Science and Technology Studies Commons^™

A Transformative Concept: From Data Being Passive Objects To Data Being Active Subjects, Hans-Peter Plag, Shelley-Ann Jules-Plag

OES Faculty Publications

The exploitation of potential societal benefits of Earth observations is hampered by users having to engage in often tedious processes to discover data and extract information and knowledge. A concept is introduced for a transition from the current perception of data as passive objects (DPO) to a new perception of data as active subjects (DAS). This transition would greatly increase data usage and exploitation, and support the extraction of knowledge from data products. Enabling the data subjects to actively reach out to potential users would revolutionize data dissemination and sharing and facilitate collaboration in user communities. The three core elements …

Ranking Complex Relationships On The Semantic Web, Boanerges Aleman-Meza, Christian Halaschek-Wiener, I. Budak Arpinar, Cartic Ramakrishnan, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Industry and academia are both focusing their attention on information retrieval over semantic metadata extracted from the Web, and it is increasingly possible to analyze such metadata to discover interesting relationships. However, just as document ranking is a critical component in today's search engines, the ranking of complex relationships would be an important component in tomorrow's semantic Web engines. This article presents a flexible ranking approach to identify interesting and relevant relationships in the semantic Web. The authors demonstrate the scheme's effectiveness through an empirical evaluation over a real-world data set.

Logical Information Modeling Of Web-Accessible Heterogeneous Digital Assets, Kshitij Shah, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper introduces the MREF framework for representing and correlating information at a higher semantic level than is possible with Web-based information systems today. The role that metadata plays in this framework is described, together with a metadata based infrastructure to support our media independent information correlation paradigm. To keep it consistent with evolving standards, broader acceptance and ease of implementation, MREF abstraction is structured on top of RDF and XML. Its central role in the context of the InfoQuilt system, for exploiting heterogeneous digital media using a federated and scalable architecture, is briefly described.

Zebra Image Access System, Srilekha Mudumbai, Kshitij Shah, Amit P. Sheth, Krishnan Parasuraman, Clemens Bertram

Kno.e.sis Publications

The ZEBRA system, which is part of the VisualHarness platform for managing heterogeneous data, supports three types of access to distributed image repositories: keyword based, attribute based, and image content based. A user can assign different weights (relative importance) to each of the three types, and within the last type of access, to each of the image properties. The image based access component (IBAC) supports access based on computable image properties such as those based on spatial domain, frequency domain or statistical and structural analysis. However, it uses a novel black box approach of utilizing a Visual Information Retrieval (VIR) …

Managing Multiple Information Sources Through Ontologies: Relationship Between Vocabulary Heterogeneity And Loss Of Information, Eduardo Mena, Vipul Kashyap, Arantza Illarramendi, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

The ability to deal with a huge number of independent and heterogeneous repositories is the most critical problem in Global Information Systems. One approach to enable efficient query processing is by utilizing semantic descriptions (organized as ontologies) of such repositories whenever available.

In this context semantic relationships among ontologies can be used Query Processors. Three kind of relationships are considered: synonyms and hypernyms. Using synonyms the semantic of the query is preserved; however, when synonyms are not available and hypernyms or hyponyms are used there exists some loss of information that must be measured.