Science and Technology Studies Commons^™

Empowering Translational Research Using Semantic Web Technologies, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

National Security: The Social Implications Of The Politics Of Transparency, M G. Michael, Katina Michael

M. G. Michael

This special issue of Prometheus is dedicated to the theme of the Social Implications of National Security Measures on Citizens and Business. National security measures can be defined as those technical and non-technical measures that have been initiated as a means to curb breaches in national security, irrespective of whether these might occur by nationals or aliens in or from outside the sovereign state. National security includes such government priorities as maintaining border control, safeguarding against pandemic outbreaks, preventing acts of terror, and even discovering and eliminating identification fraud. Governments worldwide are beginning to implement information and communication security techniques …

Historical Lessons On Id Technology And The Consequences Of An Unchecked Trajectory, Katina Michael, M G. Michael

M. G. Michael

This paper traces the use of identification techniques throughout the ages and focuses on the growing importance of citizen identification by governments. The paper uses a historical approach beginning with manual techniques such as tattoos, through to more recent automatic identification (auto-ID) techniques such as smart cards and biometrics. The findings indicate that identification techniques born for one purpose have gradually found their way into alternate applications, and in some instances have been misused altogether. There is also strong evidence to suggest that governments are moving away from localized identification schemes to more global systems based on universal lifetime identifiers.

Privacy, Value And Control Issues In Four Mobile Business Applications, Benjamin D. Renegar, Katina Michael, M G. Michael

M. G. Michael

This paper presents four case studies that explore the adoption and acceptance of mobile technologies and services within the context of the privacy-value-control (PVC) trichotomy. The technologies studied include: the mobile phone, electronic toll payment tags, e-passports, and loyalty card programs. The study shows that despite the potential barriers to adoption in each of the depicted cases, the applications were embraced with great success soon after their introduction. An understanding of why these mobile innovations succeeded in spite of the concerns surrounding them will serve to help practitioners understand other issues currently plaguing emerging technologies like radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags …

Sa-Rest: Using Semantics To Empower Restful Services And Smashups With Better Interoperability And Mediation, Karthik Gomadam, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Dynamic And Agile Soa Using Sawsdl, Karthik Gomadam, Kunal Verma, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

A Framework To Support Spatial, Temporal And Thematic Analytics Over Semantic Web Data, Matthew Perry, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Spatial and temporal data are critical components in many applications. This is especially true in analytical applications ranging from scientific discovery to national security and criminal investigation. The analytical process often requires uncovering and analyzing complex thematic relationships between disparate people, places and events. Fundamentally new query operators based on the graph structure of Semantic Web data models, such as semantic associations, are proving useful for this purpose. However, these analysis mechanisms are primarily intended for thematic relationships. In this paper, we describe a framework built around the RDF data model for analysis of thematic, spatial and temporal relationships between …

Ws3: International Workshop On Context-Enabled Source And Service Selection, Integration And Adaptation, Quan Z. Sheng, Ullas Nambiar, Amit P. Sheth, Biplav Srivastava, Zakaria Maamr, Said Elnaffar

Kno.e.sis Publications

This write-up provides a summary of the International Workshop on Context enabled Source and Service Selection, Integration and Adaptation (CSSSIA 2008), organized in conjunction with WWW2008, at Beijing, China on April 22nd 2008. We outline the motivation for organizing the work-shop, briefly describe the organizational details and program of the workshop, and summarize each of the papers accepted by the workshop. More information about the workshop can be found at http://www.cs.adelaide.edu.au/∼csssia08/.

Rdb2rdf: Incorporating Domain Semantics In Structured Data, Satya S. Sahoo

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

The New Middle-Class, Technology And Modernity In Seelampur, Sreela Sarkar

National Center for Digital Government

From introduction: My paper studies a globally acclaimed experiment in computer literacy and cultural capital in Seelampur, located on the Delhi-Uttar Pradesh state border. In late 2003, Datamation, a prominent private, Delhi based Information Technology firm, with partial funding from UNESCO and the Delhi state government, established computer literacy and e-commerce development projects in Zaffarabad in Seelampur. Seelampur is a diverse community but like the rest of the area, Zaffarabad is largely a settlement of informal working class Muslims. State violence and dominant middle-class interests have historically colluded to create Seelampur. During the National Emergency years in 1975-1977, residents of …

Artist Ranking Through Analysis Of On-Line Community Comments, Julia Grace, Daniel Gruhl, Kevin Haas, Meenakshi Nagarajan, Christine Robson, Nachiketa Sahoo

Kno.e.sis Publications

We describe an approach to measure the popularity of music tracks, albums and artists by analyzing the comments of music listeners in social networking online communities such as MySpace. This measure of popularity appears to be more accurate than the traditional measure based on album sales figures, as demonstrated by our focus group study. We faced many challenges in our attempt to generate a popularity ranking from the user comments on social networking sites, e.g., broken English sentences, comment spam, etc. We discuss the steps we took to overcome these challenges and describe an end to end system for generating …

Traveling The Semantic Web Through Space, Time, And Theme, Amit P. Sheth, Matthew Perry

Kno.e.sis Publications

In this installment of Semantics and Services, we further develop the idea of spatial, temporal, and thematic (STT) processing of semantic Web data and describe the Web infrastructure needed to support it. Starting from Ramesh Jain's vision of the EventWeb as a view of what's possible with a Web that better accommodates all three dimensions of event-related information (thematic, spatial, and temporal), we outline the architecture needed to support it and current research that aims to realize it.

Semantic Sensor Web, Amit P. Sheth, Cory Andrew Henson

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Approximate Owl Instance Retrieval With Screech, Pascal Hitzler, Markus Krotzsch, Sebastian Rudolph, Tuvshintur Tserendorj

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

With the increasing interest in expressive ontologies for the Semantic Web, it is critical to develop scalable and efficient ontology reasoning techniques that can properly cope with very high data volumes. For certain application domains, approximate reasoning solutions, which trade soundness or completeness for increased reasoning speed, will help to deal with the high computational complexities which state of the art ontology reasoning tools have to face. In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of the SCREECH approach to approximate instance retrieval with OWL ontologies, which is based on the KAON2 algorithms, facilitating a compilation of OWL DL TBoxes …

Semantics And Services Enabled Problem Solving Environment For Trypanosoma Cruzi, Amit P. Sheth, Rick L. Tarleton, Mark Musen, Satya S. Sahoo, Prashant Doshi, Natasha Noy

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Semantic Sensor Web, Cory Andrew Henson

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Semantic Provenance For Escience: Managing The Deluge Of Scientific Data, Satya S. Sahoo, Amit P. Sheth, Cory Andrew Henson

Kno.e.sis Publications

Provenance information in eScience is metadata that's critical to effectively manage the exponentially increasing volumes of scientific data from industrial-scale experiment protocols. Semantic provenance, based on domain-specific provenance ontologies, lets software applications unambiguously interpret data in the correct context. The semantic provenance framework for eScience data comprises expressive provenance information and domain-specific provenance ontologies and applies this information to data management. The authors' "two degrees of separation" approach advocates the creation of high-quality provenance information using specialized services. In contrast to workflow engines generating provenance information as a core functionality, the specialized provenance services are integrated into a scientific workflow …

Learning Expressive Ontologies, Johanna Volker, Peter Haase, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Coherent Well-Founded Model For Hybrid Mknf Knowledge Bases, Matthias Knorr, Jose Julio Alferes, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

With the advent of the Semantic Web, the question becomes important how to best combine open-world based ontology languages, like OWL, with closed-world rules paradigms. One of the most mature proposals for this combination is known as Hybrid MKNF knowledge bases [11], which is based on an adaptation of the stable model semantics to knowledge bases consisting of ontology axioms and rules. In this paper, we propose a well-founded semantics for such knowledge bases which promises to provide better efficiency of reasoning, which is compatible both with the OWL-based semantics and the traditional well-founded semantics for logic programs, and which …

Expressive Tractable Description Logics Based On Sroiq Rules, Markus Krotzsch, Sebastian Rudolph, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

We introduce description logic (DL) rules as a new rule-based formalism for knowledge representation in DLs. As a fragment of the Semantic Web Rule Language SWRL, DL rules allow for a tight integration with DL knowledge bases. In contrast to SWRL, however, the combination of DL rules with expressive description logics remains decidable, and we show that the DL SROIQ - the basis for the ongoing standardisation of OWL 2 - can completely internalise DL rules. On the other hand, DL rules capture many expressive features of SROIQ that are not available in simpler DLs yet. While reasoning in SROIQ …

Cheap Boolean Role Constructors For Description Logics, Sebastian Rudolph, Markus Krotzsch, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

We investigate the possibility of incorporating Boolean role constructors on simple roles into some of today's most popular description logics, focussing on cases where those extensions do not increase complexity of reasoning. We show that the expressive DLs SHOIQ and SROIQ, serving as the logical underpinning of OWL and the forthcoming OWL 2, can accommodate arbitrary Boolean expressions. The prominent OWL-fragment SHIQ can be safely extended by safe role expressions, and the tractable fragments EL++ and DLP retain tractability if extended by conjunction on roles, where in the case of DLP the restriction on role simplicity can even be discarded.

Reasoning In Circumscriptive Alco, Stephan Grimm, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Non-monotonic extensions of description logics (DLs) allow for default and local closed-world reasoning and are an acknowledged desired feature for applications, e.g. in the Semantic Web. A recent approach to such an extension is based on McCarthy's circumscription, which rests on the principle of minimising the extension of selected predicates to locally close off dedicated parts of a domain model. While decidability and complexity results have been established in the literature, no practical algorithmisation for circumscriptive DLs has been proposed so far. In this paper, we present a tableaux calculus that can be used as a sound and complete decision …

Hrests: An Html Microformat For Describing Restful Web Services, Jacek Kopecky, Karthik Gomadam, Tomas Vitvar

Kno.e.sis Publications

The Web 2.0 wave brings, among other aspects, the Programmable Web: increasing numbers of Web sites provide machine-oriented APIs and Web services. However, most APIs are only described with text in HTML documents. The lack of machine-readable API descriptions affects the feasibility of tool support for developers who use these services. We propose a microformat called hRESTS (HTML for RESTful Services) for machine-readable descriptions of Web APIs, backed by a simple service model. The hRESTS microformat describes main aspects of services, such as operations, inputs and outputs. We also present two extensions of hRESTS: SA-REST, which captures the facets of …

Mobile Semantic Computing, Karthik Gomadam, Anupam Joshi, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

We propose to organize a special session on research in the intersection of mobile computing, the Semantic Web and Web services.

This session will examine how the research in these areas can serve as a foundation for new architectural and communication paradigms that can enhance service creation, distribution, discovery, integration and utilization in distributed and ubiquitous environments. Some of the initial areas that our early research have highlighted are :

1. Semantic annotation of data in bandwidth constrained environments such as mobile networks to promote efficient bandwidth utilization
2. Possibilities of using microformats such as RDFa and opportunities that can be explored …

Targeted Content Delivery For Social Media Content, Meenakshi Nagarajan, Kamal Baid, Amit P. Sheth, Shaojun Wang

Kno.e.sis Publications

Spotting contextually relevant keywords is fundamental to effective content suggestions on the Web. In this regard, misspellings, entity variations and off-topic discussions in content from Social Media pose unique challenges. Here, we present an algorithm that assists content delivery systems by identifying contextually relevant keywords and eliminating off-topic keywords. A preliminary user study over data from MySpace and Facebook clearly suggests the usefulness of our work in delivering more targeted content suggestions.

Semantic Sensor Web, Amit P. Sheth, Satya S. Sahoo

Kno.e.sis Publications

Sensors are distributed across the globe leading to an avalanche of data about our environment. It is possible today to utilize networks of sensors to detect and identify a multitude of observations, from simple phenomena to complex events and situations. The lack of integration and communication between these networks, however, often isolates important data streams and intensifies the existing problem of too much data and not enough knowledge. With a view to addressing this problem, the semantic sensor Web (SSW) proposes that sensor data be annotated with semantic metadata that will both increase interoperability and provide contextual information essential for …

Services Mashups: The New Generation Of Web Applications, Djamal Benslimane, Schahram Dustdar, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Web services are becoming a major technology for deploying automated interactions between distributed and heterogeneous applications, and for connecting business processes. Service mashups indicate a way to create new Web applications by combining existing Web resources utilizing data and Web APIs. They facilitate the design and development of novel and modern Web applications based on easy-to-accomplish end-user service compositions.

Semantic Sensor Web, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Unsupervised Discovery Of Compound Entities For Relationship Extraction, Cartic Ramakrishnan, Pablo N. Mendes, Shaojun Wang, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

In this paper we investigate unsupervised population of a biomedical ontology via information extraction from biomedical literature. Relationships in text seldom connect simple entities. We therefore focus on identifying compound entities rather than mentions of simple entities. We present a method based on rules over grammatical dependency structures for unsupervised segmentation of sentences into compound entities and relationships. We complement the rule-based approach with a statistical component that prunes structures with low information content, thereby reducing false positives in the prediction of compound entities, their constituents and relationships. The extraction is manually evaluated with respect to the UMLS Semantic Network …

Ontology Driven Semantic Provenance For Heterogeneous Bionomics Experimental Data, Satya S. Sahoo, Michael L. Raymer, Cory Andrew Henson, Amit P. Sheth, William S. York

Kno.e.sis Publications

Scientific experimental data generated by all the bionomic technologies is characterized by heterogeneity in its representation formats, constituents, and generation processes and, therefore, also in its usage. Using the proteomics domain we demonstrate the important role of provenance information o manage, interpret and analyze experimental data. We present a novel approach that employs an ontology as a knowledge model to automatically create semantic provenance information for high-throughput mass spectrometry (MS) data in the glycoproteomics domain. The Semantic Provenance Annotation of Data in protEomics (SPADE) implementation is based on the ProPreO ontology, a large-process ontology ( ~500 classes, 40 named relationships …