Abstract—An increasing trend toward product development in a collaborative environment has resulted in the use of various software tools to enhance the product design. This requires a meaningful representation and exchange of product data semantics across different application domains. This paper proposes an ontology-based framework to enable such semantic interoperability. A standards-based approach is used to develop a Product Semantic Representation Language (PSRL). Formal description logic (DAML + OIL) is used to encode the PSRL. Mathematical logic and corresponding reasoning is used to determine semantic equivalences between an application ontology and the PSRL. The semantic equivalence matrix enables resolution of ambiguities created due to differences in syntaxes and meanings associated with terminologies in different application domains. Successful semantic interoperability will form the basis of seamless communication and thereby enable better integration of product development systems. Note to Practitioners—Semantic interoperability of product information refers to automating the exchange of meaning associated with the data, among information resources throughout the product development. This research is motivated by the problems in enabling such semantic interoperability. First, product information is formalized into an explicit, extensible, and comprehensive product semantics representation language (PSRL). The PSRL is open and based on standard W3C constructs. Next, in order to enable semantic translation, the paper describes a procedure to semi-automatically determine mappings between exactly equivalent concepts across representations of the interacting applications. The paper demonstrates that this approach to translation is feasible, but it has not yet been implemented commercially. Current limitations and the directions for further research are discussed. Future research addresses the determination of semantic similarities (not exact equivalences) between the interacting information resources. Index Terms—CAD/CAM integration, ontologies, product data exchange, semantic interoperability. I.

Abstract. Interpretation of spatial features often requires combined reasoning over geometry and semantics. We introduce the Space package, an open source SWI-Prolog extension that provides spatial indexing capabilities. Together with the existing semantic web reasoning capabilities of SWI-Prolog, this allows efficient integration of spatial and semantic queries and provides an infrastructure for declarative programming with space and semantics. 1

Current directory-based hierarchical file systems have many limitations as the amount of unstructured data possessed by individual user is increasing continuously. One of the most significant problems is that users usually have difficulties searching, navigating, and organizing their files since useful semantic information describing a file is not used in the current directory-based system. To solve this problem, several research groups have suggested attribute-based file naming systems. However, their approaches have not been widely used because of lack of semantic information. In this paper, we describe the ontology-based semantic file naming approach that employs the hierarchical conceptual clustering technique to capture more complex semantic information from the set of file attributes. Ontologies, which play a major role on the Semantic Web, describe the semantics of data by organizing data into taxonomies of concepts and describing the relationships between concepts. To generate the ontology from the set of attribute-value pairs for files, we first extend one of the standard incremental hierarchical clustering techniques, COBWEB, and suggest the new clustering evaluation measure to guide search through the space of clustering. From the clustering result, we then generate the ontology and represent it by the RDF Schema. Our experimental results show that our extended clustering approach can produce a good quality of the concept hierarchy, and is computationally efficient and well suited to building the ontology-based semantic file system. 1

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a flexible model for representing information about resources in the web. With the increasing amount of RDF data which is becoming available, efficient and scalable management of RDF data has become a fundamental challenge to achieve the Semantic Web vision. The RDF model has attracted the attention of the database community and many researchers have proposed different solutions to store and query RDF data efficiently. This survey focuses on using relational query processors to store and query RDF data. We provide an overview of the different approaches and classify them according to their storage and query evaluation strategies. 1.

This paper proposes a modular architecture which separates ontology, annotations, lexical entities and search function, and offers automatic semantic annotation facilities at the document substructure level. The proposed architecture is compatible with a web services based infrastructure. Annotated resources can be XML or XHTML static or dynamic documents and need not to be stored nor modified.

In this paper, we discuss a method to screen inconsistencies in ontologies by applying a natural language processing (NLP) technique, especially, those used for word sense disambiguation (WSD). In the database research field, it is claimed that queries over target ontologies should play a significant role because they represent every aspect of the terms described in each ontology. According to (Calvanese et al., 2001), considering the global and the local ontologies, the terms in the global ontology can be viewed as the query over the local ontology, and the mapping between the global and the local ontologies is given by associating each term in the global ontology with a view. On the other hand, ontology screening systems should be able to take advantage of some popular techniques for WSD, which is supposed to decide the right sense where the target word is used in a specific context. We present several examples regarding inconsistencies in ontologies with the aid of DAML+OIL notation(DAML+OIL, 2001), and propose that WSD can be one of the promising method to screen such as inconsistencies.

Enterprises have access to vast amount of internal, deep Web and open Web information. Transforming this heterogeneous and distributed information into actionable and insightful information is the key to the emerging new class of business intelligence and national security applications. This paper attempts to bring together novel academic research and commercialized Semantic Web technology to provide these new capabilities. In particular, we discuss academic research on semantic association identification, use of commercial Semantic Web technology for semantic metadata extraction, and a prototypical demonstration of this research and technology through an aviation security application of significance to national security.

Abstract. The natural evolution of eGovernment is to go beyond the management of identities and therefore it is necessary to manage people, companies or organizations, and their capabilities to interact with Public Administrations. When developing an application based on an eID management system, this management issue must be tackled within each application (i.e. demonstrate the capability of one person to act, demonstrate the economical reliability, demonstrate his professional status, etc...) and is normally based on the local jurisdiction. The objective of the present paper is to introduce a distributed system for the privacy-enhanced management of the capabilities associated to a person within the EU framework, independently from the origin and destination EU member state. The core of this system is the intelligence of the Capabilities Resolution Nodes (CRN) to cope with the complexity of the capability resolution and the capability sources discovery in the pan-European scenario. A European Capacity Resolution Network will be able to grow up the interoperability of the digital identities provided and valid in each member state and will answer the question “is this person, identified with this digital identity and who is described by those attributes, allowed to carry out this legal act in this country according to its law?”.

The value of the master thesis goes beyond its scientific content since it summarizes the work of five years of education. In my particular case this thesis symbolically represents all the years spent between Venice, Vienna and Amsterdam, with all the gained amount of experience and personal development. My master project took more or less six months. This document reports only the final outcome, leaving out everything that is behind it. My thesis is also made by many emails, meetings, hours spent in reading articles, testing and debugging. During this time I had the honor to work with many great persons and I want to thank all of them, for their support and patience. More in particular my first thanks go to Eyal, my supervisor, that helped me through all the development of this thesis, whatever the problem was. He tried to teach me two of the nicest virtues in the scientific world: conciseness and clarity. I hope I have learned them well. This thesis received also a crucial help from Spyros Kotoulas. Without his observations and critics this work could not be done.

Issue tracking1 tools such as Jira or Bugzilla have become important for software development, especially with distributed development teams becoming the norm in several organizations. It is interesting to see that some open source software come with their own issue tracking systems, such as Eclipse bugzilla