Abstract not found

This paper describes a new environment, COE, for capturing and formally representing expert knowledge for use in the Semantic Web. COE exploits the ease of use and rapid knowledge construction capabilities of the CmapTools concept mapping system and extends them to support the import and export of formal, machine-interpretable knowledge representations, such as OWL, across multiple ontologies. Pragati’s Expozé tool suite complements COE’s ontology construction, browsing and navigation features by providing cluster-based search capabilities that expose existing reusable concepts relevant to the user’s focus of attention.

Abstract. The time of engineers is a precious commodity. This is especially true for engineers of semantic descriptions, who need to be highly skilled in conceptual modeling, a skill which will be in high demand as Semantic Web technologies are adopted by industry. Within the software engineering community Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) like the Eclipse Java Development Toolkit and NetBeans have proved to increase the productivity of engineers by bringing together tools to help engineers with their everyday tasks. This paper motivates the need for such an IDE for the Semantic Web and in particular describes the Web Service Modeling Toolkit (WSMT), an Integrated Development Environment for Semantic Web Services through the WSMO paradigm.

The semantic web promises automated invocation, discovery, and composition of web services by enhancing services with semantic descriptions. One such language used for creating semantic descriptions is the Web Ontology Language or OWL. An upper ontology for web services called OWL-S has been created to provide a mechanism for describing service semantics in a standard, well-defined manner. Unfortunately, the learning curve for semantic-rich description languages such as OWL-S can be steep, especially with given the current state of tool support for the language. This paper describes an automated software tool that uses model-driven architecture (MDA) techniques to generate an OWL-S description of a web service from a UML model. This allows the developer to focus on creating a model of the web service in a standard UML tool, leveraging existing knowledge. 1.

In the last years, important steps have been undertaken to bring the e-learning web to its full potential.

Recently, Web Services (WSs) have evolved to a quite popular research field. Nevertheless, there are obstacles that prevent the introduction of WS provision in the wide market. Among these is the inability to represent the non-functional features of WSs, i.e. their Quality-of-Service. Integrating QoS features in WS profiles is to the advantage of both users and providers, as it enables QoS-aware WS selection and composition addressing the user’s QoS requirements and objectives, while giving WS providers a significant competitive advantage in the e-business domain, also maximizing their resources ’ utilization. This paper focuses on the formulation of a QoS ontology framework that is used to support QoS-aware WS provision. It is based on work carried out in the IST-Amigo 1 Integrated Project for Ambient Intelligence (AmI) homes, which, exploiting heterogeneous technologies and infrastructures, aims to develop an open, standardized, interoperable middleware for the provision of QoS-aware AmI WSs to domestic users. 1.

In such contexts as the Semantic Web, the components of an application increasingly rely on ontological models and content knowledge developed and maintained by independent contributors. These components also are designed to be building blocks of various applications. We advocate the use of a mediating component that defines and processes the knowledge transformations required to enable application components to exchange, and inter-operate on, knowledge and data. We present our approach and associated tools to support developers (1) in defining mapping relations between the ontologies involved in their application and (2) in running a mapping interpreter to mediate content knowledge and data among the corresponding ontology-based components.

Web Services (WSs) are a new breed of web application that have brought out quite challenging research issues. One of these is the establishment of an interoperable semantic framework suitable to represent all potential features of WSs. Apart from the functional properties that have already been modeled via standardized tools, there are also the nonfunctional features of WSs i.e. their Quality-of-Service, which in most cases are not included in the WS description. Nevertheless, integrating QoS features in WS profiles is to the advantage of both users and providers, as it supports QoS-aware WS selection and composition addressing the user’s QoS requirements, while enabling WS providers to increase their profit in the e-business domain. This paper is concerned with the creation of a QoS ontology framework adequate for WS provision. It has sprang from the work carried out

OntoTrack is an ontology authoring tool that combines a graph-based hierarchical layout and instant reasoning feedback within one single view. Currently OntoTrack can handle ontologies with an expressivity almost comparable to OWL Lite. The graphical representation provides an animated and zoomable subsumption graph with context sensitive features such as click-able miniature branches or selective detail views, together with drag-and-drop editing. Each editing step is instantly synchronised with an external reasoner in order to provide appropriate graphical feedback about relevant modelling consequences. A recent extention of OntoTrack provides an on-demand textual explanation for subsumption relationships between classes. This paper describes the key features of the current implementation and discusses future work, as well as some development issues. OntoTrack can be downloaded at

Context awareness is an inherent feature of pervasive computing. It enhances the proactiveness of the system thus requiring less user attention and fewer human-machine interactions, it supports intelligent personalization features, and it can assist the system to address the user requirements considering the current conditions. Nevertheless, in such environments, various types of context information are involved and need to be efficiently managed and maintained, soundly interpreted, rapidly processed, and securely disseminated by the system. Thus, an interoperable and flexible context representation scheme is necessary that will support efficient context interpretation and reasoning and will perform well in distributed large-scale context-aware systems. This paper is concerned with the development of a hybrid context representation scheme 1 that aims to combine the maintenance, distribution and administrative facilities of a location-based context model and the semantic advantages of context ontologies. 1.