics, educational psychology, and intensive care. The work is ongoing, but at this stage we have identified types of tasks Refiner++ is particularly good at solving, and some for which it is less useful. The application has met with great interest from domain experts, but as yet none seem willing to use it directly. Enhancements to the UI and the materials used to introduce a new domain expert to the conceptualisation task inherent in a Refiner++ session are under way. Shortly we plan to run a series of new studies with further domain experts. 2003-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/333/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/333/01/p141.pdf

oai:aktors.org:334 2004-06-17

Constraint Relaxation Techniques to Aid the Reuse of Knowledge Bases and Problem Solvers Knowledge reuse Effective re-use of knowledge bases requires the identification of plausible combinations of both problem solvers and knowledge bases, which can be an expensive task. Can we identify impossible combinations quickly? The capabilities of combinations can be represented using constraints, and we propose using constraint relaxation to help eliminate impossible combinations. If a relaxed constraint representation of a combination is inconsistent then we know that the original combination is inconsistent as well. We examine different relaxation strategies based on constraint graph properties, and we show that removing constraints of low tightness is an efficient strategy which is also simple to implement. 2003-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/334/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/334/01/p142.pdf

oai:aktors.org:336 2004-06-17

Adaptive Brokering in Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce Knowledge modelling Knowledge maintenance In this paper we advocate an approach that extends models of trust and reputation to take into account the competence of agents. The argument is that such an approach will lead to more reliable agent-mediated electronic commerce environments than those in which agents are simply considered to have cooperated or defected. If there is a mismatch between the advertised and actual competence of an agent and the agent fails to complete a task as a consequence of this mismatch, then the description of this agent's competence should be refined in addition to any loss in reputation. Consequently, this agent is less likely to be employed for an inappropriate task in the future. Two models of adaptive brokering are presented in this paper that illustrate the use of refinement techniques in developing effective brokering mechanisms for agent-mediated electronic commerce. 2003-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/336/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/336/01/p144.pdf

oai:aktors.org:337 2004-06-22

Data Driven Ontology Evaluation Brewster, C. Alani, H. Dasmahapatra, S. Wilks, Y. Knowledge reuse Knowledge retrieval The evaluation of ontologies is vital for the growth of the Semantic Web. We consider a number of problems in evaluating a knowledge artifact like an ontology. We propose in this paper that one approach to ontology evaluation should be corpus or data driven. A corpus is the most accessible form of knowledge and its use allows a measure to be derived of the `fit' between an ontology and a domain of knowledge. We consider a number of methods for measuring this `fit' and propose a measure to evaluate structural fit, and a probabilistic approach to identifying the best ontology. 2004-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/337/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/337/02/BrewsterLREC-final.pdf

oai:aktors.org:338 2004-06-22

Using Protege for Automatic Ontology Instantiation Alani, H. Kim, S. Millard, D. E. Weal, M. J. Hall, W. Lewis, P. H. Shadbolt, N. Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing This paper gives an overview on the use of Prot?g? in the Artequakt system, which integrated Prot?g? with a set of natural language tools to automatically extract knowledge about artists from web documents and instantiate a given ontology. Prot?g? was also linked to structured templates that generate documents from the knowledge fragments it maintains. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/338/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/338/01/Alani.pdf

oai:aktors.org:341 2004-06-29

Event Recognition on News Stories and Semi-Automatic Population of an Ontology Vargas-Vera, Dr Maria Celjuska, Mr David Knowledge acquisition This paper describes a system which recognizes events on news stories. Our system classifies stories and populates a hand-crafted ontology with new instances of classes defined in it.  Currently, our system recognizes events which can be classified as belonging to a single category and it also recognizes overlapping events within one article (more than one event is recognized). In each case, the system provides a confidence value associated to the suggested classification. Our system uses Information Extraction and Machine Learning technologies. The system was tested using a corpus of 200 news articles from an archive of electronic news stories describing the academic life of the Knowledge Media (KMi). In particular, these news stories describe events such as a project award, publications, visits, etc.) 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/341/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000341/01/KMI-TR-149.pdf

oai:aktors.org:342 2004-07-06

OntoWeaver-S: Supporting the Design of Knowledge Portals Lei, Ms Y Motta, Prof E Domingue, Dr J Knowledge publishing This paper presents OntoWeaver-S, an ontology-based infrastructure for building knowledge portals. In particular, OntoWeaver-S is integrated with a comprehensive web service platform, IRS-II, for the publication, discovery, and execution of web services. In this way, OntoWeaver-S supports the access and provision of remote web services for knowledge portals. Moreover, it provides a set of comprehensive site ontologies to model and represent knowledge portals, and thus is able to offer high level support for the design and development process. Finally, OntoWeaver-S provides a set of powerful tools to support knowledge portals at design time as well as at run time. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/342/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/342/01/OntoWeaver-s-ekaw-v2.pdf

oai:aktors.org:343 2004-07-06

Modelling Data-Intensive Web Sites with OntoWeaver Lei, Ms Y Motta, Prof E Domingue, Dr J Knowledge publishing This paper illustrates the OntoWeaver modelling approach, which relies on a set of comprehensive site ontologies to model all aspects of data-intensive web sites and thus offers high level support for the design and development of data-intensive web sites. In particular, the OntoWeaver site ontologies comprise two components: a site view ontology and a presentation ontology. The site view ontology provides meta-models to allow for the composition of sophisticated site views, which allow end users to navigate and manipulate the underlying domain databases. The presentation ontology abstracts the look and feel for site views and makes it possible for the visual appearance and layout to be specified at a high level of abstraction. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/343/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/343/01/OntoWeaver_WISM2004_v2.pdf

oai:aktors.org:344 2004-07-06

OntoWeaver-S: Integrating Web Services into Data-Intensive Web Sites Lei, Ms Y Motta, Prof E Domingue, Dr J Knowledge publishing Designing web sites is a complex task. Ad-hoc rapid prototyping easily leads to unsatisfactory results, e.g. poor maintainability and extensibility. However, existing web design frameworks focus exclusively on data presentation: the development of specific functionalities is still achieved through low-level programming. In this paper we address this issue by describing our work on the integration of (semantic) web services into a web design framework, OntoWeaver. The resulting architecture, OntoWeaver-S, supports rapid prototyping of service-centred data-intensive web sites, which allow access to remote web services. In particular, OntoWeaver-S is integrated with a comprehensive web service platform, IRS-II, for the specification, discovery, and execution of web services. Moreover, it employs a set of comprehensive site ontologies to model and represent all aspects of service-centred data-intensive web sites, and thus is able to offer high level support for the design and development process. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/344/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/344/01/www2004_workshop.pdf

oai:aktors.org:345 2004-06-30

Model Checking Agent Dialogues AKT Submitted In this paper we address the challenges associated with the verification of correctness of communication between agents in Multi-Agent Systems. Our approach applies model-checking techniques to protocols which express interactions between a group of agents in the form of a dialogue. We define a lightweight protocol language which can express a wide range of dialogue types, and we use the SPIN model checker to verify properties of this language. Our early results show this approach has a high success rate in the detection of failures in agent dialogues. 2004-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/345/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/345/01/29-walton.pdf

oai:aktors.org:346 2004-06-30

An Agent-based e-Science Experiment Builder AKT Submitted In this paper we demonstrate the use of agent technology to assist in the construction and enactment of e-Science experiments. Our approach is founded on the adaptation of an agent protocol language to perform composition of web services. We present a definition of the language, and show how it can be used to express e-Science experiments. We also describe a tool, called MagentA, which allows experiments to be rapidly constructed, verified, and enacted. 2004-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/346/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000346/01/ebuilder.pdf

oai:aktors.org:348 2004-07-06

Design of Customized Web Applications with OntoWeaver Lei, Ms Y Motta, Prof E Domingue, Dr J Knowledge publishing OntoWeaver is our conceptual modelling methodology and a tool that support the specification and implementation of customized web applications. It relies on a number of different types of ontologies to declaratively describe all aspects of a web application. This paper focuses on the OntoWeaver customization framework, which exploits a user model, a customization rule model, and a declarative site model, to enable the design and development of customized web applications at a conceptual level. OntoWeaver makes use of the Jess inference engine to reason upon the site specifications and their underlying site ontologies according to the customization rules and the valuable user profiles to provide customization support in an intelligent way. The ontology-based approach enables the target web applications to be represented in an exchangeable format. Hence, the management and maintenance of web applications can be carried out at a conceptual level without having to worry about the implementation details. Likewise, the declarative nature of the site specifications and the generic customization framework allow the specification of customization requirements to be carried out at the conceptual level. 2003-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/348/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/348/01/p017-lei.pdf

oai:aktors.org:351 2004-07-07

Supporting Collaboration through Semantic-based Workflow and Constraint Solving Knowledge reuse Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing Knowledge modelling This paper describes our efforts to provide a collaborative problem solving architecture driven by semantic-based workflow orchestration and constraint problem solving. These technologies are based on shared ontologies that allows two systems of very different natures to communicate, perform specialised tasks and achieve common goals. We give an account of our approach for the workflow assisted collaboration with constraint solving capabilities. We found that systems built with semantic (web) based technologies is useful for collaboration and flexible to enhance the system with specialised capabilities. However, much care must be exercised before correct semantics may be exchanged and collaborations occur smoothly. 2004-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/351/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000351/01/tie-sub.pdf

oai:aktors.org:353 2005-02-13

Collaborative Tools in the Semantic Grid Bachler, Michelle Buckingham Shum, Dr. Simon Chen-Burger, Dr. Yun-Heh (Jessica) Dalton, Jeff Eisenstadt, Prof. Marc Komzak, Jiri Michaelides, Dr. Danius Page, Dr. Kevin Potter, Dr. Stephen De Roure, Prof. David Shadbolt, Prof. Nigel Tate, Prof. Austin Knowledge reuse Knowledge retrieval CoAKTinG Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing Knowledge modelling Knowledge maintenance The CoAKTinG project aims to advance the state of the art in collaborative mediated spaces for distributed e-Science. The project is integrating several knowledge based and hypertext tools into existing collaborative environments, and through use of a shared ontology to exchange structure, promotes enhanced process tracking and navigation of resources before, after, and while a meeting occurs. This paper provides an overview of the CoAKTinG tools, the ontology that connects them, and current research activities. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/353/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/353/01/2004-ggf11semgrid-danius-sub.pdf

oai:aktors.org:355 2004-07-08

Learning Information Extraction Rules: An Inductive Logic Programming approach Aitken, J.S. Knowledge acquisition The objective of this work is to learn information extraction rules by applying Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) techniques to natural language data. The approach is ontology-based, which means that the extraction rules conclude with specific ontology relations that characterise the meaning of sentences in the text. An existing ILP system, FOIL, is used to learn attribute-value relations. This enables instances of these relations to be identified in the text. In specific, we explore the linguistic preprocessing of the data, the use of background knowledge in the learning process, and the practical considerations of applying a supervised learning approach to rule induction, i.e. in terms of the human effort in creating the data set, and in the inherent biases in the use of small data sets. 2002-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/355/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/355/01/ecai02-paper.pdf

oai:aktors.org:356 2004-07-08

part-of relations in anatomy ontologies: A proposal for RDFS and OWL formalisations Aitken, J.S. Webber, B.L. Bard, J.B.L. Knowledge modelling Part-of relations are central to anatomy. However, the definition, formalisation and use of part-of in anatomy ontologies is problematic. This paper surveys existing formal approaches, as well as the use of part-of in the Open Biological Ontologies (OBO) anatomies of model species. Based on this analysis, we propose a minimal ontology for anatomy which is expressed in the Semantic Web languages RDFS and OWL-Full. The paper concludes with a description of the context of this work in capturing cross-species tissue homologies and analogies. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/356/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/356/01/aitken.pdf

oai:aktors.org:358 2004-07-23

Semi-Automatic Population of Ontologies from Text Celjuska, Mr David Vargas-Vera, Dr Maria Knowledge acquisition This paper describes a system for semi-automatic population of ontologies with instances from unstructured text. The system is based on supervised learning and therefore learns extraction rules from annotated text and then applies those rules on newly documents for ontology population. It is based on three componentes: Marmot, a natural language processor; Crystal, a dictionary induction tool; and Badger, an information extraction tool. The important part of the entire cycle is a user who accepts, rejects or modifies newly extracted and suggested instances to be populated. A description of experiments performed with text corpus consisting of 91 documents is given in turn. The results cover the paper and support a presented hypothesis of assigning a rule confidence value to each extraction rule to improve the performance. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/358/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000358/01/kmi-tr-153.pdf

oai:aktors.org:359 2004-07-23

MnM: Ontology-Driven Tool for Semantic Markup Vargas-Vera, Dr Maria Motta, Dr Enrico Domingue, Dr John Lanzoni, Mr Mattia Stutt, Dr Arthur Ciravegna, Dr Fabio Knowledge acquisition Abstract. An important precondition for realising the goal of a semantic web is the ability to annotate web resources with semantic information. In order to carry out this task, users need appropriate representation languages, ontologies, and support tools. In this paper we present MnM, an annotation tool which provides both automated and semi-automated support for annotating web pages with semantic contents. MnM integrates a web browser with an ontology editor and provides open APIs to link to ontology servers and for integrating information extraction tools. MnM can be seen as an early example of the next generation of ontology editors, being web-based, oriented to semantic markup and providing mechanisms for large-scale automatic markup of web pages. 2002-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/359/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000359/01/vargas-vera-camarara-ready-saakm02.pdf

oai:aktors.org:360 2004-07-23

MnM: Ontology Driven Semi-Automatic and Automatic Support for Semantic Markup Vargas-Vera, Dr Maria Motta, Dr Enrico Domingue, Dr John Lanzoni, Mr Mattia Stutt, Dr Arthur Ciravegna, Dr Fabio Knowledge acquisition Abstract. An important precondition for realizing the goal of a semantic web is the ability to annotate web resources with semantic information. In order to carry out this task, users need appropriate representation languages, ontologies, and support tools. In this paper we present MnM, an annotation tool which provides both automated and semi-automated support for annotating web pages with semantic contents. MnM integrates a web browser with an ontology editor and provides open APIs to link to ontology servers and for integrating informa-tion extraction tools. MnM can be seen as an early example of the next genera-tion of ontology editors, being web-based, oriented to semantic markup and providing mechanisms for large-scale automatic markup of web pages. 2002-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/360/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000360/01/vargas-vera-etal.pdf

oai:aktors.org:361 2004-07-23

Knowledge Extraction by using an Ontology Based Annotation Tool Vargas-Vera, Dr Maria Motta, Dr Enrico Domingue, Dr John Buckinham Shum, Dr Simon Lanzoni, Mr Mattia Knowledge acquisition This paper describes a Semantic Annotation Tool for extraction of knowledge structures from web pages through the use of simple user-defined knowledge extraction patterns. The semantic annotation tool contains: an ontology-based mark-up component which allows the user to browse and to mark-up relevant pieces of information; a learning component (Crystal from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst) which learns rules from examples and an information extraction component which extracts the objects and relation between these objects. Our final aim is to provide support for ontology population by using the information extraction component. Our system uses as domain of study “KMi Planet”, a Webbased news server that helps to communicate relevant information between members in our institute. 2001-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/361/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000361/01/vargas-saw.pdf

oai:aktors.org:362 2004-09-20

Lexicon generation by extraction of context patterns Uren, Dr Victoria Motta, Prof Enrico Knowledge retrieval Semantic browser technologies such as Magpie require the construction of lexicons to support the identification of terms in Web pages which are linked to a user’s chosen ontology. We frame the generation of such lexicons from ontologies as a problem of finding synonyms and hyponyms. Synonym finding using the hypothesis of semantic substitutability relies upon the discovery of patterns in which the target word occurs. Information extraction has the potential to find a range of patterns in text. We present a methodology for finding synonyms for inclusion in lexicons in this way and preliminary tests of the method using standard tools. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/362/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000362/01/UrenLex.pdf

oai:aktors.org:363 2004-09-08

Opening Up Magpie via Semantic Services Dzbor, Dr Martin Motta, Prof Enrico Domingue, Dr John Knowledge reuse Knowledge retrieval AKT Submitted Magpie is a suite of tools supporting a ‘zero-cost’ approach to semantic web browsing: it avoids the need for manual annotation by automatically associating an ontology-based semantic layer to web resources. An important aspect of Magpie, which differentiates it from superficially similar hypermedia systems, is that the association between items on a web page and semantic concepts is not merely a mechanism for dynamic linking, but it is the enabling condition for locating services and making them available to a user. These services can be manually activated by a user (pull services), or opportunistically triggered when the appropriate web entities are encountered during a browsing session (push services). In this paper we analyze Magpie from the perspective of building semantic web applications and we note that earlier implementations did not fulfill the criterion of “open as to services”, which is a key aspect of the emerging semantic web. For this reason, in the past twelve months we have carried out a radical redesign of Magpie, resulting in a novel architecture, which is open both with respect to ontologies and semantic web services. This new architecture goes beyond the idea of merely providing support for semantic web browsing and can be seen as a software framework for designing and implementing semantic web applications. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/363/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/363/01/iswc2004-dzbor-etal.pdf

oai:aktors.org:366 2004-09-20

OntoWeaver-S: Integrating Web Services into Data-Intensive Web Sites Lei, Ms Y Motta, Prof E Domingue, Dr J Knowledge publishing Designing web sites is a complex task. Ad-hoc rapid prototyping easily leads to unsatisfactory results, e.g. poor maintainability and extensibility. However, existing web design frameworks focus exclusively on data presentation: the development of specific functionalities is still achieved through low-level programming. In this paper we address this issue by describing our work on the integration of (semantic) web services into a web design framework, OntoWeaver. The resulting architecture, OntoWeaver-S, supports rapid prototyping of service-centred data-intensive web sites, which allow access to remote web services. In particular, OntoWeaver-S is integrated with a comprehensive web service platform, IRS-II, for the specification, discovery, and execution of web services. Moreover, it employs a set of comprehensive site ontologies to model and represent all aspects of service-centred data-intensive web sites, and thus is able to offer high level support for the design and development process. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/366/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/366/01/ontoweavers_sw.pdf

oai:aktors.org:369 2004-09-20

OntoSearch: An Ontology Search Engine Zhang, Mr. Yi Vasconcelos, Dr. Wamberto Sleeman, Prof. Derek Knowledge reuse Knowledge retrieval Reuse of knowledge bases and the semantic web are two promising areas in knowledge technologies. Given some user requirements, finding the suitable ontologies is an important task in both these areas. This paper discusses our work on OntoSearch, a kind of "ontology Google", which can help users find ontologies on the Internet. OntoSearch combines Google Web APIs with a hierarchy visualization technique. It allows the user to perform keyword searches on certain types of “ontology” files, and to visually inspect the files to check their relevance. OntoSearch system is based on Java, JSP, Jena and JBoss technologies. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/369/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/369/01/AI-2004.pdf

oai:aktors.org:371 2004-09-20

Mapping a Business Process Model to a Semantic Web Service Model Guo, Mr. Li Chen-Burger, Dr. Yun-Heh Robertson, Dr. Dave Knowledge acquisition Knowledge modelling OWL-S is used to support automated discovery, composition, invocation and monitoring of web services. Its process model is a typical type of web service model that might be used to express a business process model and could be processed by an agent automatically. Furthermore, OWL-S promises to provide semantics for web services. However, OWL-S is an XML based syntax that is hard to use for those with little XML knowledge, which presents obstacles at requirements capture and design stages. In contrast, diagram based business process modelling languages like FBPML include standard process constructs familiar to this target user group. Such methods are semantically richer than an OWL-S styled modelling language, but do not provide direct inputs for web service development and cannot be used by agent systems straightforwardly. In order to bridge this gap, automatic translation from diagram based business process models to web services models is necessary. In this paper, we have provided such a translation by applying conceptual mapping techniques, demonstrated by using concrete mapping examples from FBPML notations to the OWL-S process ontology. We also have implemented a system which translates FBPML models to OWL-S process models automatically according to our conceptual mapping principles. Model constructs that cannot easily be expressed using OWL-S are also identified. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/371/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/371/01/BPM2WSM.pdf

oai:aktors.org:372 2004-10-17

Trust Strategies for the Semantic Web O'Hara, Kieron Alani, Harith Kalfoglou, Yannis Shadbolt, Nigel Knowledge modelling Enabling trust on the Semantic Web to ensure more efficient agent interaction is an important research topic. Current research on trust seems to focus on developing computational models, semantic representations, inference techniques, etc. However, little attention has been given to the plausible trust strategies or tactics that an agent can follow when interacting with other agents on the Semantic Web. In this paper we identify five most common strategies of trust and discuss their envisaged costs and benefits. The aim is to provide some guidelines to help system developers appreciate the risks and gains involved with each trust strategy. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/372/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/372/01/ISWC04-OHara-final.pdf

oai:aktors.org:374 2005-01-20

ClaimSpotter: An Environment to Support Sensemaking with Knowledge Triples Knowledge reuse Knowledge acquisition Annotating a document with an interpretation of its contents raises a number of challenges that we are hoping to address via the creation of a supporting environment. We present these challenges and motivate an approach based on the notion of suggestions to support document annotation, hoping these suggestions would act as leads to follow for annotators, therefore reducing some of the difficulties inherent to the task. The environment resulting from this approach, ClaimSpotter, is presented. Aspects of its evaluation are also given, using the findings of a study involving a group of participants faced with a document annotation task. 2005-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/374/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/374/01/p3889-sereno.pdf

oai:aktors.org:375 2005-01-21

Automating CapCom Using Mobile Agents and Robotic Assistants Clancey, W.J. Sierhuis, M. Alena, R. Berrios, D. Dowding, J. Graham, J.S. Tyree, K.S Hirsh, R.L. Garry, W.B. Semple, A. Buckingham Shum, S.J. Shadbolt, N. Rupert, S.M. CoAKTinG Knowledge reuse Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing Knowledge modelling We have developed and tested an advanced EVA communications and computing system to increase astronaut self-reliance and safety, reducing dependence on continuous monitoring and advising from mission control on Earth. This system, called Mobile Agents (MA), is voice controlled and provides information verbally to the astronauts through programs called "personal agents." The system partly automates the role of CapCom in Apollo-including monitoring and managing EVA navigation, scheduling, equipment deployment, telemetry, health tracking, and scientific data collection. EVA data are stored automatically in a shared database in the habitat/vehicle and mirrored to a site accessible by a remote science team. The program has been developed iteratively in the context of use, including six years of ethnographic observation of field geology. Our approach is to develop automation that supports the human work practices, allowing people to do what they do well, and to work in ways they are most familiar. Field experiments in Utah have enabled empirically discovering requirements and testing alternative technologies and protocols. This paper reports on the 2004 system configuration, experiments, and results, in which an EVA robotic assistant (ERA) followed geologists approximately 150 m through a winding, narrow canyon. On voice command, the ERA took photographs and panoramas and was directed to move and wait in various locations to serve as a relay on the wireless network. The MA system is applicable to many space work situations that involve creating and navigating from maps (including configuring equipment for local topology), interacting with piloted and unpiloted rovers, adapting to environmental conditions, and remote team collaboration involving people and robots. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/375/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/375/01/AIAA-MobileAgents-2005.pdf

oai:aktors.org:376 2005-01-28

Developing a Service-Oriented Architecture to Harvest Information for the Semantic Web Norton, Mr Barry Chapman, Mr Sam Ciravegna, Prof Fabio Knowledge acquisition Knowledge maintenance Armadillo is a tool that provides automatic annotation for the Semantic Web using unannotated resources like the existing Web for information harvesting, that is: combining a crawling mechanism with an extensible architecture for ontology population. The latter is achieved via largely unsupervised machine learning, boot-strapped from oracles, such as web-site wrappers, and backed up by an `evidential reasoning', allowing evidence to be gained from the redundancy in the Web and allowing the inaccuracies in information, also characteristic of today's Web, to be circumvented. In this paper we sketch how the Armadillo architecture has been reinterpreted as work ow templates that compose semantic web services and show how the porting of Armadillo to new domains, and the application of new tools, has thus been simplied. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/376/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/376/01/aktsws04.pdf

oai:aktors.org:377 2005-02-13

Chain ReAKTing: Collaborative Advanced Knowledge Technologies in the Comb-e-Chem Grid CoAKTinG Knowledge reuse Knowledge acquisition Knowledge modelling Knowledge maintenance The CoAKTinG (Collaborative Advanced Knowledge Technologies in the Grid) project has developed a set of integrated tools to enhance collaboration between e-Scientists. As one of three case studies, these tools are being applied within the Combechem e-Science pilot project. Two levels of integration are being explored: straightforward deployment of generic CoAKTinG tools, and a “deep” integration between these tools and the Combechem grid. The deeper integration supports the publication at source research objective of Combechem, in which a digital record is maintained through the information processing chain that starts in the laboratory, supporting retrospective use in the e-Science process. In this paper we provide an overview of the tools and we focus in particular on the adaptation of one of the tools for the Combechem application. 2004-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/377/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/377/01/escience-ahm2004-chain-reackting-danius.pdf

oai:aktors.org:380 2005-02-13

Collaboration in the Semantic Grid: a Basis for e-Learning Bachler, Michelle Buckingham Shum, Simon Chen-Burger, Yun-Heh Dalton, Jeff De Roure, David Eisenstadt, Marc Komzak, Jiri Michaelides, Danius Page, Kevin Potter, Stephen Shadbolt, Nigel Tate, Austin CoAKTinG Knowledge reuse Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing Knowledge modelling Knowledge maintenance The CoAKTinG project aims to advance the state of the art in collaborative mediated spaces for the Semantic Grid. This paper presents an overview of the hypertext and knowledge based tools which have been deployed to augment existing collaborative environments, and the ontology which is used to exchange structure, promote enhanced process tracking, and aid navigation of resources before, after, and while a collaboration occurs. While the primary focus of the project has been supporting e-science, this paper also explores the similarities and application of CoAKTinG technologies as part of a human centred design approach to e-Learning. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/380/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/380/01/gls2004-2-krp.pdf

oai:aktors.org:381 2005-02-22

Concept Mapping Between Compendium and IX Chen-Burger, Dr. Yun-Heh Tate, Prof. Austin CoAKTinG Knowledge reuse Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing Knowledge modelling Knowledge maintenance This document provides a conceptual framework for mapping modelling primitives between I-X adn Compendium. It extends the initial description of issues discussed during the CoAKTinG workshop at Open University, October 10-11, 2002. Its content is based on a follow-up internal Edinburgh meeting and the design of new I-X v3.0. Feedback in telephone conversations with Michelle Bachler from OU has also been factored in. 2003-05-01 Departmental Technical Report http://eprints.aktors.org/381/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/381/01/concept-mapping.pdf

oai:aktors.org:382 2005-02-22

Mapping Principles between IX and Compendium Chen-Burger, Dr. Yun-Heh CoAKTinG Knowledge reuse Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing Knowledge modelling Knowledge maintenance This document describes initial attempts to provide mapping principles that may be carried out for translating concepts between Compendium and IX Process Panels. This document is based on previous mapping results [1] and provides a more detailed illustration of it. Its purpose is to promote discussion and provide a foundation for forming mapping consensus between Compendium and IX. This document first describes mapping principles. These principles are used in and demonstrated by a concrete example that is based on a larger Compendium map provided by Simon Buckingham-Shum, KMI OU. As understood, a new version of IX Process Panel will be produced. In addition to the existing Issue, Activity and Constraint sub-panels, the new IX Process Panel will also have an Annotation sub-panel. Although these changes will largely not affect its conceptual mapping to Compendium, the presentation of the mapping results will be reflected in an IX Panel. This document is constructed based on this new IX Process Panel. 2003-05-01 Departmental Technical Report http://eprints.aktors.org/382/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/382/01/mapping-principles.pdf

oai:aktors.org:386 2005-03-03

ConEditor: Tool to Input and Maintain Constraints Ajit, Suraj Sleeman, Derek Fowler, David W. Knott, David Knowledge acquisition Knowledge maintenance We present a tool which helps domain experts capture and maintain constraints. The tool displays parts of an ontology (as classes, sub-classes and properties) in the form of a tree. A number of keywords and operators from a constraint language are also listed. The tool helps a user to create a constraint expression. Additionally, the tool has a facility which allows the user to input tabular data. The expressed constraints can be converted into a standard format, making them portable. It is planned to integrate this tool, ConEditor, with Designers’ Workbench, a system that supports human designers. 2004-01-01 Conference Poster http://eprints.aktors.org/386/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/386/01/AJIT_PDF.pdf

oai:aktors.org:387 2005-03-07

ReTAX+: A Cooperative Taxonomy Revision Tool Knowledge reuse Knowledge acquisition Knowledge maintenance ReTAX is a system that assists domain experts to accommodate a new item in an established taxonomy; it suggests a number of ways in which that can be achieved namely; modifying the new entity, the taxonomy, or both. Further, a set of refinement operators are used to guarantee the consistency of the resulting taxonomy. ReTAX+ is a system which provides the user with additional functionalities as they build a new taxonomy or reuse an existing taxonomy. Specifically, it provides functions to enable a user to add, edit or delete the values associated with class attributes; additionally, it provides functions to add a class, delete a class, merge two classes, and split a class. Again consistent with the philosophy of ReTAX, ReTAX+ offers the user, when relevant, a number of options to achieve his objectives. For example, deleting a class is a fairly radical step and various decisions need to be made about the resulting “orphaned” instances and sub-classes. 2004-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/387/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/387/01/p148-ai-2004-RETAX-fin.pdf

oai:aktors.org:389 2005-03-07

The Designers’ Workbench: Using Ontologies & Constraints for Configuration Knowledge reuse Knowledge acquisition Typically, complex engineering artifacts are designed by teams who may not all be located in the same building or even city. Additionally, besides having to design a part of an artifact to be consistent with the specification, it must also be consistent with the company's design standards. The Designers' Workbench supports designers by checking that their configurations satisfy both physical and organisational constraints. The system uses an ontology to describe the available elements in a configuration task. Configurations are composed of features, which can be geometric or nongeometric, physical or abstract. Designers can select a class of feature (e.g. Bolt) from the ontology, and add an instance of that class (e.g. a particular bolt) to their configuration. Properties of the instance can express the parameters of the feature (e.g. the size of the bolt), and also describe connections to other features (e.g. what parts the bolt is used to hold together). 2004-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/389/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/389/01/p149-ai-2004-desWB-DF-fin.pdf

oai:aktors.org:390 2005-03-07

Issues in moving to a Semantic Web for a large Corporation Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition In many large engineering design organizations the information systems have developed over time into a set of heterogeneous resources. This makes it difficult for engineers to follow a trail through the resources. This situation becomes particular difficult when the Engineer is new to a company; unfamiliar with the systems and unaware of the history of the designs. This paper presents a demonstrator system developed with a major aerospace company to aid engineers, through the use of knowledge technologies, to locate the documentation they require. The paper presents the systems and lessons learnt to enable the organisation to move towards a more semantically enriched document repository. 2004-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/390/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/390/01/p150-pakm-FIN-1.pdf

oai:aktors.org:391 2005-03-07

Analysing Time Series Medical Data-sets Sleeman, D Luo, Z Christie, G Coghill, G Knowledge acquisition Knowledge maintenance At the 1999 AIME Conference [1] we reported a decision tree study on a subset of data, including time series physiological data, admissions characteristics, and outcome after traumatic head injury. That study analysed total duration for which patients had, for example, raised Intracranial Pressure, but it did not consider temporal relationships between various physiological and clinical events. In this study, we have addressed that issue in a number of ways. Firstly, by using a workbench, AAB, to display the Real Time data-set and asking clinicians to make predictions of expected outcome based on complete physiological and clinical data. Secondly, repeating the exercise with a reduced (more compact) representation for the physiological data. Thirdly, patterns were generated, including “adjacent” physiological parameters and clinicians were asked if they are likely/very unlikely to cause a particular major physiological event or outcome. Finally, we implemented a module to test patterns of the form: IF X happens then Y will happen between T1-T2 against patient time-series data. Results of all these studies have so far not been conclusive [2]; it has been suggested that the brain is currently not very well understood physiologically, and that a similar set of analyses should be applied to a simpler organ. Given that significant amounts of data are now available for patients undergoing dialysis, we have chosen to do an analogous study in this area; also the physiology of the renal system is much better understood. We have outlined some additional studies we plan to undertake using data-mining, theory refinement and knowledge base refinement approaches. 2004-01-01 Departmental Technical Report http://eprints.aktors.org/391/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/391/01/tr-03-gordon-Christie-Bonn-2h.pdf

oai:aktors.org:392 2005-03-09

Extending SWRL to Express Fully-Quantified Constraints Knowledge reuse Drawing on experience gained over a series of distributed knowledge base and database projects, we argue for the utility of an expressive quantified constraint language for the Semantic Web logic layer. Our Constraint Interchange Format (CIF) is based on classical range-restricted FOL. CIF allows the expression of invariant conditions in Semantic Web data models, but the choice of how to implement the constraints is left to local reasoners. We develop the quantified constraint representation as an extension of the current proposal for a Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL). An RDF syntax for our extended CIF/SWRL is given in this paper. While our approach differs from SWRL in that existential quantifiers are handled explicitly rather than using OWL-DL constructs, we believe our proposal is still fully compatible with the use of the various OWL species as well as RDFS. We demonstrate the use of the CIF/SWRL representation in the context of a practical Semantic Web reasoning application, based on the CS AKTive Space demonstrator (the 2003 Semantic Web Challenge winner). We indicate where in our application it makes sense to use the existing SWRL directly, and where our CIF/SWRL allows more complex constraints to be expressed in a natural manner. 2004-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/392/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/392/01/ruleml2004.pdf

oai:aktors.org:393 2005-03-10

Multi-Layer Active Documents for the Semantic Web Lanfranchi, Dr. Vita Ciravegna, Prof. Fabio Petrelli, Dr. Daniella Knowledge publishing Users’ disorientation and cognitive overload are well known phenomena intrinsic to the idea of hypertext and studied since the early days [3]. The Semantic Web (SWeb in the following) with its layers of annotations can increase the cognitive overload when a document is accessed. As a matter of fact, in a SWeb framework, annotations can be added at different stages in a document lifetime. Initially annotations are added at editing time by the author [11] [12] [13]. Annotations can span from tagging portions of documents with concept labels, to identifying instances or concept mentions, to connect information (e.g. a telephone number and its owner). Different users can annotate the same document in different ways, e.g. using different ontologies, creating different views of the same document. Other annotations can be composed at reading time, i.e. when the document is displayed, for example added by automatic semantic harvesters that extract and integrate information from different repositories [14] [15], or systems which link entities to additional information or services [4]. The many times a document can be annotated and the many pieces of knowledge potentially connected can easily transform a SWeb document into an intricate set of connections. Moreover, the semantic consistence of the annotations (e.g. outgoing links) cannot be guaranteed when different heterogeneous schemas can be applied to the same document. For example, from the author of a document it would be possible to add a hyperlink to reach her diary; from her contact address it is possible to reach the weather forecast for that region. Though both annotations are perfectly acceptable in principle, it is likely that such different navigation choices would distract and disorient the user. This paper proposes to organize the annotations into layers to offer functionalities specific to the user and the context of use as a way to limit the cognitive overload. Managing layers of annotations requires the document to be active. An active document is aware of its own content and can flexibly change the way it presents itself to the actual user, e.g. by allowing the user to read only up to a predefined level of detail. However an active document should not be limited to the presentation phase: we extend the activity to the annotation layer as well. A global framework for editing and accessing multi-layered semantically active documents is proposed. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/393/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/393/01/multi-layer.pdf

oai:aktors.org:394 2005-03-10

Semantic Web based Document Editing and Browsing in AktiveDoc Lanfranchi, Dr. Vita Ciravegna, Prof. Fabio Petrelli, Dr. Daniella Knowledge reuse Knowledge retrieval Knowledge publishing In this paper, we present a tool for supporting sharing and reuse of knowledge in document production (writing) and use (e.g. reading). The tool uses Semantic Web technologies for supporting the production of ontology-based annotations while the document is written. It also supports free text annotations (comments) that integrate the knowledge contained in the document. Moreover it is able to use external services (e.g. a Semantic Web harvester) to propose relevant content to be inserted into the document, enabling easy knowledge reuse. Similar facilities are provided for readers when their task does not coincide with the author’s one. The tool is specifically designed for Knowledge Management in organizations. In this paper we present and discuss how Semantic Web technologies are designed and integrated in the environment. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/394/ ascii http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000394/01/VitaAbstract.txt

oai:aktors.org:395 2005-03-10

Proposed Functional-Style Extensions for Semantic Web Service Composition Norton, Mr. Barry AKT Working Paper In a related paper we set out how various parts of a semantic web service-based architecture for Armadillo, a harvesting tool for semantic annotation, can be instantiated with information extraction and related language services. We have constructed this as a workflow in BPEL4WS, reasoning, as have several other authors, that even while we should like to take advantage of semantic web service technology there exist few, if any, generally available choreography solutions for OWL-S. As a result we plan to take the lessons learned as input to an effort to implement and extend a `coordination engine' for OWL-S in the CASheW-s project. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/395/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/395/01/sws.pdf

oai:aktors.org:396 2005-03-11

T-Rex: A Flexible Relation Extraction Framework Knowledge acquisition In the wake of the explosive growth in the use of the computer as a communication device, has come a need for systems that help people cope with the sheer volume of information available. It is universally known that the Internet contains vast amounts of unstructured documents, but the same is also true for large organizations like publishing companies, government departments, airplane manufacturers, car manufacturers, and so forth. In many application domains, there is the potential to significantly increase the utility of available textual information by using automated methods for mapping parts of the unstructured text into a structured representation. This process is called Information Extraction (IE). Within IE, the task of Entity Extraction is essentially a classification problem: given a piece of text in a document, the task consists in deciding whether it fits into some entity class. The task of Relation Extraction (REX), also known as event extraction or template filling, additionally aims to establish relations between the classified entities. The top performer in the 2002 DARPA ACE evaluation got entity extraction precision and recall scores of about 80%, but binary relation extraction scores of only roughly 60%. Using a system that makes nearly one mistake out of two suggestions is hardly acceptable in real-world applications. Relation extraction is therefore a difficult open research problem, with important applications in diverse fields, such as Knowledge Management and Web Mining. 2005-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/396/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/396/01/cluk05.pdf

oai:aktors.org:397 2005-03-12

The Ontology: Chimaera or Pegasus Knowledge modelling In the context of the needs of the Semantic Web and Knowledge Management, we consider what the requirements are of ontologies. The ontology as an artifact of knowledge representation is in danger of becoming a Chimera. We present a series of facts concerning the foundations on which automated ontology construction must build. We discuss a number of different functions that an ontology seeks to fulfill, and also a wish list of ideal functions. Our objective is to stimulate discussion as to the real requirements of ontology engineering and take the view that only a selective and restricted set of requirements will enable the beast to fly. 2005-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/397/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/397/01/brewster-iria-ciravegna-wilks.pdf

oai:aktors.org:398 2005-03-12

Armadillo: Integrating Knowledge for the Semantic Web Knowledge reuse Knowledge acquisition Knowledge modelling Knowledge maintenance The Semantic Web, SW, needs semantically-based structured content to both enable better document retrieval and empower semantically-aware agents. One prerequisite for the SW is the widespread adop- tion of such structured knowledge, so without a uni- versal acceptance other automated methods need to be employed to generate structured content from the existing unstructured web. Most of the current tech- nologies available for creating structured content is based on static human centred annotation, very of- ten completely manual, of documents. Manual annotation is time-consuming and can in- troduce noise, being incom- plete or incorrect, hence decreasing the quality of the information. For these reasons, we believe that the SW needs automatic methods for annotating con- tent. Automatic annotation services such as Sem- Tag and Armadillo intend to solve this problem by automatically providing SW content. In this paper we describe the Armadillo approach to automatic annotation and detail the methods em- ployed internally for integrating and ensuring consis- tency of elicited knowledge. Armadillo is a tool for extracting and integrating information from large repositories (e.g. the Web) developed at Sheffield. The methodology employed for validating and inte- grating the information is a series of weak eviden- tial similarity tests, implemented through a library of String Metrics. The paper focuses on presenting the Armadillo tool and details a use case, relating the methodologies used. 2005-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/398/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/398/01/chapman-norton-ciravegna.pdf

oai:aktors.org:399 2005-03-12

Mining the Semantic Web: Requirements for Machine Learning Knowledge acquisition In the current form of the Web, content is designed and published for human reading and it is not typi- cally tractable by machines; the Semantic Web, SW, is expected to extend this by providing structured content via the addition of annotations. A prereq- uisite for the SW is the availability of structured knowledge, so methods need to be employed to gen- erate it from existing unstructured content (docu- ment annotation). A number of tools have been proposed for manual annotation of documents, some of them use Information Extraction, IE, to re- duce the burden on the user side. Relying on a man- ual process presents some risks for the SW, because it creates a bottleneck: convincing millions of users to annotate documents requires a world-wide action of unlikely outcome. Moreover there are some se- rious concerns about the quality of manual annota- tion, due to user inability or to spamming. To produce a viable and maintainable SW, large scale automatic anno- tation services, similar to today's search engines, are needed. They must be: (1) easily defined for a specific ontological component or ser- vice; (2) able to constantly re-index documents (so to solve problem of obsolete/misaligned annotation). Machine Learning, ML, and IE become then in- dispensable for developing SW tools able to extract and structure information: in this paper we focus on identifying requirements an challenges for future re- search in ML and IE applied to SW. When detailing the requirements and challenge we refer, as an ex- ample, to Armadillo. Armadillo is a tool for extracting and integrating information from large repositories (e.g. the Web) developed at She±eld. Armadillo is able to (1) learn to extract facts and entities in a largely unsupervised way; (2) cope with unstructured documents such as semi- structured and free documents as well. The learn- ing algorythm currently integrated into Armadillo is (LP)2, implemented in Amilcare. The requirements and challenges that we identify, however, are not related simply to Ar- madillo but can be shared by other SW tools with similar aims. 2005-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/399/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/399/01/ciravegna-chapman.pdf

oai:aktors.org:400 2005-03-12

Pascal Challenge: The Evaluation of Machine Learning for Information Extraction Knowledge acquisition If the Semantic Web is to utilise the vast number of documents available on the WWW it requires an effective way to automatically annotate those docu- ments, enabling the extraction of relevant informa- tion. The Pascal Challenge on the Evaluation of Ma- chine Learning for Information Extraction provided a common basis on which it assess the relative per- formance of multifarious machine learning systems. This paper describes the challenge and presents an initial analysis of the results. 2005-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/400/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/400/01/ireson-ciravegna.pdf

oai:aktors.org:405 2005-03-12

Relation Extraction for Mining the Semantic Web Iria, Mr. José Ciravegna, Prof. Fabio Knowledge acquisition The knowledge acquisition bottleneck problem, well-known to the Knowledge Management community, is turning the weaving of the Semantic Web (SW) into a hard and slow process. Nowadays' high costs associated with producing two versions of a document – one version for human consumption and another version for machine consumption – prevent the creation of enough metadata to make the SW realizable. There are several potential solutions to the problem. We advocate the use of automated methods for semantic markup, i.e., for mapping parts of unstructured text into a structured representation such as ontology. In this paper, we describe initial work on a general software framework for supervised extraction of entities and relations from text. The framework was designed so as to provide the degree of flexibility required by automatic semantic markup tasks for the Semantic Web. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/405/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/405/01/iria-ciravegna.pdf

oai:aktors.org:406 2005-03-12

Orchestration of Semantic Web Services for Large-Scale Document Annotation Norton, Mr. Barry Chapman, Mr. Sam Ciravegna, Prof. Fabio Knowledge acquisition AKT In Progress Armadillo is a tool that provides automatic annotation for the Semantic Web using unannotated resources like the existing Web for information harvesting, that is: combining a crawling mechanism with an extensible architecture for ontology population. The latter is achieved via largely unsupervised machine learning, boot-strapped from oracles, such as web-site wrappers, and backed up by `evidential reasoning', allowing evidence to be gained from the redundancy in the Web and inaccuracies in information, also characteristic of today's Web, to be circumvented. In this paper we sketch how the architecture of Armadillo has now been reinterpreted as workflow templates that compose semantic web services and show how the porting of Armadillo to new domains, and furthermore the application of new tools, has thus been simplified and benefits from semantic discovery and automatic orchestration. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/406/ ascii http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000406/01/abstract.txt

oai:aktors.org:409 2005-03-12

Ontologies, Taxonomies, Thesauri: Learning from Texts Brewster, Mr. Christopher Wilks, Prof. Yorick Knowledge acquisition The use of ontologies as representations of knowledge is widespread but their construction, until recently, has been entirely manual. We argue in this paper for the use of text corpora and automated nat- ural language processing methods for the construction of ontologies. We delineate the challenges and present criteria for the selection of appropriate methods. We distinguish three major steps in ontology building: associating terms, constructing hierarchies and labelling re- lations. A number of methods are presented for these purposes ut we conclude that the issue of data-sparsity still is a major challenge. We argue for the use of resources external to the domain specific corpus. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/409/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/409/01/KeyWord_FMO.pdf

oai:aktors.org:410 2005-03-12

Knowledge Representation with Ontologies: The Present and Future O'Hara, Dr. Kieron Brewster, Mr. Christopher Knowledge modelling Ontologies—specifications of what exists, or what we can say about the world—have been around at least since Aristotle. At various times, philosophers have wondered whether the present King of France is bald or whether existence is a predicate. Just as scientists have grappled with the reality of negative numbers, subatomic particles, or the vital force, so have theologians and mystics grappled with the reality of God and inner spiritual experiences. The nature of knowledge is an abiding question and has resulted in people’s continuous attempts to find ways to express, word, or convey their own “knowledge.” Physics and mathematics depend on specific symbolic languages, and many approaches to AI regard finding the problem’s optimal representation as most of the solution. Recently, we have seen an explosion of interest in ontologies as artifacts to represent human knowledge and as critical components in knowledge management, the Semantic Web, business-to-business applications, and several other application areas. Various research communities commonly assume that ontologies are the appropriate modeling structure for representing knowledge. However, little discussion has occurred regarding the actual range of knowledge an ontology can successfully represent. 2004-01-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/410/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/410/01/Trends_and_Controversies_Jan_2004.pdf

oai:aktors.org:413 2005-06-08

On Interoperability of Ontologies for Web-based Educational Systems AKT Showcase Papers Knowledge maintenance Interoperability between disparate systems in open, distributed environments has become the quest of many practitioners in a variety of fields. Web-based educational systems are not an exception, but provide some unique characteristics. In this perspectives paper we argue for the role of multiple ontologies in support of Web-based educational systems and speculate on the efforts involved in achieving interoperable systems. We draw our criticism from our involvement in interoperability tasks between ontologies for Semantic Web systems and elaborate on the role of communities of users in interoperability scenarios. 2005-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/413/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/413/01/www05-interoper-kalfoglou-etal.pdf

oai:aktors.org:414 2005-06-08

Monitoring Research Collaborations Using Semantic Web Technologies Alani, Harith Gibbins, Nicholas Glaser, Hugh Harris, Stephen Shadbolt, Nigel Knowledge retrieval Knowledge publishing In the current research environment, funding agencies are increasingly required to demonstrate that the projects they fund represent value for money. When funds are disbursed in a speculative manner, in order to stimulate interdisciplinary collaboration, the determination of value for money relies on evidence that shows the generation of new collaborations. This paper summarises the work we carried out on behalf of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), in which we have implemented a set of applications to enable the research council to examine the existence and nature of collaborations between researchers.We have used SemanticWeb technologies to construct a flexible application framework to provide multiple complementary visualisations of the data, while separating the issues of knowledge acquisition and curation from the more user-centric interface requirements. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/414/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/414/01/eswc-camera-ready.pdf

oai:aktors.org:415 2005-06-27

Ontology Mapping with Domain Specific Agents in the AQUA Question Answering System. Nagy, Mr Miklos Vargas-Vera, Dr Maria Motta, Dr Enrico Knowledge retrieval This paper describes a domain specific multi-agent ontology-mapping solution in the AQUA query answering system. In order to incorporate uncertainty inherent to the mapping process, the system uses the Dempster-Shafer model for dealing with incomplete and uncertain information produced during the mapping. A novel approach is presented how specialized agents with partial local knowledge of the particular domain achieve ontology mapping without creating global or reference ontology. Our approach is particularly fit for a query-answering scenario, where answer needs to be created in real time to satisfy a query posed by the user. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/415/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000415/01/kmi-05-3.pdf

oai:aktors.org:416 2005-06-08

Ontosophie: A Semi-Automatic System for Ontology Population from Text. Celjuska, Mr David Vargas-Vera, Dr Maria Knowledge acquisition This paper describes a system for semi-automatic population of ontologies with instances from unstructured text. It is based on supervised learning, learns extraction rules from annotated text and then applies those rules on new articles to populate the ontology. Hence, the system classifies stories and populates a hand-crafted ontology with new instances. It is based on three components: Marmot - a natural language processor; Crystal - a dictionary induction tool; and Badger - an information extraction tool. A part of the entire cycle is a user who accepts, rejects or modifies extracted and suggested instances to be populated. A description of experiments performed with a text corpus consisting of 91 articles is given. The results complete the paper and support the hypothesis that assigning a rule confidence value to each extraction rule improves the performance. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/416/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000416/01/kmi-04-19.pdf

oai:aktors.org:418 2005-06-23

Fundamental Laws of Dynamics for Computational Creativity WEN, Dr. Guihua Shadbolt, Professor Nigel Knowledge modelling Dynamics for computational creativity forms a promising unified theoretical framework for cognitive science broadly construed. This paper discusses its some fundamental laws that can be employed to understand the mechanism of the mind, to find the solid theoretical foundation for and to practically support the implementation of creativity support systems. These laws include curved manifold law, completeness law, normal distribution law, boundary law, and asymmetric law. Finally, a prototype of creativity support system based on these laws is also illustrated 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/418/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/418/01/WEN_IJCAI05%5BFinalVersion%5D.pdf

oai:aktors.org:423 2005-09-27

Narrative as a Form of Knowledge Transfer: Narrative Theory and Semantics Tuffield, Mr Mischa M Shadbolt, Professor Nigel R Millard, Dr David E Student Papers This paper presents a theoretical discussion of semantically enabled technologies that adopt narrative theories to aid knowledge transfer. The paper aims to present the applicability of existing narrative theories as methods of transferring and retrieving knowledge, underlying the importance of semantic mark-up 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/423/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/423/01/AKT_DTA.pdf

oai:aktors.org:424 2005-09-27

Towards the Narrative Annotation of Personal Information and Gaming Environments Tuffield, Mr Mischa M Millard, Dr David E Shadbolt, Professor Nigel R Student Papers This paper presents an analogy between SemanticWeb technologies and an existing narrative theory. Narrative generation is presented as an alternative method of human computer interaction, in the form of context based search. The discussions are grounded in domains of Memories for Life, and Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/424/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/424/01/tuffieldetal.pdf

oai:aktors.org:425 2005-09-27

OntoMedia: An Ontology for the Representation of Heterogeneous Media Jewell, Mr Mike O Lawrence, Ms K F Tuffield, Mr Mischa M Prugel-Bennett, Professor Adam Nixon, Dr Mark S schraefel, Dr monica c Shadbolt, Professor Nigel R Student Papers With the emergence of the Semantic Web, a shared vocabulary is necessary to annotate the vast collection of heterogeneous media already in existence. The OntoMedia ontology aims to provide a meaningful set of relationships which may enable this process, while being suited to mapping and extension. In this paper we outline the salient features of our ontology as well as initial applications and comparisons to existing technologies. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/425/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/425/01/OntoMedia.pdf

oai:aktors.org:426 2005-09-27

OntoMedia - Creating an Ontology for Marking Up the Contents of Heterogeneous Media Lawrence, Ms K Faith Tuffield, Mr Mischa M Jewell, Mr Mike O Prugel-Bennett, Professor Adam Millard, Dr David E Nixon, Dr Mark S schraefel, Dr monica c Shadbolt, Professor Nigel R Student Papers This paper describes the OntoMedia ontology, an ontology for describing the semantic content of hetrogeneous media. We present our motivation for creating this ontology and consider how it relates to similar ontologies in the bibliographic and multimedia domains. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/426/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/426/01/ISWC05.pdf

oai:aktors.org:428 2005-09-28

Uses of Contextual Information to Support Online Tasks Heath, Mr Tom Motta, Professor Enrico Dzbor, Dr Martin Student Papers First Doctoral Symposium In this paper we make a case for the role of user context information in supporting task performance online, examine previous attempts at representing and making use of user context factors, and highlight the limitations of existing tools and services. We then suggest how the emergent Semantic Web might be able to better facilitate the capture of knowledge regarding user context, and provide the means for its reuse in supporting the performance of tasks online. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/428/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/428/01/heath-contextual-information-online-tasks.pdf

oai:aktors.org:429 2005-09-30

Semiometrics and Impact Calculations McRae-Spencer, Mr D M Shadbolt, Prof N R First Doctoral Symposium Citation analysis and journal impact factors are considered controversial yet have been a standard measure of research value for over thirty years. This paper considers the nature of citation, the arguments for and against the current approach to impact measurement based on citation count and proposed alternative measures. It is argued that most proposed alternatives are attempting to do the same thing: apply a value-based approach to the impact measurement, more subtle than purely counting citations. Parallels are drawn with psychology research and in particular the emerging field of Semiometrie, and it is argued that applying the semiometric approach to the area of citation analysis and im-pact measurement provides not only a method to unify the proposed alterna-tives, but suggests a future scenario of research measurement and impact analy-sis far richer than has previously been considered possible. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/429/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/429/01/Semiometric_Impact.pdf

oai:aktors.org:432 2006-04-06

Supporting User Tasks and Context: Challenges for Semantic Web Research Heath, Mr Tom Dzbor, Dr Martin Motta, Professor Enrico Student Papers Knowledge reuse Knowledge acquisition Whilst the tasks users perform online are often complex and wideranging, the tools currently available may not adequately support them. Attempts to classify user behaviors online have tended to focus on the medium of the web, where searching and browsing are seen as the primary modes of interaction. This paper introduces a comprehensive user-oriented classification of online tasks that emphasizes the user’s goals without assuming the use of particular internet tools or technologies. Taking greater account of a user’s context is also discussed as an essential component in better supporting performance of tasks online. Finally we consider how Semantic Web technologies can support the development of task-focused context-aware tools. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/432/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/432/01/heath-dzbor-motta-usersweb2005-supporting-user-tasks-context.pdf

oai:aktors.org:435 2005-11-12

A Framework for Reference Management in the Semantic Web Lewy, Timothy Glaser, Hugh Shadbolt, Prof Nigel Knowledge maintenance Much of the semantic web relies upon open and unhindered interoperability between diverse systems. The successful convergence of multiple ontologies and referencing schemes is key. This is hampered by a lack of any means for managing and communicating co-references. We have therefore developed an ontology and framework for the exploration and resolution of potential co-references, in the semantic web at large, that allow the user to a) discover and record uniquely identifying attributes b) interface candidates with and create pipelines of other systems for reference management c) record identified duplicates in a usable and retrievable manner, and d) provide a consistent reference service for accessing them. This paper describes this ontology and a framework of web services designed to support and utilise it. 2005-01-01 Departmental Technical Report http://eprints.aktors.org/435/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/435/01/www2006.pdf

oai:aktors.org:436 2005-11-21

AKTive Food: Semantic Web based knowledge conduits for the Organic Food Industry Brewster, Christopher Glaser, Hugh Haughton, Barny Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing We present a vision and a proposal for using Semantic Web technologies in the organic food industry. This is a very knowledge inten- sive industry at every step from the producer, to the caterer or restau- ranteur, 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 different and parallel form of knowledge to that of price. Semantic Web technologies can be used effectively 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. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/436/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000436/01/Brewster_SWCASE.pdf

oai:aktors.org:437 2005-11-27

Report on Summer Internship Work For the AKT Project: Benchmarking RDF Triplestores Streatfield, Michael Glaser, Hugh Knowledge retrieval AKT Working Paper This report details the work done on the benchmarking of RDF triplestores over the summer. It talks about the structure of the tests performed and the scripts produced which were used to run the tests. It is intended to be useful in both assessing the results produced and for anyone who wishes to take the work on further in the future. This work was done in conjunction with Dr Jeremy Frey and Kieron Taylor of the University of Southampton's Chemistry department. I have gone into as much detail as possible whilst trying to keep it relevant, so that the scripts I have written can be understood in context. It should be noted that this report does include the results from all of the tests performed (~12 million triples in 3store's case), although it might be better not to publish those until there are similar results for all of the stores. 2005-11-01 Departmental Technical Report http://eprints.aktors.org/437/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/437/01/finalreport-hg.pdf

oai:aktors.org:440 2006-02-13

Ontological Approaches to Modelling Narrative Tuffield Southampton, Mr Mischa M Millard Southampton, Dr David E Shadbolt Southampton, Professor Nigel R Student Papers We outline a simple taxonomy of approaches to modelling narrative, explain how these might be realised ontologically, and describe our continuing work to apply these techniques to the problem of Memories for Life. 6-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/440/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/440/01/tuffieldetal.pdf

oai:aktors.org:441 2006-02-16

Mining the Semantic Web Chakravarthy, Mr Ajay First Doctoral Symposium In this paper we propose research on how semantic web technologies can be used to mine the web, for information extraction. We also examine how new unsupervised processes can aid in extracting precise and useful information from semantic data, thus reducing the problem of information overload .The Semantic Web adds structure to the meaningful content of Web pages; hence information is given a well-defined meaning; which is both human readable as well as machine-processable. This enables the development of automated intelligent systems, allowing machines to comprehend the semantics of documents and data. Here we propose techniques for automating the process of search, analysis and categorization of semantic data, further we examine how these techniques can aid in improving the efficiency of already existing information retrieval technologies by implementing reporting functionalities, which is highlighted in the future work and challenges 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/441/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/441/01/ResearchPaper.pdf

oai:aktors.org:442 2006-03-16

Collaboration in the Semantic Grid: a Basis for e-Learning Page, Kevin R. Michaelides, Danius T. Buckingham Shum, Simon J. Chen-Burger, Yun-Heh Dalton, Jeff De Roure, David C. Eisenstadt, Marc Potter, Stephen Shadbolt, Nigel R. Tate, Austin Bachler, Michelle Komzak, Jiri CoAKTinG Knowledge reuse Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing Knowledge modelling Knowledge maintenance The CoAKTinG project aims to advance the state of the art in collaborative mediated spaces for the Semantic Grid. This paper presents an overview of the hypertext and knowledge based tools which have been deployed to augment existing collaborative environments, and the ontology which is used to exchange structure, promote enhanced process tracking, and aid navigation of resources before, after, and while a collaboration occurs. While the primary focus of the project has been supporting e-Science, this paper also explores the similarities and application of CoAKTinG technologies as part of a human-centred design approach to e-Learning. 2005-11-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/442/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/442/01/aai_coakting-2005-preprint-krp.pdf

oai:aktors.org:443 2006-03-16

Typed Protocols for Peer-to-Peer Service Composition AKT Submitted In this paper we present a technique which addresses the composition of web services into peer-to-peer systems. Our approach is founded on the definition of lightweight protocols, which provide the means to specify, execute, and verify these systems. The advantage of our approach is that the protocols are defined independent of the domain in question, and therefore allow us to focus specifically on the composition aspects of the system. We present a definition of the MAP language for service composition, and show how it can be used to specify a simple peer-to-peer file-sharing system. We also illustrate how the use of type information can allow us to gain confidence in the correctness of our protocols. 2005-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/443/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/443/01/typedmap.pdf

oai:aktors.org:444 2006-03-16

Protocols for Web Service Invocation AKT Submitted The automatic invocation of a web service by an agent is a complex task which is currently being addressed by semantic markup techniques. However, it is difficult to define the computational aspects of a web service in this approach. In this paper we propose a protocol-based formalism which appears better suited to a representation of these issues. We define the syntax and semantics of a protocol language which express precisely how the interaction with a service should be performed, and how the service should be invoked. We also sketch an architecture for the execution of our protocols. 2005-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/444/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/444/01/wsprot.pdf

oai:aktors.org:445 2006-03-16

Agent Protocols for Peer-To-Peer Architectures AKT Submitted In this paper we present a technique which enables agents to participate in peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, such as file-sharing networks. Our technique is founded on the definition of lightweight protocols which specify the interactions required by the agent for a specific P2P network. The protocols that we define are executable specifications and can be directly implemented and independently verified. We present a definition of our MAP language for expressing protocols, and show how it can be used to enable participation in a simple P2P file-sharing system. 2005-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/445/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/445/01/p2pmap.pdf

oai:aktors.org:446 2006-03-22

Person to Person Trust Factors in Word of Mouth Recommendation Heath, Mr Tom Motta, Professor Enrico Petre, Dr Marian Student Papers Knowledge reuse Knowledge acquisition Online recommender systems and review sites do not currently reflect how people seek information using social networks of people they know. Developing systems that overcome this limitation requires studies of how people choose sources for recommendations and assess their trustworthiness. This paper presents the findings of such a study and discusses their implications for search and recommender applications. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/446/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/446/01/heath-motta-petre-reinvent2006-person-to-person-trust-factors.pdf

oai:aktors.org:447 2006-03-16

AKTive Workgroup Builder (AWB): Constraint Satisfaction Problem Solving over the Semantic Web McKenzie, Mr Craig Preece, Dr Alun Gray, Prof Peter Knowledge reuse Knowledge acquisition In this paper we introduce the AKTive Workgroup Builder (AWB) web application and describe how it uses distributed RDF data, defined against an OWL Lite ontology, to build and solve a user defined Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP). We describe our approach to mixed mode reasoning using both ontological and rule based methods and discuss how some of the factors relating to this affect the design of the system. We explain how we utilise derivation rules, expressed in the SemanticWeb Rule Language (SWRL) to further enrich our knowledge. Fully quantified constraints are then expressed against this semantic data using CIF/SWRL – an extension of SWRL using our Constraint Interchange Format (CIF). To the best of our knowledge, the AWB is unique in that no other semantic web application combines these various mechanisms to perform hybrid reasoning. 2005-01-01 Conference Poster http://eprints.aktors.org/447/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/447/01/AWB_demo_paper_eswc2005.pdf

oai:aktors.org:448 2006-03-16

AKTive Workgroup Builder: Semantic Web Instance Data Reasoning McKenzie, Mr Craig Preece, Dr Alun Gray, Prof Peter First Doctoral Symposium Our interest lies in exploring the interplay between ontological and rule based reasoning with instance data when applied to Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) solving. The AKTive Workgroup Builder (AWB) is a Semantic Web application developed to help us achieve this aim. We share our experiences of developing the AWB – how the current technologies can influence the usability and design of such an application – and describe our approach to reasoning using both ontological and rule based methods. We show how these rules can be represented using the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL). Constraints are then expressed against the semantic data using our Constraint Interchange Format (CIF) combined with SWRL to form a fully quantified constraint representation CIF/SWRL. Finally, the problem specific constraints and the reasoned domain knowledge are then bundled together into a CSP which the AWB attempts to solve, returning the solution (if there is one) to the user. 2005-01-01 In Collection http://eprints.aktors.org/448/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/448/01/AKT_DS_2005.pdf

oai:aktors.org:449 2006-03-16

AquaLog: An Ontology-portable Question Answering System for the Semantic Web Lopez, Vanessa Motta, Prof Enrico Pasin, Michele Knowledge retrieval As semantic markup becomes ubiquitous, it will become important to be able to ask queries and obtain answers, using natural language (NL) expressions, rather than the keyword-based retrieval mechanisms used by the current search engines. AquaLog is a portable question-answering system which takes queries expressed in natural language and an ontology as input and returns answers drawn from the available semantic markup. We say that AquaLog is portable, because the configuration time required to customize the system for a particular ontology is negligible. AquaLog combines several powerful techniques in a novel way to make sense of NL queries and to map them to semantic markup. Moreover it also in-cludes a learning component, which ensures that the performance of the system im-proves over time, in response to the particular community jargon used by the end users. In this paper we describe the current version of the system, in particular dis-cussing its portability, its reasoning capabilities, and its learning mechanism. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/449/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/449/01/eswc05_proceedings-lopez.pdf

oai:aktors.org:450 2006-03-16

PowerAqua: Fishing the Semantic Web Knowledge retrieval The Semantic Web (SW) offers an opportunity to develop novel, sophisticated forms of question answering (QA). Specifically, the availability of distributed semantic markup on a large scale opens the way to QA systems which can make use of such semantic information to provide precise, formally derived answers to questions. At the same time the distributed, heterogeneous, large-scale nature of the semantic information introduces significant challenges. In this paper we describe the design of a QA system, PowerAqua, designed to exploit semantic markup on the web to provide answers to questions posed in natural language. PowerAqua does not assume that the user has any prior information about the semantic resources. The system takes as input a natural language query, translates it into a set of logical queries, which are then answered by consulting and aggregating information derived from multiple heterogeneous semantic sources. 2006-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/450/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/450/01/PowerAqua_final.pdf

oai:aktors.org:451 2006-03-16

A Semantic Service Environment: A Case Study in Bioinformatics Potter, Dr Stephen Aitken, Dr Stuart Knowledge reuse Knowledge publishing Knowledge modelling In recent years, web services have become increasingly important components of the scientific methodology of certain domains. Currently, however, the description and use of most these is purely 'syntactic'; that is, the semantics of the services are left to the human user to infer or acquire by other means before deciding whether and how to use a service. Consequently, there are opportunities to bridge this semantic gap through the application of emerging semantic web and semantic web service technologies in these domains, thereby enriching and expanding a user's service interactions. This paper presents its authors' experiences of the application and use of these emerging technologies in a displicine in which web services already play a key role: bioinformatics. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/451/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000451/01/potter-aitken-ESWC05.pdf

oai:aktors.org:452 2006-03-19

Using Formal Concept Analysis and Information Flow for modelling and sharing common semantics: lessons learnt and emergent issues Kalfoglou, Dr Yannis Schorlemmer, Dr Marco AKT Showcase Papers Knowledge acquisition Knowledge modelling We have been witnessing an explosion of user involvement in knowledge creation, publication and access both from within and between organisations. This is partly due to the widespread adoption of Web technology. But, it also introduces new challenges for knowledge engineers, who have to find suitable ways for sharing and integrating all this knowledge in meaningful chunks. In this paper we are exposing our experiences in using two technologies for capturing, representing and modelling semantic integration that are relatively unknown to the integration practitioners: Information Flow and Formal Concept Analysis. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/452/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000452/01/iccs2005-final-kalfoglou.pdf

oai:aktors.org:453 2006-03-19

Progressive Ontology Alignment for Meaning Coordination: an Information-Theoretic Foundation Schorlemmer, Dr Marco Kalfoglou, Dr Yannis AKT Showcase Papers Knowledge reuse Knowledge maintenance We elaborate on the mathematical foundations of the meaning coordination problem that agents face in open environments. We investigate to which extend the Barwise-Seligman theory of information flow provides a faithful theoretical description of the partial semantic integration that two agents achieve as they progressively align their underlying ontologies through the sharing of tokens, such as instances. We also discuss the insights and practical implications of the Barwise-Seligman theory with respect to the general meaning coordination problem. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/453/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000453/01/aamas.pdf

oai:aktors.org:454 2006-03-19

CMS: CROSI Mapping System - Results of the 2005 Ontology Alignment Contest Kalfoglou, Dr Yannis Hu, Dr Bo Knowledge maintenance Knowledge reuse In this results report we summarize our experiences from running the CROSI Mapping System (CMS) over three test cases for this year's OAEI contest: bibliography, Web directories and medical ontologies alignment case studies. CMS successfully parsed and aligned all input ontologies in all three case studies. We also elaborate on the insights gained and potential research directions towards building more robust alignment systems to cope with the increasing diversity of alignment requirements. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/454/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000454/01/CMS-OAEI-results.pdf

oai:aktors.org:455 2006-03-19

Towards a Killer App for the Semantic Web Alani, Dr Harith Kalfoglou `, Dr Yannis O'Hara, Dr Kieron Shadbolt, Dr Nigel Knowledge maintenance Killer apps are highly tranformative technologies that create new markets and widespread patterns of behaviour. IT generally, and the Web in particular, has benefited from killer apps to create new networks of users and increase its value. The Semantic Web community on the other hand is still awaiting a killer app that proves the superiority of its technologies. There are certain features that distinguishes killer apps frm other ordinary applications. This paper examines those features in the context of the Semantic Web, in the hope that a better understanding of the characteristics of killer apps might encourage their consideration when developing Semantic Web applications. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/455/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000455/01/iswc05-camera-ready.pdf

oai:aktors.org:456 2006-03-22

On the emergent Semantic Web and overlooked issues Kalfoglou, Dr Yannis Alani, Dr Harith Schorlemmer, Dr Marco Walton, Dr Chris AKT Showcase Papers Knowledge reuse Knowledge modelling Knowledge maintenance The emergent Semantic Web, despite being in its infancy, has already received a lot of attention from academia and industry. This resulted in an abundance of prototype systems and discussion most of which are centred around the underlying infrastructure. However, when we critically review the work done to date we realise that there is little discussion with respect to the vision of the Semantic Web. In particular, there is an observed dearth of discussion on how to deliver knowledge sharing in an environment such as the Semantic Web in effective and efficient manners. There are a lot of overlooked issues, associated with agents and trust to hidden assumptions made with respect to knowledge representation and robust reasoning in a distributed environment. These issues could potentially hinder further development if not considered at the early stages of designing Semantic Web systems. In this perspectives paper, we aim to help engineers and practitioners of the Semantic Web by raising awareness of these issues. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/456/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000456/01/iswc04.pdf

oai:aktors.org:457 2006-03-22

PowerAqua: Fishing the Semantic Web Knowledge retrieval The Semantic Web (SW) offers an opportunity to develop novel, sophisticated forms of question answering (QA). Specifically, the availability of distributed semantic markup on a large scale opens the way to QA systems which can make use of such semantic information to provide precise, formally derived answers to questions. At the same time the distributed, heterogeneous, large-scale nature of the semantic information introduces significant challenges. In this paper we describe the design of a QA system, PowerAqua, designed to exploit semantic markup on the web to provide answers to questions posed in natural language. PowerAqua does not assume that the user has any prior information about the semantic resources. The system takes as input a natural language query, translates it into a set of logical queries, which are then answered by consulting and aggregating information derived from multiple heterogeneous semantic sources. 2006-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/457/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/457/01/PowerAqua_eswcfinal.pdf

oai:aktors.org:458 2006-03-23

Feature selection and classification for microarray data analysis: Evolutionary methods for identifying predictive genes Jirapech-Umpai, Thanyaluk Aitken, Stuart Knowledge acquisition Background In the clinical context, samples assayed by microarray are often classified by cell line or tumour type and it is of interest to discover a set of genes that can be used as class predictors. The leukemia dataset of Golub et al. [1] and the NCI60 dataset of Ross et al. [2] present multiclass classification problems where three tumour types and nine cell lines respectively must be identified. We apply an evolutionary algorithm to identify the near-optimal set of predictive genes that classify the data. We also examine the initial gene selection step whereby the most informative genes are selected from the genes assayed. Results In the absence of feature selection, classification accuracy on the training data is typically good, but not replicated on the testing data. Gene selection using the RankGene software [3] is shown to significantly improve performance on the testing data. Further, we show that the choice of feature selection criteria can have a significant effect on accuracy. The evolutionary algorithm is shown to perform stably across the space of possible parameter settings – indicating the robustness of the approach. We assess performance using a low variance estimation technique, and present an analysis of the genes most often selected as predictors. Conclusion The computational methods we have developed perform robustly and accurately, and yield results in accord with clinical knowledge: A Z-score analysis of the genes most frequently selected identifies genes known to discriminate AML and Pre-T ALL leukemia. This study also confirms that significantly different sets of genes are found to be most discriminatory as the sample classes are refined. 2005-01-01 Journal (On-line/Unpaginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/458/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000458/01/1471-2105-6-148.pdf

oai:aktors.org:459 2006-03-23

Formalising concepts of species, sex and developmental stage in anatomical ontologies. Aitken, Stuart Ontologies Motivation: Anatomy ontologies have a growing role in bioinformatics—for example, in indexing gene expression data in model organisms. To relate or draw conclusions from data so indexed, anatomy ontologies must be equipped with the formal vocabulary that would allow statements about meronomy to be qualified by constraints such as part of the male or part at the embryonic stage. Lacking such a vocabulary, anatomists have built this information into the structure of the ontology or into anatomical terms. For example, in the FlyBase anatomy for drosophila, the term larval abdominal segment encodes the stage in the term, while the terms male genital disc and female genital disc encode the sex. It remains implicit that a fly has one and only one of these parts during its larval stage. Such indicators of context can and should be represented explicitly in the ontology. Results: The framework we have defined for anatomical ontologies allows the canonical anatomy structures of a given species to be those common to all sexes, and to have either male, female or hermaphrodite parts—but not combinations of the latter. Temporal aspects of development are addressed by associating a stage with organism parts and requiring a connected anatomy to have parts that exist at a common stage. Both sex and anatomical stage are represented by attributes. This formalization clarifies ontological structure and meaning and increases the capacity for formal reasoning about anatomy. The framework also supports generalizations such as vertebrate and invertebrate, thereby allowing the representation of anatomical structures that are common across a sub-phylum. 2005-01-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/459/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000459/01/2773.pdf%3Fijkey%3D81fKY53u73CVLiM

oai:aktors.org:460 2006-03-23

An ontological account of action in processes and plans Aitken, Stuart Ontologies This paper formalises the constraints governing the relationship between actions and their preconditions and effects in processes and plans. By providing axiomatisations and a model theory, we establish a sound basis for both deductive and constraint satisfaction-based reasoning. The constraints we present are expressed in a common ontology of classes and relations that is the basis of process and plan representations. 2005-01-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/460/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000460/01/sdarticle.pdf

oai:aktors.org:462 2006-03-23

Democracy, Ideology and Process Re-Engineering: Realising the Benefits of e-Government in Singapore Knowledge modelling The re-engineering of governmental processes is a necessary condition for the realisation of the benefits of e-government. Several obstacles to such re-engineering exist. These include: (1) information processing thrives on transparency and amalgamation of data, whilst governments are constrained by principles of privacy and data separation; (2) top-down re-engineering may be resisted effectively from the bottom up. This paper analyses these obstacles in the way of re-engineering in Singapore – a democratic one-party state where legislative and executive power lies with the People’s Action Party – and considers how that hegemony has aided the development of e-government. 2006-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/462/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000462/01/ohara_stevens.PDF

oai:aktors.org:463 2006-03-23

Using the <I-N-C-A> Constraint Model as a Shared Representation of Intentions for Emergency Response Wickler, Dr Gerhard Tate, Prof Austin Potter, Dr Stephen Knowledge modelling The aim of this paper is to describe the I-X system with its underlying representation: <I-N-C-A>. The latter can be seen as a description of an agent's intentions, which can be shared and communicated amongst multiple I-X agents to coordinate activities in an emergency response scenario. In general, an <I-N-C-A> object describes the product of a synthesis task. In the multi-agent context it can be used to describe the intentions of an agent, although it also includes elements of beliefs about the world and goals to be achieved, thus showing a close relationship with the BDI agent model which we will explore in this paper. From a user's perspective, I-X Process Panels can be used as an intelligent to-do list that assists emergency responders in applying pre-defined standard operating procedures in different types of emergencies. In particular, multiple instances of the I-X Process Panels can be used as a distributed system to coordinate the efforts of independent emergency responders as well as responders within the same organization. Furthermore, it can be used as an agent wrapper for other software systems such as web-services to integrate these into the emergency response team as virtual members. At the heart of I-X is a Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planner that can be used to synthesize courses of action automatically or explore alternative options manually. 2006-05-01 Other http://eprints.aktors.org/463/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000463/01/2006-atdm-wickler-inca-intentions.pdf

oai:aktors.org:465 2006-03-23

Multi-agent Ontology Mapping Framework in the AQUA Question Answering System Nagy, Mr Miklos Vargas-Vera, Dr Maria Motta, Dr Enrico Knowledge retrieval Abstract. This paper describes an ontology-mapping framework in the context of query answering (QA). In order to incorporate uncertainty inherent to the mapping process, the system uses the Dempster-Shafer model for dealing with incomplete and uncertain information produced during the mapping. A novel approach is presented how specialized agents with partial local knowledge of the particular domain achieve ontology mapping without creating global or ref-erence ontology. Our approach is particularly fit for a query-answering sce-nario, where an answer needs to be created in real time that satisfies the query posed by the user. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/465/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000465/01/Nagyetal_MICAI2005_Camera_Ready.pdf

oai:aktors.org:466 2006-03-23

Automatic Extraction of Knowledge from Student Essays Vargas-Vera, Dr Maria Moreale, Miss Emanuela Knowledge acquisition Abstract: This paper presents a characterisation of argumentation in student essays and analyses patterns for extracting knowledge from them. Having analysed their complexity in light of the kinds of logic that may be used in an automatic argumentation extraction system, the main characteristic of these patterns appears to be the polymorphism of the pattern variables. Therefore, systems that learn patterns automatically ought to be able to generate many-sorted logic formulae, so that polymorphic types may be associated to the extraction slots (or – equivalently – to a Logic Formulae). An analysis of existing (pattern learning) systems was carried out to gauge the possibility of using them within our framework. However, we concluded that none of the existing systems can handle our requirements. Finally, we present our vision of an agent-based student portal as the front-end of a system that can locate argumentation links in a student essay and integrates with related educational services. 2005-01-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/466/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000466/01/Vargas-Vera_Moreale_Automatic_Extraction_final.pdf

oai:aktors.org:468 2006-03-26

MNM: Semi-Automatic Ontology Population from Text Vargas-Vera, Dr Maria Moreale, Miss Emanuela Stutt, Dr Arthur Motta, Dr Enrico Ciravegna, Dr Fabio Knowledge acquisition Abstract: Ontologies can play a very important role in information systems. They can support various information system processes, particularly information acquisition and integration. Ontologies themselves need to be designed, built and maintained. An important part of the ontology engineering cycle is the ability to keep a handcrafted ontology up to date. Therefore, we have developed a tool called MnM that helps during the ontology maintenance process. MnM extracts information from texts and populates an ontology. It uses NLP (Natural Language Processing), Information Extraction and Machine Learning technologies. In particular, MnM was tested using an electronic newsletter consisting of news articles describing events happening in the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi). MnM could constitute an important part of an ontology-driven information system, with its integrated web-based ontology editor and provision of open APIs to link to ontology servers and to integrate with information extraction tools. 2006-01-01 Book Chapter http://eprints.aktors.org/468/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000468/01/Vargas-Vera_MnM_PostPrinted_version.pdf

oai:aktors.org:474 2006-03-26

Mapping Fundamental Business Process Modelling Language to OWL-S Nadarajan, Ms Gayathri Chen-Burger, Dr Yun-Heh Knowledge reuse Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing Knowledge modelling This paper presents a conceptual mapping framework between a formal and visual process modelling language, Fundamental Business Process Modelling Language (FBPML), and the Web Services Ontology (OWL-S), aiming to bridge the gap between Enterprise Modelling methods and Semantic Web services. The framework is divided into a data model and a process model component. An implementation and an evaluation of the process model mapping are demonstrated. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/474/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000474/01/SETN06AKT.pdf

oai:aktors.org:475 2006-03-26

An Ontology-Based Conceptual Mapping Framework for Translating FBPML to the Web Services Ontology Nadarajan, Ms Gayathri Chen-Burger, Dr Yun-Heh Knowledge reuse Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing Knowledge modelling This paper presents an ontology-based conceptual mapping framework that translates a formal and visually rich business process modeling (BPM) language, Fundamental Business Process Modelling Language (FBPML) to a Semantic Web-based language, the Web Services Ontology (OWL-S). The translation aims to narrow the gap between Enterprise Modelling methods and Semantic Web services, thus bringing the two communities closer. Another significant contribution of the translation is that it allows more mature technologies such as BPM methods to be utilised within emerging fields that are constantly evolving, such as the Semantic Web. The framework is divided into a data model translation and a process model translation. An implementation and an evaluation of the process model translation are demonstrated and discussed. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/475/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000475/01/CCGridAKT.pdf

oai:aktors.org:476 2006-03-29

A Generic Multi-agent System Platform For Business Workflows Using Web Services Composition Guo, Mr Li Chen-Burger, Dr. Yun-Huh (jessica) Robertson, Dr. Dave Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing Knowledge modelling This paper describes the development of a distributed multi-agent workflow\cite{Workflow} enactment mechanism from a BPEL4WS specification. This work demonstrates that a multi-agent protocol (LCC protocol) can be derived from a BPEL4WS specification to enable business workflows using web services composition. The key difference between our system and other existing multiagent based web service composition systems is that our approach starts from a business process model which gives us an overview of the task being performed. All the participants in our system are generic agents that have no knowledge of any particular web service. The only knowledge that they have is how to execute the interaction protocol and invoke the web services properly. In addition, our approach makes it possible to avoid the single point of failure problem associated with a centralized workflow engine as it is based on decentralized computing paradigm. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/476/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000476/01/BPEL4WS2LCC.pdf

oai:aktors.org:477 2006-03-29

Enacting the Distributed Business Workflows Using BPEL4WS on the Multi-Agent Platform Guo, Mr. Li Chen-Burger, Dr. Yun-Huh (jessica) Robertson, Dr. Dave Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing Knowledge modelling This paper describes the development of a distributed multi-agent workflow enactment mechanism using the BPEL4WS specification. It demonstrates that a multi-agent protocol (Lightweight Coordination Calculus (LCC)) can be used to interpret a BPEL4WS specification to enable distributed business workflow using web services composition on the multi-agent platform. The key difference between our system and other existing multi-agent based web services composition systems is that with our approach, a business process model(system requirement) can be adopted directly in the multi-agent system, thus reduce the effort on the validation and verification of the interaction protocol (system specification). This approach also provides us with a lightweight way of re-design of large component based systems. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/477/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000477/01/MATES.pdf

oai:aktors.org:478 2006-03-26

An Infrastructure for Acquiring High Quality Semantic Metadata Lei, Dr. Yuangui Sabou, Dr. Marta Lopez, Miss Vanessa Zhu, Dr. Jianhan Uren, Dr. Victoria Motta, Prof. Enrico Knowledge acquisition Because metadata that underlies semantic web applications is gathered from distributed and heterogeneous data sources, it is important to ensure its quality (i.e., reduce duplicates, spelling errors, ambiguities). However, current infrastructures that acquire and integrate semantic data have only marginally addressed the issue of metadata quality. In this paper we present our metadata acquisition infrastructure, ASDI, which pays special attention to ensuring that high quality metadata is derived. Central to the architecture of ASDI is a erification engine that relies on several semantic web tools to check the quality of the derived data. We tested our prototype in the context of building a semantic web portal for our lab, KMi. An experimental evaluation omparing the automatically extracted data against manual annotations indicates that the verification engine enhances the quality of the extracted semantic metadata. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/478/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/478/01/eswc06.pdf

oai:aktors.org:479 2006-03-29

An Infrastructure for Building Semantic Web Portals Lei, Dr. Yuangui Lopez, Miss Vanessa Motta, Prof. Enrico Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition One important task of semantic web portals is to offer both end users and applications a seamless access to knowledge contained in heterogeneous data sources in specific user communities. As such it is important to ensure that i) high quality metadata are extracted from heterogeneous sources in an automated manner and ii) comprehensive querying facilities are provided thus nabling knowledge to be accessed as easily as possible. However, current semantic web portals have only marginally addressed these issues. In this paper, we present our work, the KMi semantic web portal infrastructure, which pays special attention to these issues. Central to our infrastructure are three components: i) an automated metadata extraction tool, ASDI, which supports the extraction of high quality metadata from heterogeneous sources, ii) an ontology-driven question answering tool, AquaLog, which makes use of the domain specific ontology and the semantic metadata extracted by ASDI to answers questions in natural language format, and iii) a semantic search engine, which enhances traditional text-based searching by making use of the underlying ontologies and the extracted metadata. A semantic web portal application has been built, which illustrates the usage of this infrastructure. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/479/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/479/01/ksw_paper.pdf

oai:aktors.org:480 2006-03-26

An Instance Mapping Ontology for the Semantic Web Lei, Dr. Yuangui Knowledge reuse Semantic data transformation plays an important role in realizing the vision of the semantic web. It supports the transformation of data in different representations into on-tologies. In order to allow the task to be achieved effec-tively, the instructions on how to realize transformation should be well specified, preferably in a declarative and re-usable format, thus allowing the construction of robust tools which on the one hand assist users to generate and maintain mappings at design time and on the other hand perform semantic data transformation at run time. Furthermore, the transformation instructions should not only allow the gen-eration of semantic data objects but also allow the creation of rich semantic relations between them. In this context, we developed a comprehensive instance mapping ontology. One distinctive feature of the instance mapping ontology is that it provides comprehensive support for the specification of complex mappings. Another feature is that the instance mapping ontology is representation independent, which does not limit itself to data sources in particular representa-tions. This ontology has been applied in generating a se-mantic layer for the web site of the Knowledge Media Insti-tute (KMi) at the Open University. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/480/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/480/01/f50-lei-new.pdf

oai:aktors.org:481 2006-03-29

Conducting The Agile Negotiation Processes Involved In The BPEL4WS Model On a Multi-agent Platform Guo, Mr. Li Chen-Burger, Dr. Yun-Huh (jessica) Robertson, Dr. Dave Knowledge acquisition Knowledge modelling With the increases of customer-driven business marketplace in the open environment (internet), a key requirement for this circumstance is building inter-operable e-Business processes for the emerging business models within different enterprise boundaries. Negotiation processes are at the core of the inter-operable e-Business. While research on negotiation is not new, the vast majority of the studies to date have been based on the multi-agent platform. However, it is very common that negotiation processes are interleaved with other business processes that are automated normally by a workflow system. Therefore, the inter-operability with other internal- and external-systems is critical in such case, which may require extra efforts on the integration issues. In this paper, we propose an approach for building a workflow system with negotiation processes incorporating the BPEL4WS, a standard for building and managing web service based business processes, on a multi-agent platform in a pure distributed manner. By adapting our approach, negotiation process can be involved in the BPEL4WS process and deployed seamlessly. The existing work on negotiation based on multi-agent system also can be adapted directly with our approach. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/481/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000481/01/Negotiation.pdf

oai:aktors.org:482 2006-03-29

Browsing for Information by Highlighting Automatically Generated Annotations: A User Study and Evaluation Uren, V Motta, E Dzbor, M Cimiano, P Knowledge retrieval The realization of the Semantic Web is constrained by a knowledge acquisition bottleneck, i.e. the problem of how to add RDF mark-up to the millions of ordinary web pages that already exist. Information Extraction (IE) has been proposed as a solution to the annotation bottleneck. In the task based evaluation reported here, we compared the performance of users without access to annotation, users working with annotations which had been produced from manually constructed knowledge bases, and users working with annotations augmented using IE. We looked at retrieval performance, overlap between retrieved items and the two sets of annotations, and usage of annotation options. Automatically generated annotations were found to add value to the browsing experience in the scenario investigated. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/482/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000482/01/fp33-uren.pdf

oai:aktors.org:483 2006-03-29

Semantic Annotation for Knowledge Management: Requirements and a Survey of the State of the Art Uren, V Cimiano, P Iria, J Handschuh, S Vargas-Vera, M Motta, E Ciravegna, F Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing While much of a company's knowledge can be found in text repositories, current content management systems have limited capabilities for structuring and interpreting documents. In the emerging Semantic Web, search, interpretation and aggregation can be addressed by ontology-based semantic mark-up. In this paper, we examine semantic annotation, identify a number of requirements, and review the current generation of semantic annotation systems. This analysis shows that, while there is still some way to go before semantic annotation tools will be able to address fully all the knowledge management needs, research in the area is active and making good progress. 2006-01-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/483/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000483/01/JWS168-uren.pdf

oai:aktors.org:484 2006-03-31

Matchmaking multi-party interactions using historical performance data Lambert, Mr David J. Robertson, Dr David S. Knowledge reuse Knowledge retrieval Knowledge modelling Matchmaking will be an important component of future agent and agent-like systems, such as the semantic web. Most research on matchmaking has been directed toward sophisticated matching of client requirements with provider capabilities based on capability descriptions. This is a vital mechanism for conducting matchmaking, but ignores the likelihood that in practice, and for various reasons, capability descriptions will not fully characterise the interaction behaviour of agents. This problem is further compounded in systems with many interacting agents, all of which have idiosyncrasies. As in everyday life, some groupings of agents will be more effective than others, regardless of their individual competencies or suitability to the task. The quality of the interaction between agents is a crucial factor. Using the incidence calculus and the lightweight co\"ordination calculus, we show that we can easily implement matchmaking agents that will learn from experience how to select those groups known to inter-operate well for particular tasks. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/484/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/484/01/aamas05.pdf

oai:aktors.org:485 2006-03-31

Accounting for Valency in Service Composition Knowledge reuse Knowledge retrieval Knowledge modelling First Doctoral Symposium Service oriented computing offers a new approach to programming. To be useful for large and diverse sets of problems, effective service composition is crucial. While current tools offer various tools and methods for selecting services based on various user-defined criteria, little attention has been paid to how such services interact. We believe that semantic co\"ordination or agreement between services will be an important factor in the usability and success of service composition, and that this agreement cannot be guaranteed by semantic description alone. We have developed a simple but apparently effective technique for selecting services based on their record of performance with others. 2005-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/485/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/485/01/aktdc05.pdf

oai:aktors.org:487 2006-03-31

Ontology Selection: Ontology Evaluation on the Real Semantic Web Sabou, Marta Lopez, Vanessa Motta, Enrico Uren, Victoria Knowledge reuse Ontologies The increasing number of ontologies on the Web and the appearance of large scale ontology repositories has brought the topic of ontology selection in the focus of the semantic web research agenda. Our view is that ontology evaluation is core to ontology selection and that, because ontology selection is performed in an open Web environment, it brings new challenges to ontology evaluation. Unfortunately, current research regards ontology selection and evaluation as two separate topics. Our goal in this paper is to explore how these two tasks relate. In particular, we are interested to get a better understanding of the ontology selection task and filter out the challenges that it brings to ontology evaluation. We discuss requirements posed by the open Web environment on ontology selection, we overview existing work on selection and point out future directions. Our major conclusion is that, even if selection methods still need further development, they have already brought novel approaches to ontology evaluation. 2006-01-01 In Collection http://eprints.aktors.org/487/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/487/01/eon2006_SabouEtAl.pdf

oai:aktors.org:488 2006-03-31

ESpotter: Adaptive Named Entity Recognition for Web Browsing Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition Browsing constitutes an important part of the user information searching process on the Web. In this paper, we present a browser plug-in called ESpotter, which recognizes entities of various types on Web pages and highlights them according to their types to assist user browsing. ESpotter uses a range of standard named entity recognition techniques. In addition, a key new feature of ESpotter is that it addresses the problem of multiple domains on the Web by adapting lexicon and patterns to these domains. 2005-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/488/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000488/01/zhuetal_WM.pdf

oai:aktors.org:489 2006-03-31

Mining Web Data for Competency Management Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition Knowledge maintenance We present CORDER (COmmunity Relation Discovery by named Entity Recognition) an un-supervised machine learning algorithm that exploits named entity recognition and co-occurrence data to associate individuals in an organization with their expertise and associates. We discuss the problems associated with evaluating unsupervised learners and report our initial evaluation experiments. 2005-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/489/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000489/01/Wr444_Zhu_Jianhan.pdf

oai:aktors.org:490 2006-03-31

BuddyFinder-CORDER: Leveraging Social Networks for Matchmaking by Opportunistic Discovery Zhu, Dr. Jianhan Eisenstadt, Prof. Marc Gonçalves, Mr. Alexandre Denham, Mr. Chris Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition Online social networking tools are extremely popular, but can miss potential discoveries latent in the social ‘fabric’. Matchmaking services can do naive profile matching with old database technology, and modern ontological markup, though powerful, can be onerous at data-input time. In this paper, we present a system called BuddyFinder-CORDER which can automatically pro-duce a ranked list of buddies to match a user’s search requirements specified in a term-based query, even in the absence of stored user-profiles. We integrate an online social networking search tool called BuddyFinder with a text mining method called CORDER to rank a list of online users based on ‘inferred pro-files’ of these users in the form of scavenged Web pages. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/490/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000490/01/SNA-Zhuetal.pdf

oai:aktors.org:491 2006-03-31

Exploiting Semantic Association To Answer Vague Queries Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition Although today's web search engines are very powerful, they still fail to provide intuitively relevant results for many types of queries, especially ones that are vaguely-formed in the user's own mind. We argue that associations between terms in a search query can reveal the underlying information needs in the users' mind and should be taken into account in search. We propose a multi-faceted approach to detect and exploit such associations. The CORDER method measures the association strength between query terms, and queries consisting of terms having low association strength with each other are seen as 'vague queries'. For a vague query, we use WordNet to find related terms of the query terms to compose extended queries, relying especially on the role of least common subsumers (LCS). We use relation strength between terms calculated by the CORDER method to refine these extended queries. Finally, we use the Hyperspace Analogue to Language (HAL) model and information flow (IF) method to expand these refined queries. Our initial experimental results on a corpus of 500 books from Amazon shows that our approach can find the right books for users given authentic vague queries, even in those cases where Google and Amazon's own book search fail. 2006-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/491/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000491/01/AMT06.pdf

oai:aktors.org:492 2006-03-31

LRD: Latent Relation Discovery for Vector Space Expansion and Information Retrieval Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition In this paper, we propose a text mining method called LRD (latent relation discovery), which extends the traditional vector space model of document representation in order to improve information retrieval (IR) on documents and document clustering. Our LRD method extracts terms and entities, such as person, organization, or project names, and discovers relationships between them by taking into account their co-occurrence in textual corpora. Given a target entity, LRD discovers other entities closely related to the target effec-tively and efficiently. With respect to such relatedness, a measure of relation strength between entities is defined. LRD uses relation strength to enhance the vector space model, and uses the enhanced vector space model for query based IR on documents and clustering documents in order to discover complex rela-tionships among terms and entities. Our experiments on a standard dataset for query based IR shows that our LRD method performed significantly better than traditional vector space model and other five standard statistical methods for vector expansion. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/492/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000492/01/WAIM2006-300.pdf

oai:aktors.org:494 2006-04-03

LRD: Latent Relation Discovery for Vector Space Expansion and Information Retrieval Gonçalves, Mr. Alexandre Zhu, Dr. Jianhan Song, Dr. Dawei Uren, Dr. Victoria Pacheco, Prof. Roberto Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition In this paper, we propose a text mining method called LRD (latent relation discovery), which extends the traditional vector space model of document representation in order to improve information retrieval (IR) on documents and document clustering. Our LRD method extracts terms and entities, such as person, organization, or project names, and discovers relationships between them by taking into account their co-occurrence in textual corpora. Given a target entity, LRD discovers other entities closely related to the target effec-tively and efficiently. With respect to such relatedness, a measure of relation strength between entities is defined. LRD uses relation strength to enhance the vector space model, and uses the enhanced vector space model for query based IR on documents and clustering documents in order to discover complex rela-tionships among terms and entities. Our experiments on a standard dataset for query based IR shows that our LRD method performed significantly better than traditional vector space model and other five standard statistical methods for vector expansion. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/494/

oai:aktors.org:495 2006-04-04

LRD: Latent Relation Discovery for Vector Space Expansion and Information Retrieval Gonçalves, Mr. Alexandre Zhu, Dr. Jianhan Song, Dr. Dawei Uren, Dr. Victoria Pacheco, Prof. Roberto Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition In this paper, we propose a text mining method called LRD (latent relation discovery), which extends the traditional vector space model of document representation in order to improve information retrieval (IR) on documents and document clustering. Our LRD method extracts terms and entities, such as person, organization, or project names, and discovers relationships between them by taking into account their co-occurrence in textual corpora. Given a target entity, LRD discovers other entities closely related to the target effec-tively and efficiently. With respect to such relatedness, a measure of relation strength between entities is defined. LRD uses relation strength to enhance the vector space model, and uses the enhanced vector space model for query based IR on documents and clustering documents in order to discover complex rela-tionships among terms and entities. Our experiments on a standard dataset for query based IR shows that our LRD method performed significantly better than traditional vector space model and other five standard statistical methods for vector expansion. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/495/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000495/01/WAIM2006-300.pdf

oai:aktors.org:496 2006-04-04

Exploiting Semantic Association To Answer Vague Queries Zhu, Dr. Jianhan Eisenstadt, Prof. Marc Song, Dr. Dawei Denham, Mr. Chris Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition Although today's web search engines are very powerful, they still fail to provide intuitively relevant results for many types of queries, especially ones that are vaguely-formed in the user's own mind. We argue that associations between terms in a search query can reveal the underlying information needs in the users' mind and should be taken into account in search. We propose a multi-faceted approach to detect and exploit such associations. The CORDER method measures the association strength between query terms, and queries consisting of terms having low association strength with each other are seen as 'vague queries'. For a vague query, we use WordNet to find related terms of the query terms to compose extended queries, relying especially on the role of least common subsumers (LCS). We use relation strength between terms calculated by the CORDER method to refine these extended queries. Finally, we use the Hyperspace Analogue to Language (HAL) model and information flow (IF) method to expand these refined queries. Our initial experimental results on a corpus of 500 books from Amazon shows that our approach can find the right books for users given authentic vague queries, even in those cases where Google and Amazon's own book search fail. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/496/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000496/01/AMT06.pdf

oai:aktors.org:497 2006-04-04

BuddyFinder-CORDER: Leveraging Social Networks for Matchmaking by Opportunistic Discovery Zhu, Dr. Jianhan Eisenstadt, Prof. Marc Gonçalves, Mr. Alexandre Denham, Mr. Chris Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition Online social networking tools are extremely popular, but can miss potential discoveries latent in the social ‘fabric’. Matchmaking services can do naive profile matching with old database technology, and modern ontological markup, though powerful, can be onerous at data-input time. In this paper, we present a system called BuddyFinder-CORDER which can automatically pro-duce a ranked list of buddies to match a user’s search requirements specified in a term-based query, even in the absence of stored user-profiles. We integrate an online social networking search tool called BuddyFinder with a text mining method called CORDER to rank a list of online users based on ‘inferred pro-files’ of these users in the form of scavenged Web pages. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/497/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000497/01/SNA-Zhuetal.pdf

oai:aktors.org:498 2006-04-04

Mining Web Data for Competency Management Zhu, Dr. Jianhan Gonçalves, Mr. Alexandre Uren, Dr. Victoria Motta, Prof. Enrico Pacheco, Prof. Roberto Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition Knowledge maintenance We present CORDER (COmmunity Relation Discovery by named Entity Recognition) an un-supervised machine learning algorithm that exploits named entity recognition and co-occurrence data to associate individuals in an organization with their expertise and associates. We discuss the problems associated with evaluating unsupervised learners and report our initial evaluation experiments. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/498/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000498/01/Wr444_Zhu_Jianhan.pdf

oai:aktors.org:499 2006-04-04

ESpotter: Adaptive Named Entity Recognition for Web Browsing Zhu, Dr. Jianhan Uren, Dr. Victoria Motta, Prof. Enrico Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition Browsing constitutes an important part of the user information searching process on the Web. In this paper, we present a browser plug-in called ESpotter, which recognizes entities of various types on Web pages and highlights them according to their types to assist user browsing. ESpotter uses a range of standard named entity recognition techniques. In addition, a key new feature of ESpotter is that it addresses the problem of multiple domains on the Web by adapting lexicon and patterns to these domains. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/499/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000499/01/zhuetal_WM.pdf

oai:aktors.org:500 2006-04-04

Ontologies and Technologies: Knowledge Representation or Misrepresentation Knowledge modelling The development of the Semantic Web (SW) raises a number of difficult and interesting technical issues. Less often remarked, however, are the social and political debates that it will engender, if and when the technologies become widely accepted. As the SW is a technology for transferring information and knowledge efficiently and effectively, then many of these questions have an epistemological base. In this paper I want to focus especially on the epistemological underpinnings of these social issues, to think about the interaction between the epistemological and the political. How does technology affect the social networks in which it is embedded? How can technology be successfully transplanted into a new context? And, perhaps most importantly for us, how is technology affected by its context? In particular, I want to look at how our decisions about how we treat knowledge can impact quite dramatically on the technologies we produce. 2004-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/500/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/500/01/ohara_sigirforum_2004d.pdf

oai:aktors.org:501 2006-04-06

A Generic Library of Problem Solving Methods for Scheduling Applications Rajpathak, Dr Dnyanesh Motta, Prof Enrico Zdrahal, Dr Zdenek Roy, Dr Rajkumar Knowledge reuse Knowledge acquisition Knowledge modelling In this paper we describe a generic library of problem-solving methods (PSMs) for scheduling applications. Although, some attempts have been made in the past at developing libraries of scheduling methods, these only provide limited coverage: in some cases they are specific to a particular scheduling domain; in other cases they simply implement a particular scheduling technique; in other cases they fail to provide the required degree of depth and precision. Our library is based on a structured approach, whereby we first develop a scheduling task ontology, and then construct a task-specific but domain independent model of scheduling problem-solving, which generalises from specific approaches to scheduling problem-solving. Different PSMs are then constructed uniformly by specialising the generic model of scheduling problem-solving. Our library has been evaluated on a number of real-life and benchmark applications to demonstrate its generic and comprehensive nature. 2003-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/501/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/501/01/p019-Rajpathak.pdf

oai:aktors.org:502 2006-04-06

The Epistemology of Scheduling Problems Motta, Prof Enrico Rajpathak, Dr Dnyanesh Zdrahal, Dr Zdenek Roy, Dr Rajkumar Knowledge reuse Knowledge acquisition Knowledge modelling Scheduling is a knowledge-intensive task spanning over many activities in day-to-day life. It deals with the temporally-bound assignment of jobs to resources. Although scheduling has been extensively researched in the AI community for the past 30 years, efforts have primarily focused on specific applications, algorithms, or 'scheduling shells' and no comprehensive analysis exists on the nature of scheduling problems, which provides a formal account of what scheduling is, independently of the way scheduling problems can be approached. Research on KBS development by reuse makes use of ontologies, to provide knowledge-level specifications of reusable KBS components. In this paper we describe a task ontology, which formally characterises the nature of scheduling problems, independently of particular application domains and in-dependently of how the problems can be solved. Our results provide a comprehensive, domain-independent and formally specified refer-ence model for scheduling applications. This can be used as the ba-sis for further analyses of the class of scheduling problems and also as a concrete reusable resource to support knowledge acquisition and system development in scheduling applications. 2002-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/502/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/502/01/E0076.pdf

oai:aktors.org:503 2006-04-06

A Generic Library of Problem Solving Methods for Scheduling Applications Rajpathak, Dr Dnyanesh Motta, Prof Enrico Zdrahal, Dr Zdenek Roy, Prof Rajkumar Knowledge reuse Knowledge acquisition Knowledge modelling In this paper we propose a generic library of problem-solving methods for scheduling applications. Although, some attempts have been made in the past at developing the libraries of scheduling problem-solvers, these only provide limited coverage. Many lack generality, as they subscribe to a particular scheduling domain. Others simply implement a particular problem-solving technique, which may be applicable only to a subset of the space of scheduling problems. In addition, most of these libraries fail to provide the required degree of depth and precision. In our approach we subscribe to the Task-Method-Domain-Application knowledge modeling framework which provides a structured organization for the different components of the library. At the task level, we construct a generic scheduling task ontology to formalize the space of scheduling problems. At the method level, we construct a generic problem-solving model of scheduling that generalizes from the variety of approaches to scheduling problem-solving, which can be found in the literature. The generic nature of this model is demonstrated by constructing seven methods for scheduling, as alternative specialization of the model. Finally, we validated our library on a number of applications to demonstrate its generic nature and effective support for developing scheduling applications. 2006-06-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/503/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000503/01/Tkde-0338-0805-2.pdf

oai:aktors.org:504 2006-04-06

An Ontological Formalization of the Planning Task Rajpathak, Dr Dnyanesh Motta, Prof Enrico Knowledge reuse Knowledge acquisition Knowledge modelling In this paper we propose a generic task ontology, which formalizes the space of planning problems. Although planning is one of the oldest researched areas in Artificial Intelligence and attempts have been made in the past at developing task ontologies for planning, these formalizations suffer from serious limitations: they do not exhibit the required level of formalization and precision and they usually fail to include some of the key concepts required for specifying planning problems. In con-trast with earlier proposals, our task ontology formalizes the nature of the planning task independently of any planning paradigm, specific domains, or applications and provides a fine-grained, precise and comprehensive characterization of the space of planning problems. Finally, in addition to producing a formal specification we have also operationalized the ontology into a set of executable definitions, which provide a concrete reusable resource for knowledge acquisition and system development in planning applications. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/504/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/504/01/Fois2004_camera-ready-final.pdf

oai:aktors.org:505 2006-04-06

Semantic Learning Narratives Pasin, Michele Motta, Enrico Knowledge reuse Knowledge retrieval AKT In Progress In this paper we highlight the importance of an interpreta-tion of the learning process from a narrative perspective and show how Semantic Web technologies, in particular ontologies, can serve to represent the key dimensions of this approach and to support an intelligent navigation of learning resources. Here we introduce our initial work in order to formalize the structure of these “learning narra-tives” in the domain of philosophy. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/505/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000505/01/SWEL-PosterPaper-Pasin.pdf

oai:aktors.org:506 2006-04-06

An ontology for the description and navigation through philosophical resources Pasin, Michele Motta, Enrico Knowledge reuse Ontologies AKT In Progress What does it mean for a student to come to an understanding of a philosophical standpoint and can the explosion of resources now available on the web support this process, or is it inclined instead to create more confusion? We believe that a possible answer to the problem of finding a means through the morass of information on the web to the philosophical insights it conceals and can be made to reveal lies in the process of narrative pathway generation. That is, the active linking of resources into a learning path that contextualizes them with respect to one another. This result can be achieved only if the content of the resources is indexed, not just their status as a text document, an image or a video. To this aim, we propose a formal conceptualization of the domain of philosophy, an ontology that would allow the categorization of resources according to a series of pre-agreed content descriptors. Within an e-learning scenario, a teacher could use a tool comprising such an ontology to annotate at various levels of granularity available philosophical materials, and let the students explore this semantic space in an unsupervised manner, according to pre-defined narrative pathways. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/506/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000506/01/eCap2006-MichelePasin.pdf

oai:aktors.org:507 2006-04-06

Using the Semantic Web to Navigate Conceptual Spaces: an Application for the Philosophical Domain Pasin, Michele Motta, Enrico Knowledge reuse AKT In Progress The semantic web offers new possibilities in the eLearning area, which are dependent at least on two factors: the increasing availability of resources on the web and the semantic power of their meta-descriptions. This paper looks at this second issue, and tries to determine the general framework and the important features of the metadata for a specific domain, philosophy. Thanks to an adequate conceptualization, in fact, it is possible to recollect resources and compose them into a novel narrative, in order to provide specific learning services. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/507/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000507/01/AKT-paper-MichelePasin.pdf

oai:aktors.org:508 2006-04-10

Acquisition and Maintenance of Constraints in Engineering Design Ajit, Suraj Sleeman, Derek Fowler, David Knott, Dave Hui, Kit Knowledge acquisition Knowledge maintenance The Designers’ Workbench is a system, developed by the Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) consortium to support designers in large organizations, such as Rolls- Royce, by making sure that a design is consistent with the specification for the particular design as well as with the company’s design rule book(s). Currently, to capture the constraint information, a domain expert (design engineer) has to work with a knowledge engineer to identify the con-straints, and it is then the task of the knowledge engineer to encode these into the Workbench’s knowledge base (KB). This is an error prone and time consuming task. It is highly desirable to relieve the knowledge engineer of this task, and so we have developed a tool, ConEditor, that enables do-main experts themselves to capture and maintain these con-straints. The tool allows the user to combine selected entities from the domain ontology with keywords and operators of a constraint language to form a constraint expression. We hypothesize that to apply constraints appropriately, it is necessary to understand the context in which each constraint is applicable. We refer to this as “application conditions”. We plan to make these application conditions machine interpretable and investigate how they, together with a domain ontology, can be used to support the verification and maintenance of constraints. 2005-01-01 Conference Poster http://eprints.aktors.org/508/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/508/01/KCAP_05_(short_paper).pdf

oai:aktors.org:510 2006-04-10

Capture and Maintenance of Engineering Design Constraints Ajit, Suraj Sleeman, Derek Fowler, David Knott, Dave Hui, Kit Knowledge acquisition Knowledge maintenance The Designers’ Workbench is a system, developed by the Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) consortium to support designers in large organizations, such as Rolls Royce, by making sure that the design is consistent with the specification for the particular design as well as with the company’s design rule book(s). Currently, to capture the constraint information, a domain expert (design engineer) has to work with a knowledge engineer to identify the constraints, and it is then the task of the knowledge engineer to encode these into the workbench’s knowledge base (KB). This is an error prone and time-consuming task. It is highly desirable to relieve the knowledge engineer of this task, and so we have developed a tool, ConEditor that enables domain experts themselves to capture and maintain these constraints. The tool allows the user to combine selected entities from the domain ontology with keywords and operators of a constraint language to form a constraint expression. However we hypothesize that to apply constraints appropriately, it is necessary to understand the context in which each constraint is applicable. We refer to this as “application conditions”. We plan to make these application conditions machine interpretable and investigate how they, together with a domain ontology, can be used to support the verification and maintenance of constraints. 2005-01-01 Conference Poster http://eprints.aktors.org/510/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/510/01/AI2005-_Suraj_Ajit.pdf

oai:aktors.org:512 2006-04-10

Capture and Maintenance of Engineering Design Constraints Knowledge acquisition Knowledge maintenance The Designers’ Workbench is a system, developed by the Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) consortium to support designers in large organizations, such as Rolls Royce, by making sure that the design is consistent with the specification for the particular design as well as with the company’s design rule book(s). Currently, to capture the constraint information, a domain expert (design engineer) has to work with a knowledge engineer to identify the constraints, and it is then the task of the knowledge engineer to encode these into the workbench’s knowledge base (KB). This is an error prone and time-consuming task. It is highly desirable to relieve the knowledge engineer of this task, and so we have developed a tool, ConEditor that enables domain experts themselves to capture and maintain these constraints. The tool allows the user to combine selected entities from the domain ontology with keywords and op-erators of a constraint language to form a constraint expression. However we hypothesize that to apply constraints appropriately, it is necessary to understand the context in which each constraint is applicable. We refer to this as “applica-tion conditions”. We plan to make these application conditions machine inter-pretable and investigate how they, together with a domain ontology, can be used to support the verification and maintenance of constraints. 2006-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/512/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/512/01/AKT_Doctoral_Symposium_06.pdf

oai:aktors.org:513 2006-04-19

Hypermedia Support for Argumentation-Based Rationale: 15 Years on from gIBIS and QOC Buckingham Shum, Dr S Selvin, A Sierhuis, Dr M Conklin, Dr J Haley, C Nuseibeh, Prof B CoAKTinG Knowledge reuse Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing Knowledge modelling Knowledge maintenance Having developed, used and evaluated some of the early IBIS-based approaches to design rationale (DR) such as gIBIS and QOC in the late 1980s/mid-1990s, we describe the subsequent evolution of the argumentation-based paradigm through software support, and per-spectives drawn from modeling and meeting facilitation. Particular attention is given to the challenge of negotiating the overheads of capturing this form of rationale. Our approach has maintained a strong emphasis on keeping the representational scheme as simple as possible to enable real time meeting mediation and capture, attending explicitly to the skills required to use the approach well, particularly for the sort of participatory, multi-stakeholder requirements analysis demanded by many design problems. However, we can then specialize the notation and the way in which the tool is used in the service of specific methodologies, supported by a customizable hypermedia environment, and interoperable with other software tools. After presenting this approach, called Compendium, we present examples to illustrate the capabilities for support security argumentation in requirements engineering, template driven modeling for document generation, and IBIS-based indexing of and navigation around video records of meetings. 2006-01-01 Book Chapter http://eprints.aktors.org/513/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/513/01/RMiSE2006_AKTeprint.pdf

oai:aktors.org:518 2006-05-01

Reusing JessTab Rules in Protégé Corsar, Mr. David Sleeman, Prof. Derek Knowledge reuse Protégé provides a complete ontology and knowledge base management tool. Along with JESS, JessTab provides one method of rule based reasoning over a Protégé ontology and knowledge base. However once JessTab rules have been created for a knowledge base, they are explicitly tied to it as they name particular classes and slots, which greatly hinders their reuse with further knowledge bases. We have developed a two phase process and a supporting tool to support the reuse of JessTab rule sets. The first phase involves changing the class and slot references in the rule set into an abstract reference; the second phase involves automatically mapping between the abstract rules and further knowledge bases. Once mappings have been defined and applied for all the classes and slots in the abstract rules, the new rule set can then be run against the new knowledge base. We have satisfactorily tested our tool with several ontologies and associated rule sets; moreover, some of these tests have identified possible future improvements to the tool. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/518/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000518/01/DCorsarDSleemanAI2005Submission.pdf

oai:aktors.org:519 2006-05-02

Knowledge Base Reuse Through Constraint Relaxation Nordlander, Tomas E. Sleeman, Derek Brown, Ken N. Knowledge reuse Effective reuse of Knowledge Bases (KBs) often entails the expensive task of identifying plausible KB-PS (Problem Solver) combinations. We propose a novel technique based on Constraint Satisfaction to enable more rapid identification of incompatible KBs, leaving fewer combinations on which to conduct a thorough investigation. In this paper, we describe our investigation process, its tools, and the latest empirical results applied to non-binary problems that demonstrate our relaxation approach is an effective method for plausibility testing. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/519/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/519/01/p151-kcap05-tomas.pdf

oai:aktors.org:520 2006-05-10

ReTAX++: a Tool for Browsing and Revising Ontologies Lam, Sik Chun (Joey) Sleeman, Derek H. Vasconcelos, Wamberto Knowledge maintenance Many existing ontology tools provide an integrated environment to browse and edit ontologies as well as inconsistency checking facilities. However, their visualization facilities are limited and guidance on how to correct the detected errors is not usually provided. We present our ontology editor, ReTAX++, a tool that facilitates browsing and revision of ontologies. 2005-01-01 Conference Poster http://eprints.aktors.org/520/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/520/01/p155-ISWC-poster-joey.pdf

oai:aktors.org:521 2006-05-10

Graph-Based Ontology Checking Lam, Sik Chun (Joey) Sleeman, Derek Vasconcelos, Wanberto Knowledge maintenance Despite the growing availability of ontologies, the reuse of existing ontologies is often not possible without con- siderable effort. When one wants to reuse an ontology by importing it into ontology editors, the import process is not always successful due to an ill-formed content. Many existing ontology editors provide consistency detection by connecting to a reasoner, and highlighting the inconsistencies. However, no explanation nor functionalities are provided for users to correct the problems. In this paper we introduce a graph-based approach to checking ontology inconsistencies, implemented in our tool, ReTAX++. The system not only highlights the inconsistencies in an ontology by interacting with a reasoner, but also provides facilities for users to resolve the problems. By formalising an ontology as a graph, we check which relationships of the inconsistent concepts may cause the contradiction, and a number of options to resolve the problems are provided. Currently, we only focus on disjointedness and complement contradictions. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/521/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/521/01/p156-kcap05-workshop-joey.pdf

oai:aktors.org:522 2006-05-10

Searching and Ranking Ontologies on the Semantic Web Thomas, Edward Alani, Harith Sleeman, Derek Brewster, Christopher Knowledge reuse Knowledge retrieval The number of ontologies available online is increasing constantly. Tools that are capable of searching, retrieving,and ranking ontologies are becoming crucial to facilitate ontology search and reuse. In this document, we describe OntoSearch, which is a tool for capturing and searching ontologies on the Semantic web. We also briefly describe AKTiveRank which is used to rank OWL ontologies based on certain ontology-structure analysis. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/522/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/522/01/p157-KCAP-workshop-edward.pdf

oai:aktors.org:523 2006-05-10

OntoSearch: Retrieval and Reuse of Ontologies Thomas, Edward Zhang, Yi Sleeman, Derek Preece, Alun McKenzie, Craig Wright, Joe Knowledge reuse Knowledge retrieval This document provides an update on the development of OntoSearch[1][2], an ontology search engine designed to help users find RDF based ontological information on the Semantic Web. It uses the Google API to search several million documents on the Semantic Web and uses these results to populate a local repository of ontological data. This is then searched using queries optimised for the relationships within Ontologies. It supports various visualisation and representational algorithms. These facilities allow the user to make a rapid assessment of the files retrieved. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/523/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/523/01/p158-aime-workshop-edward.pdf

oai:aktors.org:525 2006-09-13

Issues with evaluating and using publicly available ontologies Kalfoglou, Dr Yannis Hu, Dr Bo Knowledge reuse Knowledge maintenance The proliferation of ontologies in the public domain and the ease of accessing them offers new opportunities for knowledge sharing and interoperability in an open, distributed environment, but it also poses interesting challenges for knowledge and Web engineers alike. In this paper we discuss and analyse those challenges with emphasis on the need to evaluate publicly available ontologies prior to use. We elaborate on a number of issues ranging from technological concerns to strategic and political issues. We drawn our experiences from the field of ontology mapping on the Semantic Web, a necessity that enables many of Semantic Web's proclaimed features. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/525/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000525/01/eon06-kalfoglou-hu.pdf

oai:aktors.org:526 2006-09-13

Also By The Same Author: AKTiveAuthor, a Citation Graph Approach to Name Disambiguation McRae-Spencer, Duncan Shadbolt, Nigel Knowledge retrieval Knowledge modelling The desire for definitive data and the semantic web drive for inference over heterogeneous data sources requires co-reference resolution to be performed on those data. In particular, name disambiguation is required to allow accurate publication lists, citation counts and impact measures to be determined. This paper describes a graph-based approach to author disambiguation on large-scale citation networks. Using self-citation, co-authorship and document source analyses, AKTiveAuthor clusters papers, achieving precision of 0.997 and recall of 0.818 over a test group of eight surname clusters. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/526/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/526/01/sp080-mcraespencer.pdf

oai:aktors.org:529 2006-09-13

Personalizing Relevance on the Semantic Web through Trusted Recommendations from a Social Network Heath, Mr Tom Motta, Professor Enrico Student Papers Knowledge reuse Knowledge retrieval Personalization efforts to date have centred on presenting web users with novel items by predicting what they may find relevant. This approach has utility where the user is unsure of exactly what they are looking for, but not where they have a particular information need to satisfy or a particular item to locate. Furthermore, by operating purely on a predefined database of users and items, systems using this approach represent closed worlds and offer poor scalability to new data sets. To address these limitations we propose a technique for personalizing relevance in information seeking activities, based on an understanding of how people seek information and recommendations from their social network. We then describe technical work in progress, based on Semantic Web technologies, that aims to realize this perspective. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/529/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/529/01/heath-motta-swp06-personalizing-relevance-trusted-recommendations.pdf

oai:aktors.org:532 2006-10-09

User Interaction and Uptake Challenges to Successfully Deploying Semantic Web Technologies Heath, Mr Tom Domingue, Dr John Shabajee, Mr Paul Student Papers Knowledge reuse The Semantic Web community could benefit greatly from 'eating its own dog food' in order to better understand the challenges and opportunities of a Semantic Web from the user perspective. In this paper we describe the deployment of Semantic Web applications and services at the 3rd European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC2006), before presenting results of an evaluation into how these technologies were experienced by delegates. Based on themes identified in the evaluation we highlight seven user interaction and uptake challenges raised by the conference experience, and discuss how these may generalize to the widespread deployment of Semantic Web technologies. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/532/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/532/01/heath-domingue-shabajee-swui06-user-interaction-uptake-challenges.pdf

oai:aktors.org:533 2006-10-09

Using a Semantic MediaWiki to Interact with a Knowledge Based Infrustructure Millard, Ian Jaffri, Afraz Glaser, Hugh Rodriguez, Benedicto Knowledge acquisition Facilitating knowledge acquisition is a task that usually requires special purpose interfaces with which users are not familiar. Providing effective acquisition through a familiar interface, such as a wiki, can provide a route to acquiring knowledge for low user investment. We present an architecture that is being used in the ReSIST project based on a Semantic MediaWiki integrated with a knowledge base that allows users to add and view knowledge using normal Semantic MediaWiki syntax. The architecture aims to facilitate the acquisition and representation of knowledge about resilient systems for users with no experience of knowledge technologies. 2006-01-01 Conference Poster http://eprints.aktors.org/533/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/533/01/ekaw06.pdf

oai:aktors.org:534 2007-01-05

The Semantic Logger: Supporting Service Building from Personal Context Tuffield Southampton, Mr Mischa M Loizou Southampton, Mr Antonis Dupplaw Southampton, Dr David P Dasmahapatra Southampton, Dr Srinandan Lewis Southampton, Professor Paul H Millard Southampton, Dr David E Shadbolt Southampton, Professor Nigel R Student Papers The Semantic Logger (SL) is presented as a system for the importing, housing, and exploiting of personal information. The system has been implemented using a number of Semantic Web enabling technologies, and attempts to store the information in a manner adhering to as many W3C recommendations as possible. The Semantic Logger's utility is grounded in two context-based applications, namely a recommender system, and a photo-annotation tool. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/534/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/534/01/carpe23p-tuffield.pdf

oai:aktors.org:535 2007-01-23

Photocopain - Annotating Memories For Life Tuffield, Mr Mischa M Chakravarthy, Mr Ajay Duplaw, Mr David P Brewster, Mr Christopher Hara, Mr Kieron O Ciravegna, Prof Fabio Shadbolt, Prof Nigel R Wilks, Prof Yorick Student Papers Knowledge acquisition Photo annotation is a resource-intensive task, yet is increasingly essential as image archives and personal photo collections grow in size. There is an inherent conflict in the process of describing and archiving personal experiences, because casual users are generally unwilling to spend large amounts of effort on creating the annotations which are required to manage their collections. This poster outlines Photocopain, a semi-automatic image annotation system which combines information about the context in which a photograph was captured with information extracted from the content of the image. These automatically generated annotations are then presented to the user for extension or alteration as need be. This work is presented as an initial investigation into the applicability of surreptitiously captured metadata to describe the events of a person’s observable life. 2006-01-01 Conference Poster http://eprints.aktors.org/535/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/535/01/m4l.pdf

oai:aktors.org:536 2007-01-23

Cross-media document annotation and enrichment Chakravarthy, Mr Ajay Ciravegna, Prof Fabio Lanfranchi, Ms Vitakeska Student Papers AKT Submitted Knowledge acquisition Annotation of documents is a complex and labour intensive task. So far, research has focused on supporting the annotation of documents in single media, e.g. texts or images. Much less attention has been paid to the issue of annotating documents across media, especially useful for web documents that usually contain both text and images. In this paper we describe AKTiveMedia, a tool which supports human-centric annotation of documents across media. It offers a number of features to support different types of annotations, from ontology-based ones to free comments. We discuss what we believe are the main requirements for annotating Web documents, from support of annotator communities, to the reduction of the annotation burden, to the support of document lifecycle and how they have been implemented inside AKTiveMedia. The tool has applications in annotation of web pages, personal memories and knowledge management. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/536/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/536/01/paper-camera-workshop(2).pdf

oai:aktors.org:537 2007-01-23

AKTiveMedia: Cross-media Document Annotation and Enrichment Chakravarthy, Mr Ajay Ciravegna, Prof Fabio Lanfranchi, Ms Vitakeska Student Papers Knowledge reuse Knowledge acquisition Nowadays a large and growing amount of information is stored in various multimedia formats, such as images, video, audio. Much research has been undertaken into the efficient and effective storage, access, usage and retrieval of textual information. Semantic annotation and enrichment has been proposed as a way to make textual and graphical information available in documents for effective and efficient use. For example, several activities focus on text annotation as a way to enrich a textual document, making it machine-readable and also accessible to people [1, 2, 4, 5]; other projects focus more on annotation of images e.g. [3]. However, we believe that the separation of text and images is artificial and there is a strong need for enabling true cross-media annotations that span the division of text and images. A constantly increasing number of information sources, like websites, often contain both text and images that are interrelated: usually the text in the document contains references to the image or describes it. It is therefore crucial to develop strategies and interfaces for cross-media knowledge creation and sharing that will make these references explicit, increasing the value of the document itself. 2006-01-01 Conference Poster http://eprints.aktors.org/537/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/537/01/poster-camera.pdf

oai:aktors.org:538 2007-01-23

Selecting Web Services Statistically Lambert, Mr David J Robertson, Dr David S Student Papers Knowledge reuse Knowledge retrieval Knowledge publishing Service oriented computing offers a new approach to programming. To be useful for large and diverse sets of problems, effective service selection and composition is crucial. While current frameworks offer tools and methods for selecting services based on various user-defined criteria, little attention has been paid to how such services act and interact. Similarly, the patterns of interaction might be important at a level other than that of the user-programmer. Semantic agreement between services, and the patterns of interaction between them, will be an important factor in the usability and success of service composition. We argue that this cannot be guaranteed by logic-based description of individual services. We have developed a simple but apparently effective technique for selecting agents and interactions based on evidence of their prior performance. 2006-01-01 In Collection http://eprints.aktors.org/538/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/538/01/cia06.pdf

oai:aktors.org:539 2007-01-23

Requirements for Multimedia Document Enrichmen Chakravarthy, Mr Ajay Lanfranchi, Ms Vitaveska Ciravegna, Prof Fabio Student Papers Knowledge reuse Knowledge acquisition Nowadays a large and growing percentage of information is stored in various multimedia formats. In order for multimedia information to be efficiently utilised by users, it is very important to add suitable metadata. In this paper we will present AKTiveMedia, a tool for enriching multimedia documents with semantic information. 2006-01-01 Conference Poster http://eprints.aktors.org/539/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/539/01/pp189-Chakravarthy.pdf

oai:aktors.org:540 2007-01-23

Changing Ontology Breaks the Queries Student Papers Knowledge retrieval Ontologies Knowledge maintenance Updating an ontology that is in use may result in inconsistencies between the ontology and the knowledge base, dependent ontologies and applications/services. Current research concentrates on the creation of ontologies and how to manage ontology changes in terms of mapping ontology versions and keeping consistent with the instances. Very little work investigated controlling the impact on dependent applications/services; which is the aim of the system presented in this paper. The approach we propose is to make use of ontology change logs to analyse incoming RDQL queries and amend them as necessary. Revised queries can then be used to query the ontology and knowledge base as requested by the applications and services. We describe our prototype system and discuss related problems and future directions. 2006-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/540/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/540/01/DC-ISWC06-cameraready.pdf

oai:aktors.org:541 2007-01-23

Ontologies Change and Queries Break: Towards a Solution Liang, Mr. Yaozhong Alani, Dr. Harith Shadbolt, Prof. Nigel Student Papers Knowledge retrieval Ontologies Knowledge maintenance Keeping track of ontology changes is becoming a critical issue for ontology-based applications. Updating an ontology that is in use may result in inconsistencies between the ontology and the knowledge base, dependent ontologies and applications/services. Current research concentrates on the creation of ontologies and how to manage ontology changes in terms of mapping ontology versions and keeping consistent with the instances. Very little work investigated ontrolling the impact on dependent applications/services; which is the aim of the system presented in this paper. The approach we propose is to make use of ontology change logs to analyse incoming RDQL queries and amend them as necessary. Revised queries can then be used to query the ontology and knowledge base as requested by the applications and services. We describe the design of our prototype system, and discuss related problems and future directions. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/541/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/541/01/ekaw06-cameraready.pdf

oai:aktors.org:542 2007-01-23

Ontology Change Management in Protégé Liang, Mr. Yaozhong Alani, Dr. Harith Shadbolt, Prof. Nigel Ontologies First Doctoral Symposium Knowledge maintenance Ontology schemas tend to change and evolve over time to meet new requirements. This change may invalidate dependent applications if there is no dynamic adaptation to the changes made to underlying ontologies. Protégé, as a popular ontology development tool, should meet the challenges addressed by the evolving ontology. In this paper, we will briefly analyse the current ontology-change management in Protégé, and propose some extensions to facilitate change traceability by external application and services. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/542/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/542/01/Ontology_Change_Management_in_Protege.pdf

oai:aktors.org:543 2007-01-23

Change Management: The Core Task of Ontology Versioning and Evolution Liang, Mr. Yaozhong Alani, Dr. Harith Shadbolt, Prof. Nigel Student Papers Ontologies Knowledge maintenance Change management as a key issue in ontology versioning and evolution is still not fully addressed, which to some extent forms a barrier against the smooth process of ontology evolution. The key issue in the support of evolving ontologies is to distinguish and recognize the changes during the process of ontology evolution. Most of the current popular work on ontology versioning do not keep a record of the changes in the ontology, thus preventing the user from tracking those changes back and forward, or to at least understand the rational behind those changes. We are proposing an approach to get the evidences of ontology changes, keep track of them, and manage them in an engineering fashion. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/543/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/543/01/Change_Management_The_Core_Task_of_Ontology_Versioning_and_Evolution.pdf

oai:aktors.org:544 2007-01-23

An Approach to Cope with Ontology Changes for Ontology-based Applications Liang, Mr. Yaozhong Alani, Dr. Harith Shadbolt, Prof. Nigel Student Papers Knowledge retrieval Ontologies First Doctoral Symposium Knowledge maintenance Keeping track of ontology changes is becoming a critical issue for ontology-based applications because updating an ontology that is in use may result in inconsistencies between the ontology and the knowledge base, dependent ontologies and dependent applications/services. Current research concentrates on the creation of ontologies and how to manage ontology changes in terms of the attempts to ease the communications between ontology versions and keep consistent with the instances, and there is little work available on controlling the impact to dependent appli- cations/services which is the aims of the system presented in this paper. The approach we propose in this paper is to manually capture and log ontology changes, use this log to analyse incoming RDQL queries and amend them as necessary. Revised queries can then be used to query the knowledge base of the applications/services. We present the infrastruc- ture of our approach based on the problems and scenarios identified within ontology-based systems. We discuss the issues met during our design and implementation, and consider some problems whose solutions will be bene¯cial to the development of our approach. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/544/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/544/01/aktdta06-davidliang.pdf

oai:aktors.org:545 2007-01-23

Enabling Active Ontology Change Management within Semantic Web-based Applications Liang, Mr. Yaozhong Student Papers Knowledge retrieval Ontologies Knowledge maintenance Enabling traceable ontology changes is becoming a critical issue for ontology-based applications. Updating an ontology that is in use may result in inconsistencies between the ontology and the knowledge base, dependent ontologies and applications/services. Current research concentrates on the creation of ontologies and how to manage ontology changes in terms of mapping ontology versions and keeping consistent with the instances. Very little work investigated on-the-fly keeping track of ontology changes while update (active ontology versioning) and using these information to control the impact on dependent applications/services, which is the aim of our research presented in this thesis. The approach we propose is to make use of ontology change logs as a check-point to analyse changed entities related to the requested services via end-user’s incoming queries (RDQL/SPARQL) and amend them as necessary to maintain the validation and continuousness of the dependent application. Firstly, We build up Log Ontology I as the concept structure to organize and construct the change information, develop our prototype system to demonstrate how the change information retrieved from Log Ontology I could be used to control the impacts brought by the ontology changes on the dependent applications and services. And then, by analysing the limitations and difficulties of our prototype system in maintaining the services related to the more complex ontology changes, we identify that the problem which fails the system facing the more complex ontology changes is the inabilities of Log Ontology I to represent complex change information in a semantic fashion. Therefore, we retract to put more focuses on Log Ontology I to enable the implementation of the mechanism to on-the-fly keep track of ontology change information, forming Log Ontology II, in order to reserve the semantics of ontology change from the beginning of ontology update process. Finally we discuss the future direction in terms of how the improved Log Ontology II enables the better service validation and continuousness maintenance of changing-ontology-based applications. 2006-09-01 Departmental Technical Report http://eprints.aktors.org/545/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/545/01/minithesis.pdf

oai:aktors.org:546 2007-01-23

Community-based Annotation of Multimedia Documents Chakravarthy, Mr Ajay Lanfranchi, Ms Vitaveska Ciravegna, Prof Fabio Student Papers Knowledge reuse Knowledge acquisition In this paper, we analyse the process of annotating multimedia documents inside a community as a way to enable knowledge sharing and reuse. 2006-01-01 Conference Poster http://eprints.aktors.org/546/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/546/01/Poster_community_based_annotation.pdf

oai:aktors.org:548 2007-01-23

Image annotation with Photocopain Tuffield, Mr Mischa M Harris, Mr Stephen Duplaw, Mr David P Chakravarthy, Mr Ajay Brewster, Mr Christopher Gibbins, Dr Nicholas O Hara, Dr Kieron Ciravegna, Prof Fabio Sleeman, Prof Derek Shadbolt, Prof Nigel R Wilks, Prof Yorick Student Papers AKT Showcase Papers Photo annotation is a resource-intensive task, yet is increasingly essential as image archives and personal photo collections grow in size. There is an inherent conflict in the process of describing and archiving personal experiences, because casual users are generally unwilling to expend large amounts of effort on creating the annotations which are required to organise their collections so that they can make best use of them. This paper describes the Photocopain system, a semi-automatic image annotation system which combines information about the context in which a photograph was captured with information from other readily available sources in order to generate outline annotations for that photograph that the user may further extend or amend. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/548/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/548/01/paper09.pdf

oai:aktors.org:549 2007-02-14

Focused Data Mining for decision support in Emergency Response Scenarios Chapman, Mr Sam Ciravegna, Prof Fabio Student Papers AKT Showcase Papers Knowledge acquisition This paper introduces the growing emergency response domain where there is a strong need to collate structured information to aid in decision-making. Semantic Web and natural language technologies can aid this process by providing the ability to perform focused mining of unstructured data to create a timely structured data repository. A focused use-case is detailed along with a working system (Armadillo e-Response) demonstrating how this can be employed in a real world application. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/549/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/549/01/ISWC2006chapmanEtAlEResponse.pdf

oai:aktors.org:550 2007-02-06

The "Helpful Environment": Geographically Dispersed Intelligent Agents That Collaborate Tate, Professor Austin AKT Showcase Papers A future network of sophisticated sensors, protection, and repair systems could be integral to clothing, communications devices, transportation systems, buildings, and the environment. These would form the basis for a distributed, adaptable, and resilient "helpful environment". 2006-05-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/550/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/550/01/2006-ieee-is-tate-helpful-environment.pdf

oai:aktors.org:551 2007-02-06

PowerMap: Mapping the real semantic web on the fly Knowledge retrieval Ontology mapping plays an important role in bridging the semantic gap between distributed and heterogeneous data sources. As the Semantic Web slowly becomes real and the amount of online semantic data increases, a new generation of tools is developed that automatically find and integrate this data. Unlike in the case of earlier tools where mapping has been performed at the design time of the tool, these new tools require mapping techniques that can be performed at run time. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we investigate the general requirements for run time mapping techniques. Second, we describe our PowerMap mapping algorithm that was designed to be used at run-time by an ontology based question answering tool. 2006-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/551/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/551/01/powerMap-iswc06-camera-ready.pdf

oai:aktors.org:552 2007-02-14

Using I-X Process Panels as Intelligent To-Do Lists for Agent Coordination in Emergency Response Wickler, Dr Gerhard Potter, Dr Stephen Tate, Prof Austin AKT Showcase Papers The aim of this paper is to describe the I-X system with its principal user interface, the I-X Process Panel, its underlying ontology, <I-N-C-A>, and how this panel can be used as an intelligent to-do list that assists emergency responders in applying pre-defined standard operating procedures in different types of emergencies. In particular, multiple instances of I-X Process Panels can be used as a distributed system to coordinate the efforts of independent emergency responders as well as responders within the same organization. Furthermore, it can be used as an agent wrapper for other software systems, such as web services, to integrate these into the emergency response team as virtual members. The heart of the I-X system is an automated planner that can be used to synthesize courses of action or explore alternative options manually. In the Co-OPR project that is currently underway the I-X framework has been used to develop a prototypical application to support training exercises for personnel recovery. This paper will describe some of the initial findings that are the result of an experiment conducted to evaluate the suitability and extent to which personnel recovery trainees and trainers can be supported by I-X in so-called “Command Post Exercises”. The result shows that an I-X application can be usefully used in such a scenario eliminating some of the basic problems that often occur. 2007-01-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/552/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000552/01/2007-ijics-wickler-ix-personnel-recovery-final.pdf

oai:aktors.org:553 2007-02-14

Winnowing Ontologies based on Application Use Alani, Harith Harris, Steven O'Neil, Ben AKT Showcase Papers Knowledge reuse Knowledge modelling 2006-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/553/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/553/01/Alani-eswc06.pdf

oai:aktors.org:554 2007-02-14

Metrics for Ranking Ontologies Knowledge retrieval Ontologies 2006-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/554/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/554/01/Alani-EON06.pdf

oai:aktors.org:555 2007-02-14

Short Paper: Ontology Construction from Online Ontologies Knowledge reuse Ontologies 2006-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/555/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/555/01/www06-Alani.pdf

oai:aktors.org:556 2007-02-14

Ranking Ontologies with AKTiveRank Knowledge reuse Ontologies 2006-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/556/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/556/01/iswc06-camera-ready.pdf

oai:aktors.org:557 2007-02-14

Towards a Killer App for the Semantic Web AKT Showcase Papers 2006-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/557/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/557/01/iswc05-camera-ready.pdf

oai:aktors.org:558 2007-02-14

Ontologies as Facilitators for Repurposing Web Documents Weal, Mark Alani, Harith Kim, Sanghee Lewis, Paul Millard, Dave Sinclair, Patrick De Roure, Dave Shadbolt, Nigel Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing This paper investigates the role of ontologies as a central part of an architecture to repurpose existing material from the Web. A prototype system called ArtEquAKT is presented, which combines information extraction, knowledge management and consolidation techniques and adaptive document generation. All of these components are co-ordinated using one central ontology, providing a common vocabulary for describing the information fragments as they are processed. Each of the components of the architecture is described in detail and an evaluation of the system discussed. Conclusions are drawn as to the eectiveness of such an approach and further challenges are outlined. 2007-01-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/558/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000558/01/weal2007.pdf

oai:aktors.org:559 2007-02-14

Reviews and Ratings on the Semantic Web Heath, Mr Tom Motta, Professor Enrico Student Papers Knowledge publishing We present a system for creating online reviews and ratings, based on Semantic Web technologies. This approach overcomes many of the limitations of conventional reviewing and rating systems on the web, such as: a closed world in terms of what can be reviewed, poor integration with reviews or data from other sources, and the inability to aggregate reviews from known and trusted individuals. We detail how the system overcomes these issues, and conclude with an outline of ongoing and future work that exploits its benefits. 2006-01-01 Conference Poster http://eprints.aktors.org/559/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/559/01/heath-motta-iswc2006-reviews-ratings-semantic-web.pdf

oai:aktors.org:560 2007-02-14

Semantic Search Components: a blueprint for effective query language interfaces Uren, V.S. Motta, E. Knowledge retrieval Formulating complex queries is hard, especially in heterogeneous information environments, where users do not understand all the data structures of multiple complex knowledge bases. We see a gap between semantic search tools that are user friendly, but have restricted functionality, and powerful, formal query languages, which are unsuit-able for end users. We explore the complexity of semantic queries through an example. Building on this example, we propose a solution using a component based approach. We propose a layered architecture, with components taking an intermediary role between the end user inter-face and formal query languages. The kinds of components that would be needed for such a system are outlined, and challenges for the system are discussed, in particular, how to combine semantic searches. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/560/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000560/01/EKAW2006-vsu.pdf

oai:aktors.org:561 2007-02-14

SemSearch: a search engine for the semantic web Lei, Y. Uren, V.S. Motta, E. Knowledge retrieval 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. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/561/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000561/01/ekaw_paper.pdf

oai:aktors.org:562 2007-02-19

Living with the Semantic Gap: Experiences and remedies in the context of medical imaging Kalfoglou, Dr Yannis Dasmahapatra, Dr Srinandan Dupplaw, Dr David Hu, Dr Bo Lewis, Prof Paul Shadbolt, Prof Nigel Knowledge reuse Knowledge publishing Knowledge maintenance Semantic annotation of images is a key concern for the newly emerged applications of semantic multimedia. Machine processable descriptions of images make it possible to automate a variety of tasks from search and discovery to composition and collage of image data bases. However, the ever occurring problem of the semantic gap between the low level descriptors and the high level interpretation of an image poses new challenges and needs to be addressed before the full potential of semantic multimedia can be realised. We explore the possibilities and lessons learnt with applied semantic multimedia from our engagement with medical imaging where we deployed ontologies and a novel distributed architecture to provide semantic annotation, decision support and methods for tackling the semantic gap problem. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/562/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000562/01/kalfoglou-et-al-samt063.pdf

oai:aktors.org:563 2007-02-19

Semantic Metrics Hu, Dr Bo Kalfoglou, Dr Yannis Dupplaw, Dr David Alani, Dr Harith Lewis, Prof Paul Shadbolt, Prof Nigel AKT Showcase Papers Knowledge reuse Knowledge maintenance In the context of the Semantic Web, many ontology-related operations, e.g. ontology ranking, segmentation, alignment, articulation, reuse, evaluation, can be boiled down to one fundamental operation: computing the similarity and/or dissimilarity among ontological entities, and in some cases among ontologies themselves. In this paper, we review standard metrics for computing distance measures and we propose a series of semantic metrics. We give a formal account of semantic metrics drawn from a variety of research disciplines, and enrich them with semantics based on standard Description Logic constructs. We argue that concept-based metrics can be aggregated to produce numeric distances at ontology-level and we speculate on the usability of our ideas through potential areas. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/563/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000563/01/ekaw2006-bh-etal.pdf

oai:aktors.org:564 2007-02-25

A Semantic Web Blackboard System Student Papers Knowledge reuse In this paper, we propose a Blackboard Architecture as a means for coordinating hybrid reasoning over the Semantic Web. We describe the components of traditional blackboard systems (Knowledge Sources, Blackboard, Controller) and then explain how we have enhanced these by incorporating some of the principles of the SemanticWeb to pro- duce our Semantic Web Blackboard. Much of the framework is already in place to facilitate our research: the communication protocol (HTTP); the data representation medium (RDF); a rich expressive description language (OWL); and a method of writing rules (SWRL). We further en- hance this by adding our own constraint based formalism (CIF/SWRL) into the mix.We provide an example walk-though of our test-bed system, the AKTive Workgroup Builder and Blackboard(AWB+B), illustrating the interaction and cooperation of the Knowledge Sources and providing some context as to how the solution is achieved. We conclude with the strengths and weaknesses of the architecture. 2006-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/564/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/564/01/AI2006.pdf

oai:aktors.org:565 2007-02-25

A Reusable Commitment Management Service Using Semantic Web Technology Student Papers Knowledge reuse Commitment management is a key issue in service-provisioning in the context of virtual organisations (VOs). A service-provider—which may be a single agent acting within an organisation, or the VO acting as a collective whole— manages particular resources, and commits these resources to meet specific goals. Commitments can be modelled as constraints on resources. Such constraints are often soft: they can be broken if necessary. The goal of the work described in this paper is to create an open, reusable commitment management service (CMS) based on Semantic Web standards. The chief requirement is that the CMS should be reusable in different domains, able to manage commitments over services described in a wide range of domain-specific service ontologies. This paper presents open SemanticWeb representations for (1) expressing individual commitments as constraints over service descriptions, (2) capturing a set of commitments as a soft constraint satisfaction problem, and (3) representing and communicating the solution to a soft CSP. A reference implementation of a constraint solver able to operate on (1) and (2) to produce (3) is described, and its reuse is demonstrated in two distinct domains: e-commerce and e-response. 2006-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/565/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/565/01/CMS_SGAI2006.pdf

oai:aktors.org:566 2007-02-25

A Semantic Web Approach To Handling Soft Constraints In Virtual Organisations Student Papers Knowledge reuse Knowledge publishing In this paper we present a proposal for representing soft constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) within the Semantic Web architecture. The proposal is motivated by the need for a service-providing agent in a virtual organisation to reason about its commitments as soft constraints. The three essential requirements addressed are: (1) the need to have constraints express commitments in terms of Semantic Web services, (2) the need to associate utility values with constraints, to reflect the relative importance of satisfying them, and (3) the need to make statements about which constraints are satisfied and violated by a given solution. The proposal builds upon previous work in defining a Semantic Web Constraint Interchange Format (CIF), which itself builds on the proposed Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL). The paper describes an ontology for representing soft CSPs and their solutions, allowing an agent’s set of commitments to be expressed as a collection of soft constraints. The ontology is an open interchange format for soft CSPs, allowing commitment to be communicated and exchanged among the members of a virtual organisation. 2006-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/566/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/566/01/ICEC2006.pdf

oai:aktors.org:567 2007-02-25

Semantic Web Reasoning using a Blackboard System McKenzie, Mr Craig Preece, Dr Alun Gray, Prof Peter Student Papers Knowledge reuse Knowledge modelling In this paper, we discuss the need for a hybrid reasoning ap- proach to handing Semantic Web (SW) data and explain why we believe that the Blackboard Architecture is particularly suitable. We describe how we have utilised it for coordinating a combination of ontological inference, rules and constraint based reasoning within a SW context. After describing the metaphor on which the Blackboard Architecture is based we introduce its key components: the blackboard Panels containing the solution space facts and problem related goals and sub-goals; the differing behaviours of the associated Knowledge Sources and how they interact with the blackboard; and, finally, the Controller and how it manages and focuses the problem solving effort. To help clarify, we use our test-bed system, the AKTive Workgroup Builder and Blackboard (AWB+B) to explain some of the issues and problems encountered when implementing a SW Blackboard System in a problem oriented context. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/567/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/567/01/SWReasonUsingBb_ppswr2006.pdf

oai:aktors.org:568 2007-02-25

Handling Soft Constraints in the Semantic Web Architecture Preece, Dr Alun Chalmers, Dr Stuart McKenzie, Mr Craig Pan, Dr Jeff Gray, Prof Peter Student Papers Knowledge reuse Knowledge modelling In this paper we present a proposal for representing soft CSPs within the Semantic Web architecture. The proposal is motivated by the need for a service-providing agent to reason about its commitments as soft constraints. The two essential requirements addressed are: the need to associate utility values with constraints, to reflect the relative importance of satisfying them, and the need to make statements about which constraints are satisfied and violated by a given solution. The proposal builds upon previous work in defining a Semantic Web Constraint Interchange Format (CIF), which itself builds on the proposed Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL).The main contribution of this paper is a new ontology for representing soft CSPs; we also extend the previous form of CIF/SWRL. The soft CSP ontology is intended to be used with CIF/SWRL, but is also potentially usable with other constraint and rule representations. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/568/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/568/01/softconstraints_row2006.pdf

oai:aktors.org:569 2007-02-25

Implementing a Semantic Web Blackboard System using Jena McKenzie, Mr Craig Preece, Dr Alun Gray, Prof Peter Student Papers Knowledge reuse Ontologies In this paper, we discuss the need for a hybrid reasoning approach to handing Semantic Web data and explain why we believe that the Blackboard Architecture is particularly suitable. We describe how we have utilised it for combining ontological inference, rules and constraint based reasoning within a Semantic Web context. After describing the metaphor on which the Blackboard Architecture is based we introduce the key components of the architecture: the blackboard Panels containing the solution space facts and problem related goals and sub-goals; the differing behaviours of the associated Knowledge Sources and how they interact with the blackboard; and, finally, the Controller and how it manages and focuses the problem solving effort. To help clarify, we use our test-bed system, the AKTiveWorkgroup Builder and Blackboard (AWB+B) to explain some of the issues and problems encountered when implementing a Semantic Web Blackboard System in Java, using Jena. We also discuss our reasons why we elected to use the Jena toolkit and explain its usage within several of the key components of our system. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/569/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/569/01/ImplSWBbUsingJena_juc2006.pdf

oai:aktors.org:570 2007-02-25

Ontology Selection on the Real Semantic Web: How to Cover the Queens Birthday Dinner? Sabou, Dr. Marta Lopez, Vanessa Motta, Prof. Enrico Knowledge retrieval Robust mechanisms for ontology selection are crucial for the evolving Semantic Web characterized by rapidly increasing numbers of online ontologies and by applications that automatically use the associated metadata. However, existing selection techniques have primarily been designed in the context of human mediated tasks and fall short of supporting automatic knowledge reuse. We address this gap by proposing a selection algorithm that takes into account 1) the needs of two applications that explore large scale, distributed markup and 2) some properties of online ontology repositories. We conclude that the ambitious context of automatic knowledge reuse imposes several challenging requirements on selection. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/570/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/570/01/sabouEtAl_118.pdf

oai:aktors.org:571 2007-02-25

Using the Semantic Web as Background Knowledge for Ontology Mapping Sabou, Dr. Marta d'Aquin, Dr. Mathieu Motta, Prof. Enrico Knowledge acquisition While current approaches to ontology mapping produce good results by mainly relying on label and structure based similarity measures, there are several cases in which they fail to discover important mappings. In this paper we describe a novel approach to ontology mapping, which is able to avoid this limitation by using background knowledge. Existing approaches relying on background knowledge typically have one or both of two key limitations: 1) they rely on a manually selected reference ontology; 2) they suffer from the noise introduced by the use of semi-structured sources, such as text corpora. Our technique circumvents these limitations by exploiting the increasing amount of semantic resources available online. As a result, there is no need either for a manually selected reference ontology (the relevant ontologies are dynamically selected from an online ontology repository), or for transforming background knowledge in an ontological form. The promising results from experiments on two real life thesauri indicate both that our approach has a high precision and also that it can find mappings, which are typically missed by existing approaches. 2006-01-01 In Collection http://eprints.aktors.org/571/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/571/01/om2006.pdf

oai:aktors.org:573 2007-02-25

Modularization: a Key for the Dynamic Selection of Relevant Knowledge Components d'Aquin, Dr. Mathieu Sabou, Dr. Marta Motta, Prof. Enrico Knowledge reuse Ontology selection is crucial to support knowledge reuse on the ever increasing Semantic Web. However, applications that rely on reusing existing knowledge often require only relevant parts of existing ontologies rather than entire ontologies. In this paper we investigate how modularization can be integrated with ontology selection techniques. Our contribution is twofold. On the one hand we extend a selection technique with a modularization component. On the other hand we design and implement a modularization algorithm which, unlike many existing approaches, is tightly integrated in a concrete tool. 2006-01-01 In Collection http://eprints.aktors.org/573/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/573/01/daquin-womo06.pdf

oai:aktors.org:574 2007-02-25

Capturing Quantified Constraints in FOL, Through Interaction with a Relationship Graph Gray, Prof P.M.D. Kemp, Dr G.J.L. Knowledge acquisition Knowledge modelling As new semantic web standards evolve to allow quanti¯ed rules in FOL, we need new ways to capture them from end users.We show how to do this against a graphic view of entities and their relationships (not just their subclasses). Some of these relationships can be derived from data values by algebraic expressions. For example scientists may use ad hoc lists of numbers instead of SQL key-matching conventions, as we show in the case of molecular pathway data. The derived relationships can also be included in captured constraints, which express domain se- mantics better. The constraints are captured as FOL and transmitted in RDFS(XML) format. However the user unfamiliar with FOL is made to see them as simple nested loops. This device even allows inclusion of ex- istential quanti¯ers in readable fashion. The captured constraint can be tested by generating queries to search for violations in stored data. The constraint can then be automatically revised to exclude speci¯c cases picked out by the user, who is spared worries about proper syntax and boolean connectives. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/574/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/574/01/ekaw2006extended.pdf

oai:aktors.org:576 2007-03-01

The Use of Ontologies in Contextually Aware Environments Millard, I. C. De Roure, D. C. Shadbolt, N. R. Student Papers Knowledge acquisition Ontologies Knowledge modelling In this paper we outline work in progress related to the construction of contextually aware pervasive computing environments, through the use of semantic and knowledge technologies. Key to this activity is modelling both where and what a user is doing at any given time. We present a prototype application to illustrate this work and describe part of its implementation. 2004-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/576/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/576/01/Paper19.pdf

oai:aktors.org:577 2007-03-01

Contextually Aware Information Delivery in Pervasive Computing Environments Millard, I. C. De Roure, D. C. Shadbolt, N. R. Knowledge modelling This paper outlines work in progress related to the construction of a system which is able to deliver information in a contextually sensitive manner within a pervasive computing environment, through the use of semantic and knowledge technologies. Our approach involves modelling of task and domain as well as location and device. We discuss ideas and steps already taken in the development of prototype components, and outline our future work in this area. 2005-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/577/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000577/01/fulltext.pdf

oai:aktors.org:578 2007-03-01

ConEditor+: Capture and Maintenance of Constraints in Engineering Design Ajit, S Sleeman, D Fowler, D W Knott, D Hui, K Knowledge maintenance The Designers’ Workbench is a system, developed to support designers in large organizations, such as Rolls-Royce, by making sure that the design is consistent with the specification for the particular design as well as with the company’s design rule book(s). Currently, to capture the constraint information, a domain expert (design engineer) has to work with a knowledge engineer to identify the constraints, and it is then the task of the knowledge engineer to encode these into the Workbench’s knowledge base (KB). This is an error prone and time consuming task. It is highly desirable to relieve the knowledge engineer of this task, and so we have developed a tool, ConEditor+ that enables domain experts themselves to capture and maintain these constraints. The tool allows the user to combine selected entities from the domain ontology with keywords and operators of a constraint language to form a constraint expression. Further, we hypothesize that to apply constraints appropriately, it is necessary to understand the context in which each constraint is applicable. We refer to this as “application conditions”. We show that an explicit representation of application conditions, in a ma-chine interpretable format, along with the constraints and the domain ontology can be used to support the verification and maintenance of constraints. 2007-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/578/ msword http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000578/01/Derek07-workshop-camera-ready-1a.doc

oai:aktors.org:579 2007-03-01

Reusing JessTab rules in Protégé Corsar, D Sleeman, D Knowledge reuse Ontologies Protégé provides a complete ontology and knowledge base management tool. Along with JESS, JessTab provides one method of rule-based reasoning over a Protégé ontology and knowledge base. However, once JessTab rules have been created for a knowledge base, they are explicitly tied to it as they name particular classes and slots, which greatly hinders their reuse with further knowledge bases. We have developed a two-phase process and a supporting tool to support the reuse of JessTab rule sets. The first phase involves changing the class and slot references in the rule set into an abstract reference; the second phase involves automatically mapping between the abstract rules and further knowledge bases. Once mappings have been defined and applied for all the classes and slots in the abstract rules, the new rule set can then be run against the new knowledge base. We have satisfactorily tested our tool with several ontologies and associated rule sets; moreover, some of these tests have identified possible future improvements to the tool. 2006-01-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/579/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/579/01/sdarticle.pdf

oai:aktors.org:581 2007-03-01

f-SWRL: A Fuzzy Extension of SWRL Pan, J Z Stoilos, G Stamou, G Tzouvaras, V Horrocks, I Knowledge modelling Although the combination of OWL and Horn rules results in the creation of a highly expressive language, i.e. SWRL, there are still many occasions where this language fails to accurately represent knowledge of our world. In particular, SWRL fails at representing vague and imprecise knowledge and information. Such type of information is apparent in many applications like multimedia processing and retrieval, information fusion, etc. In this paper, we propose f-SWRL, a fuzzy ex- tension to SWRL to include fuzzy assertions (such as `Mary is tall in the degree of 0.9') and fuzzy rules (such as `being healthy is more important than being rich to determine if one is happy'). 2006-01-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/581/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000581/01/PSSTH06.pdf

oai:aktors.org:582 2007-03-01

A Diagnosis Tutor Aiken, A Sleeman, D Knowledge modelling Diagnosis is difficult to perform and difficult to teach as it requires a large volume of information of various kinds and an appreciation of the differential diagnosis process. The fourth version of the Refiner series, AKT-R4, incorporates a new concept known as the diagnostic web, which is a combination of hypothetico-deductive reasoning (HDR) and illness scripts. AKT-R4 requires no additional knowledge acquisition beyond the loading of a set of cases which the system uses to build a model of the domain (although contextual factors can be added to provide a finer degree of control over the diagnostic process). The system will be evaluated in terms of accuracy of diagnosis, speed of diagnosis and ease of use. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/582/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000582/01/ITS.pdf

oai:aktors.org:583 2007-03-01

Inconsistencies, Negations and Changes in Ontologies Flouris, G Huang, Z Pan, J Z Plexousakis, D Wache, H Ontologies Ontology management and maintenance are considered cornerstone issues in current Semantic Web applications in which semantic integration and ontological reasoning play a fundamental role. The ability to deal with inconsistency and to accommodate change is of utmost importance in realworld applications of ontological reasoning and management, wherein the need for expressing negated assertions also arises naturally. For this purpose, precise, formal definitions of the the different types of inconsistency and negation in ontologies are required. Unfortunately, ontology languages based on Description Logics (DLs) do not provide enough expressive power to represent axiom negations. Furthermore, there is no single, well-accepted notion of inconsistency and negation in the Semantic Web community, due to the lack of a common and solid foundational framework. In this paper, we propose a general framework accounting for inconsistency, negation and change in ontologies. Different levels of negation and inconsistency in DL-based ontologies are distinguished. We demonstrate how this framework can provide a foundation for reasoning with and management of dynamic ontologies. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/583/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000583/01/FHPPW06e.pdf

oai:aktors.org:584 2007-03-01

Norm Refinement - Informing the Re-negotiation of Contracts Kollingbaum, M J Norman, T J Preece, A Sleeman, D Knowledge modelling Conflicts between norms are a common problem in open Virtual Organisations and has to be dealt with. Norm-governed agents that populate such VO’s can remain operational only if they are able to resolve such conflicts. In this paper, we discuss how norm-governed agents based on the NoA architecture identify such conflicts and how the NoA model of norm conflicts can inform a re-negotiation of contracts and norms. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/584/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000584/01/Kollingbaum_COIN_ECAI2006.pdf

oai:aktors.org:585 2007-03-01

A Fine-Grained Approach to Resolving Unsatisfiable Ontologies Lam, S J Pan, J Sleeman, D Vasconcelos, W Ontologies In the Semantic Web, inconsistencies in OWL ontologies may easily occur. Existing approaches either identify the minimally unsatisfiable sub-ontologies or calculate the maximally satisfiable sub-ontologies. However practical problems remain; it is not clear which axioms or which parts of axioms should be selected for repair, and how to repair those axioms. In this paper, we address this limitation by proposing a ¯ne-grained approach to resolving unsatisfiable ontologies. We revise the axiom tracing technique first proposed by Baader and Hollunder, so as to track which parts of the problematic axioms cause the unsatisfiability. Moreover, we support ontology users in rewriting problematic axioms. In order to minimise the impact of changes and prevent unintended entailment loss, harmful and helpful changes are identified and provided as guidelines. Based on the methods described we present a preliminary version of an interactive debugging tool and demonstrate its applicability in practice. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/585/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000585/01/Joey_WI06.pdf

oai:aktors.org:586 2007-03-01

ONTOSEARCH2: Searching and Querying Web Ontologies Pan, J Z Thomas, E J Sleeman, D H Ontologies Ontologies are important components of web-based applications. While the Web makes an increasing number of ontologies widely available for applications, how to discover ontologies in the Web becomes a more challenging issue. Existing approaches are mainly based on keywords and metadata information of ontologies, rather than semantic entailments of ontologies. In this paper, we present a Semantic Web engine, called ONTOSEARCH2, which searches and queries Web ontologies by creating and storing a copy of ontologies in a tractable description logic. ONTOSEARCH2 allows formal querying of its repository, including both the structures and instances of ontologies, using the SPARQL query language. Furthermore, this paper reports on preliminary, but encouraging, benchmark results which compare ONTOSEARCH2’s response times on a number of queries with those of existing knowledge base management systems. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/586/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000586/01/ONTOSEARCH2%20-%20IADIS%20paper.pdf

oai:aktors.org:587 2007-03-01

Assisting domain experts to formulate & solve constraint satisfaction problems Sleeman, D Chalmers, S Knowledge acquisition Constraint satisfaction is a powerful approach to solving a wide class of problems. However, as many non-experts have problems formulating tasks as Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs), we have built a number of interfaces for particular kinds of CSPs, including crypt-arithmetic problems, map-colouring problems, and scheduling tasks, which ask highly focused questions of the user, c.f., the earlier MOLE/MORE, and SALT knowledge acquisition systems. Information from each of these interfaces is then transformed initially into a structured format which is semantic web compliant and is secondly transformed into the format required by the generic Constraint satisfaction problem solver. When this problem solver is run, the user is either provided with solution(s) or feedback that the problem is underspecified (when many solutions are feasible) or over-specified (when no solution is possible). Effectively the system has 3 distinct phases, namely; information capture, transformation of the information to that suitable for the standard problem solver, and thirdly the solving and user feedback phase. We are planning to analyse in detail a greater range of the CSP tasks, and to produce further UIs to support these tasks. Secondly, we plan to exploit the existence of the intermediary representation which is semantic web compliant, by enhancing the information about tasks with relevant information available from the semantic web. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/587/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000587/01/ekaw2006.pdf

oai:aktors.org:588 2007-03-01

CleanONTO: Evaluating Taxonomic Relationships in Ontologies Sleeman, D Reul, Q H Ontologies Consistent ontologies are vital for the growth of the Semantic Web. We describe and appraise the OntoClean methodology and the different implementations available to evaluate taxonomic relationships in ontologies. We propose a new system, CleanONTO, which uses definitions to describe each concept, where definitions are paths from the concept to the root node of the ontology. In the current study, these definitions (paths) have been extracted from WordNet. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/588/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000588/01/CleanONTO.pdf

oai:aktors.org:589 2007-03-01

The role of ontologies in creating & maintaining corporate knowledge: a case study from the aero industry Sleeman, D Ajit, S Fowler, D W Knott, D Ontologies Knowledge maintenance The Designers’ Workbench is a system, developed to support designers in large organizations, such as Rolls-Royce, by making sure that the design is consistent with the specification for the particular design as well as with the company’s design rule book(s). The evolving design is described against a jet engine ontology. Currently, to capture the constraint information, a domain expert (design engineer) has to work with a knowledge engineer to identify the constraints, and it is then the task of the knowledge engineer to encode these into the Workbench’s knowledge base (KB). This is an error prone and time consuming task. It is highly desirable to relieve the knowledge engineer of this task, and so we have developed a tool, ConEditor+ that enables domain experts themselves to capture and maintain these constraints. The tool allows the user to combine selected entities from the domain ontology with keywords and operators of a constraint language to form a constraint expression. Further, we hypothesize that to apply constraints appropriately, it is necessary to understand the context in which each constraint is applicable. We refer to this as “application conditions”. We show that an explicit representation of application conditions, in a machine interpretable format, along with the constraints and the domain ontology can be used to support the verification and maintenance of constraints. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/589/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000589/01/Derekpaper-cameraReady-submitted.pdf

oai:aktors.org:590 2007-03-01

Reuse: Revisiting Sisyphus-VT Sleeman, D Runchie, T Gray, P Knowledge reuse Reuse has long been a major goal of the Knowledge Engineering community. The focus of this paper is the reuse of domain knowledge acquired for an initial problem solver, with a further problem solver. For our analysis we chose a knowledge base system written in CLIPS based on the propose-andrevise (PnR) problem solver, and which had a lift/elevator knowledge base (KB). Given the nature of the problem solver, the KB contained 4 components, namely an ontology, procedural statements which specify how the artifact, the lift, could be enhanced/modified, a set of constraints to be satisfied, and a set of fixes to be applied when constraint violations occurred. These 4 components were first extracted manually, and were used with both an Excel spreadsheet and a constraint problem solver (ECLiPSe) to solve a range of tasks. The next phase was to implement ExtrAKTor which extracts the same 4 knowledge sources virtually automatically from the CLIPS knowledge base (held by Protégé), and transforms these so that they are usable with a number of problem solvers. To date Excel & ECLiPSe have been selected, and again we have demonstrated that the resulting systems are able to solve a variety of lift configuration tasks. This is in contrast to earlier work which produced abstract formulations of the problem but which were unable to perform reuse of actual knowledge bases. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/590/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000590/01/DerekEKAW-2006-TrevorR-etal.pdf

oai:aktors.org:593 2007-03-08

Memories for Life: A Review of the Science and Technology O'Hara, Dr Kieron Morris, Prof Richard Shadbolt, Prof Nigel Hitch, Prof Graham J. Hall, Prof Wendy Beagrie, Dr Neil Knowledge retrieval Knowledge maintenance This paper discusses scientific, social and technological aspects of memory. Recent developments in our understanding of memory processes and mechanisms, and their digital implementation, have placed the encoding, storage, management and retrieval of information at the forefront of several fields of research. At the same time, the divisions between the biological, physical and the digital worlds seem to be dissolving. Hence, opportunities for interdisciplinary research into memory are being created, between the life sciences, social sciences and physical sciences. Such research may benefit from immediate application into information management technology as a testbed. The paper describes one initiative, memories for life, as a potential common problem space for the various interested disciplines. 2006-04-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/593/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/593/01/M4L_Interface_oharaetal_final_version.pdf

oai:aktors.org:594 2007-03-08

A Framework for Web Science Berners-Lee, Prof Tim Hall, Prof Wendy Hendler, Prof James A. O'Hara, Dr Kieron Shadbolt, Prof Nigel Weitzner, Prof Daniel J. Knowledge reuse Knowledge retrieval Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing Knowledge modelling Knowledge maintenance This paper sets out a series of approaches to the analysis and synthesis of the World Wide Web, and other web-like information structures. A comprehensive set of research questions is outlined, together with a sub-disciplinary breakdown, emphasising the multi-faceted nature of the Web, and the multi-disciplinary nature of its study and development. These questions and approaches together set out an agenda for Web Science, the science of decentralised information systems. Web Science is required both as a way to understand the Web, and as a way to focus its development on key communicational and representational requirements. The paper surveys central engineering issues, such as the development of the Semantic Web, Web services and P2P. Analytic approaches to discover the Web’s topology, or its graph-like structures, are examined. Finally, the Web as a technology is essentially socially embedded; therefore various issues and requirements for Web use and governance are also reviewed. 2006-01-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/594/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/594/01/1800000001.pdf

oai:aktors.org:595 2007-03-08

Interpretations of Ontologies for Breast Cancer Dasmahapatra, Dr Srinandan O'Hara, Dr Kieron Knowledge modelling There are increasing efforts directed at providing formal frameworks to consolidate the widening net of terms and relations used in medical practice. While there are many reasons for this, the need for standardisation of protocol and terminology is critical, not only for the provision of uniform levels of health care, but also to facilitate medical science research. In the domain of breast cancer pathology, a summary of current practice by the World Health Organisation states that the variability of the evidence archive (inconsistencies in describing microscopic appearances of phenomena, different diagnostic thresholds for working pathologists) is chief among the barriers to the medical understanding of the symptoms and development of early cancers. Such variability is acknowledged across specialist fields of medicine, motivating standardisation of terminologies for reporting medical practice. The desideratum of making these standards machine-readable has led to their formalisation as ontologies. Ontologies are computational artefacts designed to provide representations of a domain of interest. Thus, the representation must be a formal description so that it can be encoded, and reused, allowing navigation of the key concepts recorded and retrieval of information indexed against it. This brings the required standardisation by offering a set of labelling options to record observations and events encountered by medical professionals. Given the twin goals of ontologies -- representation and standardisation -- this paper will consider the key question of their design in the context of the use by experts, of information handling applications built around them. We build on our experience in developing ontologies for decision support software in the area of breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. We will also examine, from this perspective, the suggestion offered in the literature that a set of metaphysically motivated questions should form the basis of ontology building as guarantors of fidelity to reality. We find that ontologies intended to support medical practice can only be understood within the context of their intended use. The declarative framework within which they are encoded generates the hope that their meaning transcends the specific application context. We show, however, that these declarative statements are to be understood as end products of chains of procedural engagements between humans, materials and communitarian norms. It is only when this scaffolding that brings this representation into existence becomes routine and consensual (within the community that exchanges information indexed against it) that the concepts stand in for physiological states with independent dynamics. However, as the state of biomedical knowledge is always in a state of flux, and different institutions and practitioners may be out of sync with respect to such modifications, the concepts embedded in the ontologies are constantly subject to reinterpretation within the context of specific institutional practices. Given the fragmentation of the patient’s body when viewed through various specialised lenses, ontologies can provide placeholders for co-ordinating disparate viewpoints to provide suitable medical interventions. The extent to which such interventions reflect any underlying reality, as manifest in measures of their efficacy, is closely wrapped up in the regulatory apparatus of protocol-guided consensus making. The value of ontologies lies in their reflection of, and support for, the sense-making activities that constitute expertise, not in their transparent access to a metaphysical reality. 2006-01-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/595/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/595/01/tripleC4(2)_Dasmahapatra_OHara.pdf

oai:aktors.org:596 2007-03-08

Informed Deliberation during Norm-Governed Practical Reasoning Kollingbaum, M J Norman, T J Knowledge modelling A norm-governed agent takes social norms into account in its practical reasoning. Such norms characterise its role within a specific organisational context. By adopting a role, the agent commits to fulfil and adhere to the social norms associated with that role. These com- mitments require the agent to act in a way that does not violate any of its prohibitions or obligations. In adopting different sets of norms, an agent may experience conflicts between these norms as well as in- consistencies between possible actions for fulfilling its obligations and its currently adopted set of norms. In order to resolve such problems, it must be informed about conflicts and inconsistencies. The NoA architecture for norm-governed agents implements a computationally efficient mech- anism for identifying and indicating such problems – possible candidates for action are assigned a specific label that contains cross-referenced in- formation of actions and norms. As actions are indicated as problematic and not simply filtered out, the agent can still choose to either act accord- ing to its norms or against them. The labelling mechanism presented in this paper is therefore a critical step towards enabling an agent to reason about norm violations – the agent becomes norm-autonomous. 2006-01-01 Book Chapter http://eprints.aktors.org/596/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000596/01/anirem2005.pdf

oai:aktors.org:597 2007-03-08

Engineering Organisation-Oriented Software Kollingbaum, M J Norman, T J Mehandjiev, N Brown, K Knowledge modelling The conventional ways of building software are accepted to produce rigid systems that impede the processes of change typical for contemporary organisations. In this paper, we propose that software can be made more adaptable and tuned to the needs of changing organisations, if it is built using organisation-inspired principles and software structures such as Virtual Organisations, roles and norms. Agent-based software engineering is already using these principles, and we extend the state of the art in that domain by proposing an "open systems" approach, where agents can join and leave Virtual Organisations at will, taking on different roles as needed. Reasoning on organisational roles and norms is facilitated by formalised contract templates and automatic con ict resolution strategies. In terms of overall lifecycle, a system is initiated to satisfy a set of formalised requirements. Agents respond to bids for joining a Virtual Organisation, where each bid is for a contract-based coalition. In this paper, we describe our approach and outline a set of research challenges. 2006-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/597/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000597/01/Wiser03-Kollingbaum.pdf

oai:aktors.org:599 2007-03-07

Knowledge Management Support for Enterprise Distributed Systems Chen-Burger, Dr. Yun-Heh Kalfoglou, Dr. Yannis Knowledge reuse Knowledge acquisition Ontologies Knowledge publishing Knowledge modelling The era we are living in is characterised by an unprecedented explosion of information that is digitized and available to large audiences through online, distributed and open-ended environments. Presented with it are also opportunities to exploit this information meaningfully and benefiting from it. Modern organisations have to quickly adapt to this new phenomenon: software applications, database and expert systems that were designed and run by a closed group of software and knowledge engineers who had centralised control over the entire lifecycle of IT artefacts seem to be old practice today. Moreover, the distributed nature of IT systems has experienced a dramatic explosion with the arrival and generalised use of the Internet and its associated technologies – hypertext and XML based documents, online databases, terminological repositories, Web services, blogs - which continually challenge the traditional roles of IT in our society. To address these problems, we investigate the important roles played by human, Organisational Memory (OM) and business processes in an organisation and how they relate to each other. We also speculate that formal logical methods, such as the semantic-based ADP (Actor, Data and Process-oriented) framework proposed here, can interface these important organisational components to help improve the utilisation of an OM, thus lead to organisational performance enhancements. We start our exploration of KM support for enterprise distributed systems by focussing on a core component of many enterprises: the Organisational Memory (OM). 2007-01-01 Book Chapter http://eprints.aktors.org/599/ msword http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000599/01/KM_Support_for_ES-publish.doc

oai:aktors.org:600 2007-03-08

Semantic-Based Workflow Composition for Video Processing in the Grid Knowledge reuse Knowledge acquisition Ontologies Knowledge publishing Knowledge modelling We outline the problem of automatic video processing for the EcoGrid. This poses many challenges as there is a vast amount of raw data that need to be analysed effectively and efficiently. Furthermore, ecological data are subject to environmental changes and are exception-prone, hence their qualities vary. As manual processing by humans can be time and labour intensive, video and image processing tools can go some way to addressing such problems since they are computationally fast. However, most video analyses that utilise a combination of these tools are still done manually. We propose a semantic-based hybrid workflow composition method that strives to provide automation to speed up this process. The requirements for such a system are presented, whereby we aim for a solution that best satisfies these requirements and that overcomes the limitations of existing Grid workflow composition systems. 2006-01-01 Conference Proceedings http://eprints.aktors.org/600/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000600/01/2006-1218-Gaya-WI-HongKong-SemWorkflowGrid.pdf

oai:aktors.org:601 2007-03-08

Translating a Typical Business Process Modelling Language to a Web Services Ontology through Lightweight Mapping Nadarajan, Gayathri Chen-Burger, Dr. Yun-Heh Knowledge reuse Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing Knowledge modelling Bridging the gap between Enterprise Modelling methods and Semantic Web services is an important yet challenging task. For organisations with business goals, the automation of business processes as Web services is increasingly important, especially with many business transactions taking place within the Web today. Taking one approach to address this problem, a lightweight mapping between Fundamental Business Process Modelling Language (FBPML) and the Web Services Ontology (OWL-S) is outlined. The framework entails a data model translation and a process model translation via the use of ontologies and mapping principles. Several working examples of the process model translations are presented together with an implementation of an automated translator. FBPML constructs and process models that could not be translated to OWL-S equivalents highlight the differences between the languages of the two domains. It also implies that evolving Semantic Web technologies, in particular OWL-S, are not adequate for all service modelling needs and could thus benefit from the more traditional and mature BPM methods. On a more interesting note, this is effectively the first step towards enabling a semantic-based business workflow system. 2007-01-01 Journal (Paginated) http://eprints.aktors.org/601/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/secure/00000601/01/2006-1218-Gaya-IEE-journal-ontoMapping-sub.pdf

oai:aktors.org:602 2007-04-30

The Application of Advanced Knowledge Technologies for Emergency Response Potter, Stephen Kalfoglou, Yannis Alani, Harith Bachler, Michelle Buckingham Shum, Simon Carvalho, Rodrigo Chakravarthy, Ajay Chalmers, Stuart Chapman, Sam Hu, Bo Preece, Alun Shadbolt, Nigel Tate, Austin Tuffield, Mischa AKT Showcase Papers Making sense of the current state of an emergency and of the response to it is vital if appropriate decisions are to be made. This task involves the acquisition, interpretation and management of information. In this paper we present an integrated system that applies recent ideas and technologies from the fields of Artificial Intelligence and semantic web research to support sense- and decision-making at the tactical response level, and demonstrate it with reference to a hypothetical large-scale emergency scenario. We offer no end-user evaluation of this system; rather, we intend that it should serve as a visionary demonstration of the potential of these technologies for emergency response. 2007-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/602/ msword http://eprints.aktors.org/602/01/2007-iscram-akt-e-response-large-figures.doc pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/602/02/2007-iscram-akt-e-response-large-figures.pdf

oai:aktors.org:603 2007-05-04

Formalization, User Strategy and Interaction Design: Users' Behaviour with Discourse Tagging Semantics Sereno, Bertrand Buckingham Shum, Simon Motta, Enrico Knowledge reuse Knowledge acquisition Knowledge publishing Knowledge modelling When authors publish their interpretations of the ideas, opinions, claims or rebuttals in the literature, they are drawing on a repertoire of well understood moves, contributing to an extended discourse. Readers also bring their own perspective to documents, interpreting them in the light of their own research interests, and initiating, for instance, new connections that may not have been intended by authors. Collaborative, social, tagging holds promise as an approach to mediating these processes via the Web, but may lack the discourse dimension that is fundamental to the articulation of interpretations. We therefore take a hybrid semiformal approach to add structure to freeform folksonomies. Our experience demonstrates that this particular brand of tagging requires tools designed specifically for this sensemaking task by providing enough support to initiate the annotation, while not overwhelming users with suggestions. We describe a tool called ClaimSpotter that aims at supporting this tradeoff, through a novel combination of system-initiated tag recommendations, Web interface design, and an expanded conception of how tags can be both expressed, and semantically linked. We then report a detailed study which analysed the tool’s usability and the tag structures created, contributing to our understanding of the implications of adding structure to collaborative tagging. 2007-01-01 Conference Paper http://eprints.aktors.org/603/ pdf http://eprints.aktors.org/603/01/WWW_CKC2007_Sereno_Final.pdf