OS and Networks Commons^™

The Semantic Web In One Day, York Sure, Pascal Hitzler, Andreas Eberhart, Rudi Studer

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

To gain momentum, technologies for building private semantic Webs or parts of the World Wide semantic Web must become a commodity and easy to integrate. To determine just how far semantic Web technologies have come, we wanted to create a snapshot of what you could do by applying and assembling existing semantic Web technologies - in one day.

Taxaminer: An Experimentation Framework For Automated Taxonomy Bootstrapping, Vipul Kashyap, Cartic Ramakrishnan, Christopher Thomas, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Construction of domain ontologies on the semantic web is a human and resource intensive process, efforts to reduce which are crucial for the Semantic Web to scale. We present a framework for automated taxonomy construction, that involves: (a) generation of a cluster hierarchy from a document corpus using statistical clustering and NLP techniques; (b) extraction of a topic hierarchy from this cluster hierarchy; and (c) assignment of labels to nodes in the topic hierarchy. Metrics for estimating topic hierarchy quality and parameters of an experimentation framework are identified. MEDLINE was the document corpus and MeSH thesaurus was the gold standard.

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.

Variational Bayesian Image Modelling, Li Chen, Feng Jiao, Dale Schuurmans, Shaojun Wang

Kno.e.sis Publications

We present a variational Bayesian framework for performing inference, density estimation and model selection in a special class of graphical models—Hidden Markov Random Fields (HMRFs). HMRFs are particularly well suited to image modelling and in this paper, we apply them to the problem of image segmentation. Unfortunately, HMRFs are notoriously hard to train and use because the exact inference problems they create are intractable. Our main contribution is to introduce an efficient variational approach for performing approximate inference of the Bayesian formulation of HMRFs, which we can then apply to the density estimation and model selection problems that arise when …

Framework For Semantic Web Process Composition, Kaarthik Sivashanmugam, John A. Miller, Amit P. Sheth, Kunal Verma

Kno.e.sis Publications

Web services have the potential to revolutionize e-commerce by enabling businesses to interact with each other on the fly. To date, however, Web processes using Web services have been created mostly at the syntactic level. Current composition standards focus on building processes based on the interface description of the participating services. This rigid approach, with its strong coupling between the process and the interface of the participating services, does not allow businesses to dynamically change partners and services. As shown in this article, Web process composition techniques can be enhanced by using semantic process templates to capture the semantic requirements …

Tontogen: A Synthetic Data Set Generator For Semantic Web Applications, Matthew Perry

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

From Semantic Search & Integration To Analytics, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Semantics is seen as the key ingredient in the next phase of the Web infrastructure as well as the next generation of enterprise content management. Ontology is the centerpiece of the most prevalent semantic technologies and provides the basis of representing, acquiring, and utilizing knowledge. With the availability of several commercial products and many research tools, specifications and increasing adoption of Semantic Web standards such as RDF for metadata and OWL for ontology representation, ontology-driven techniques and systems have already enabled a new generation of industry strength semantic applications. In particular, Semagix's Freedom has powered applications in leading verticals such …

A Brief History Of Bioperl, Colin Crossman, Arti K. Rai

Faculty Scholarship

Large-scale open-source projects face a litany of pitfalls and difficulties. Problems of contribution quality, credit for contributions, project coordination, funding, and mission-creep are ever-present. Of these, long-term funding and project coordination can interact to form a particularly difficult problem for open-source projects in an academic environment.

BioPerl was chosen as an example of a successful academic open-source project. Several of the roadblocks and hurdles encountered and overcome in the development of BioPerl are examined through the telling of the history of the project. Along the way, key points of open-source law are explained, such as license choice and copyright.

The …

The "Best K" For Entropy-Based Categorical Data Clustering, Keke Chen, Ling Liu

Kno.e.sis Publications

With the growing demand on cluster analysis for categorical data, a handful of categorical clustering algorithms have been developed. Surprisingly, to our knowledge, none has satisfactorily addressed the important problem for categorical clustering – how can we determine the best K number of clusters for a categorical dataset? Since categorical data does not have the inherent distance function as the similarity measure, traditional cluster validation techniques based on the geometry shape and density distribution cannot be applied to answer this question. In this paper, we investigate the entropy property of the categorical data and propose a BkPlot method for determining …

A Uniform Approach To Logic Programming Semantics, Pascal Hitzler, Matthias Wendt

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Part of the theory of programming and nonymonotonic reasoning concerns the study of fixed-point semantics for these paradigms. Several different semantics have been proposed during the last two decades, and some have been more successful and acknowledged than others. The rationales behind those various semantics have been manifold, depending on one's point of view, which may be that of a programmer or inspired by commonsense reasoning, and consequently the constructions which lead to these semantics are technically very diverse, and the exact relationships between them have not yet been fully understood. In this paper, we present a conceptually new method, …

Dlp - An Introduction, Denny Vrandecic, Pascal Hitzler, Rudi Studer

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

DLP - Description Logic Programs - is the name for the common language that is able to integrate knowledge bases described in Description Logic with Logic Programs. In this introduction, we offer a very short overview of DLP, the motivation for it, the benefits it offers and how to use it.

Glyde - An Expressive Xml Standard For The Representation Of Glycan, Satya S. Sahoo, Christopher Thomas, Amit P. Sheth, Cory Andrew Henson, William S. York

Kno.e.sis Publications

The amount of glycomics data being generated is rapidly increasing as a result of improvements in analytical and computational methods. Correlation and analysis of this large, distributed data set requires an extensible and flexible representational standard that is also ‘understood’ by a wide range of software applications. An XML-based data representation standard that faithfully captures essential structural details of a glycan moiety along with additional information (such as data provenance) to aid the interpretation and usage of glycan data, will facilitate the exchange of glycomics data across the scientific community. To meet this need, we introduce GLYcan Data Exchange (GLYDE) …

Semantic Web & Semantic Web Services: Applications In Healthcare And Scientific Research, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Discovering Informative Subgraphs In Rdf Graphs, William H. Milnor, Cartic Ramakrishnan, Matthew Perry, Amit P. Sheth, John A. Miller, Krzysztof Kochut

Kno.e.sis Publications

Discovering patterns in graphs has long been an area of interest. In most contemporary approaches to such pattern discovery either quantitative anomalies or frequency of substructure is used to measure the interestingness of a pattern. In this paper we address the issue of discovering informative sub-graphs within RDF graphs. We motivate our work with an example related to Semantic Search. A user might pose a question of the form: ' What are the most relevant ways in which entity X is related to entity Y?' the response to which is a subgraph connecting X to Y. Relevance of the …

Semantic Web Technology In Support Of Bioinformatics For Glycan Expression, Amit P. Sheth, William S. York, Christopher Thomas, Meenakshi Nagarajan, John A. Miller, Krzysztof Kochut, Satya S. Sahoo, Xiaochuan Yi

Kno.e.sis Publications

Due to the complexity of biological systems, interpretation of data obtained by a single experimental approach can often be interpreted only if viewed from a broader context, taking into account the information obtained by many diverse techniques. The vast amount of interpreted experimental data that is now available via the internet opens the possibility of collecting the relevant pieces of information that will enable scientists to form hypotheses based on the integration of this diverse information. However, the sheer volume of data that is available makes it very difficult to select the information necessary to make a coherent model of …

Lsdis: Large Scale Distributed Information Systems Lab, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

The LSDIS (Large Scale Distributed Information Systems) lab was established in 1994 with the guidance and direction provided by Dr. Amit P. Sheth with the help of Dr. John A. Miller and Dr. Krzysztof J. Kochut. In 1998 this faculty group was further strengthened by the addition of Dr. Ismailcem B. Arpinar. LSDIS is the largest research group in Computer Science at UGA and one of the strongest in its area. During Fall 2004, it is funding 15 students (majority of them PhD), and has one research staff.

Over the years LSDIS has been actively involved in research projects in …

Logic Programs, Iterated Function Systems, And Recurrent Radial Basis Function Networks, Sebastian Bader, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Graphs of the single-step operator for first-order logic programs—displayed in the real plane—exhibit self-similar structures known from topological dynamics, i.e., they appear to be fractals, or more precisely, attractors of iterated function systems. We show that this observation can be made mathematically precise. In particular, we give conditions which ensure that those graphs coincide with attractors of suitably chosen iterated function systems, and conditions which allow the approximation of such graphs by iterated function systems or by fractal interpolation. Since iterated function systems can easily be encoded using recurrent radial basis function networks, we eventually obtain connectionist systems which …

Enhancing Web Services Description And Discovery To Facilitate Composition, Preeda Rajasekaran, John A. Miller, Kunal Verma, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Web services are in the midst of making the transition from being a promising technology to being widely used in the industry. However, most efforts to use Web services have been manual, thus slowing down the ever changing and dynamic businesses of today. In this paper, we contend that more expressive descriptions of Web services will lead to greater automation and thus provide more agility to businesses. We present the METEOR-S front-end tools for source code annotation and semantic Web service description generation. We also present WSDL-S, a language created for incorporating semantic descriptions in the industry wide accepted WSDL, …

Workflow Management Systems And Erp Systems: Differences, Commonalities, And Applications, Jorge Cardoso, Robert P. Bostrom, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Two important classes of information systems, Workflow Management Systems(WfMSs) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, have been used to support e-business process redesign, integration, and management. While both technologies can help with business process automation, data transfer, and information sharing, the technological approach and features of solutions provided by WfMS and ERP are different. Currently, there is a lack of understanding of these two classes of information systems in the industry and academia, thus hindering their effective applications. In this paper, we present a comprehensive comparison between these two classes of systems. We discuss how the two types of systems …

Learning Mixture Models With The Regularized Latent Maximum Entropy Principle, Shaojun Wang, Dale Schuurmans, Fuchun Peng, Yunxin Zhao

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper presents a new approach to estimating mixture models based on a recent inference principle we have proposed: the latent maximum entropy principle (LME). LME is different from Jaynes' maximum entropy principle, standard maximum likelihood, and maximum a posteriori probability estimation. We demonstrate the LME principle by deriving new algorithms for mixture model estimation, and show how robust new variants of the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm can be developed. We show that a regularized version of LME (RLME), is effective at estimating mixture models. It generally yields better results than plain LME, which in turn is often better than …

Discovery Of Web Services In A Federated Registry Environment, Kaarthik Sivashanmugam, Kunal Verma, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

The potential of a large scale growth of private and semi-private registries is creating the need for an infrastructure which can support discovery and publication over a group of autonomous registries. Recent versions of UDDI have made changes to accommodate interactions between distributed registries. In this paper, we discuss METEOR-S Web service Discovery Infrastructure, which provides an ontology-based infrastructure to access a group of registries that are divided based on business domains and grouped into federations. We also discuss how Web service discovery is carried out within a federation.

Sweto: Large-Scale Semantic Web Test-Bed, Boanerges Aleman-Meza, Chris Halaschek, Amit P. Sheth, I. Budak Arpinar, Gowtham Sannapareddy

Kno.e.sis Publications

The emergent Semantic Web community needs a common infrastructure for testing the scalability and quality of new techniques and software which use machine processable data. Since ontologies are a centerpiece of most approaches, we believe that for an accurate evaluation of tools for quality, scalability and performance, the research community needs a freely available ontology with a large description base. If the use of tools is to be for advanced semantic applications, such as those in business intelligence and national security, then instances in the knowledge base should be highly interconnected. Thus, we propose and describe a Semantic WEb Technology …

Semantic Web Technology Evaluation Ontology (Sweto): A Test Bed For Evaluating Tools And Benchmarking Applications, Boanerges Aleman-Meza, Amit P. Sheth, I. Budak Arpinar, Chris Halaschek

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Meteor-S Web Service Annotation Framework, Abhijit A. Patil, Swapna A. Oundhakar, Amit P. Sheth, Kunal Verma

Kno.e.sis Publications

The World Wide Web is emerging not only as an infrastructure for data, but also for a broader variety of resources that are increasingly being made available as Web services. Relevant current standards like UDDI, WSDL, and SOAP are in their fledgling years and form the basis of making Web services a workable and broadly adopted technology. However, realizing the fuller scope of the promise of Web services and associated service oriented architecture will requite further technological advances in the areas of service interoperation, service discovery, service composition, and process orchestration. Semantics, especially as supported by the use of ontologies, …

Sempl: A Semantic Portal, Matthew Perry, Eric Stiles

Kno.e.sis Publications

Semantic Web technology is intended for the retrieval, collection, and analysis of meaningful data with significant automation afforded by machine understandability of data [1]. As one illustration of semantic web technology in action, we present SEMPL, a semantic web portal for the Large Scale Distributed Information Systems lab (LSDIS) at the University of Georgia. SEMPL, which is powered by a state of the art commercial system, Semagix Freedom [7], uses an ontology-driven approach to provide semantic browsing, linking, and contextual querying of content within the portal. By using the ontology based information integration technique, SEMPL can specify the context of …

Indexing Genomic Databases, Gina Cooper, Michael L. Raymer, Travis E. Doom, Dan E. Krane, Natsuhiko Futamura

Kno.e.sis Publications

Current biological sequence comparison tools utilize full database searches to find approximate matches between a database and a query. A new approach to sequence comparisons can be performed by indexing the database using a novel indexing scheme. An indexed scheme can immediately eliminate highly mismatched sequences thereby improving performance and accuracy. iBlast is proposed as an indexed version of BLAST. In its initial implementation, iBlast uses a sequence-based index to catalog genomic databases in an NCR Teradata RDBMS. Several types of indexes and querying methods are explored to determine the most efficient solution utilizing the parallel nature of the Teradata …

Quality Of Service For Workflows And Web Service Processes, Jorge Cardoso, Amit P. Sheth, John A. Miller, Jonathan Arnold, Krzysztof J. Kochut

Kno.e.sis Publications

Workflow management systems (WfMSs) have been used to support various types of business processes for more than a decade now. In workflows or Web processes for e-commerce and Web service applications, suppliers and customers define a binding agreement or contract between the two parties, specifying quality of service (QoS) items such as products or services to be delivered, deadlines, quality of products, and cost of services. The management of QoS metrics directly impacts the success of organizations participating in e-commerce. Therefore, when services or products are created or managed using workflows or Web processes, the underlying workflow engine must accept …

Early Work In Database Research On Schema Mapping/Merging/Transformation, Semantic Heterogeneity, And Use Of Ontology And Description Logics For Schematic And Semantic Integration, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Exploiting Syntactic, Semantic And Lexical Regularities In Language Modeling Via Directed Markov Random Fields, Shaojun Wang, Shaomin Wang, Russell Greiner, Dale Schuurmans, Li Cheng

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

On The Decidability Of The Termination Problem Of Active Database Systems, James Bailey, Guozhu Dong, K. Rammamohanarao

Kno.e.sis Publications

Active database systems enhance the functionality of traditional databases through the use of active rules or ‘triggers’. One of the principal analysis questions for such systems is that of termination—is it possible for the rules to recursively activate one another indefinitely, given an initial triggering event. In this paper, we study the decidability of the termination problem, our aim being to delimit the boundary between the decidable and the undecidable. We present results for two broad types of variations, variations in rule syntax and variations in meta level features. Within each of these, we identify members close to the …