Angelo Di Iorio

Wiki content templating

Wiki content templating enables reuse of content structures among wiki pages. In this paper we present a thorough study of this widespread feature, showing how its two state of the art models (functional and creational templating) are sub-optimal. We then propose a third, better, model called lightly constrained (LC) templating and show its implementation in the Moin wiki engine. We also show how LC templating implementations are the appropriate technologies to push forward semantically rich web pages on the lines of (lowercase) semantic web and microformats.

A Semantic Web approach to everyday overlapping markup

Overlapping structures in XML are not symptoms of a misunderstanding of the intrinsic characteristics of a text document nor evidence of extreme scholarly requirements far beyond those needed by the most common XML-based applications. On the contrary, overlaps have started to appear in a large number of incredibly popular applications hidden under the guise of syntactical tricks to the basic hierarchy of the XML data format. Unfortunately, syntactical tricks have the drawback that the affected structures require complicated workarounds to support even the simplest query or usage. In this article, we present Extremely Annotational Resource Description Framework (RDF) Markup (EARMARK), an approach to overlapping markup that simplifies and streamlines the management of multiple hierarchies on the same content, and provides an approach to sophisticated queries and usages over such structures without the need of ad-hoc applications, simply by using Semantic Web tools and languages. We compare how relevant tasks (e.g., the identification of the contribution of an author in a word processor document) are of some substantial complexity when using the original data format and become more or less trivial when using EARMARK. We finally evaluate positively the memory and disk requirements of EARMARK documents in comparison to Open Office and Microsoft Word XML-based formats.

From the writable web to global editability

The technical and competence requirements for writing content on the web is still one of the major factors that widens the gap between authors and readers. Although tools that support an easy approach to web writing, such as blogs and wikis, are becoming increasingly important and mainstream, they still lack in terms of layout and typographical sophistication, and, most importantly, only allow local editing (on the pages that are stored by the application itself). In this paper we re-propose an old paradigm for writing content on the net, directly derived from the Xanadu vision by Ted Nelson: global editability foresees that all documents on the web can be accessed for editing and modified on line, very much as in a global wiki. Global editability needs to address a number of issues, including correct support for intellectual property and legal issues, before it can be accepted as an idea. We provide some considerations on technical issues of global editability, and describe the architecture and implementation of a system, called IsaWiki, that is being developed at the University of Bologna.

Semantic Publishing Challenge – Assessing the Quality of Scientific Output

Linked Open Datasets about scholarly publications enable the development and integration of sophisticated end-user services; however, richer datasets are still needed. The first goal of this Challenge was to investigate novel approaches to obtain such semantic data. In particular, we were seeking methods and tools to extract information from scholarly publications, to publish it as LOD, and to use queries over this LOD to assess quality. This year we focused on the quality of workshop proceedings, and of journal articles w.r.t. their citation network. A third, open task, asked to showcase how such semantic data could be exploited and how Semantic Web technologies could help in this emerging context.

Dealing with structural patterns of XML documents

Evaluating collections of XML documents without paying attention to the schema they were written in may give interesting insights into the expected characteristics of a markup language, as well as any regularity that may span vocabularies and languages, and that are more fundamental and frequent than plain content models. In this paper we explore the idea of structural patterns in XML vocabularies, by examining the characteristics of elements as they are used, rather than as they are defined. We introduce from the ground up a formal theory of 8 plus 3 structural patterns for XML elements, and verify their identifiability in a number of different XML vocabularies. The results allowed the creation of visualization and content extraction tools that are completely independent of the schema and without any previous knowledge of the semantics and organization of the XML vocabulary of the documents.

Semantic Publishing Challenge – Assessing the Quality of Scientific Output by Information Extraction and Interlinking

The Semantic Publishing Challenge series aims at investigating novel approaches for improving scholarly publishing using Linked Data technology. In 2014 we had bootstrapped this effort with a focus on extracting information from non-semantic publications - computer science workshop proceedings volumes and their papers - to assess their quality. The objective of this second edition was to improve information extraction but also to interlink the 2014 dataset with related ones in the LOD Cloud, thus paving the way for sophisticated end-user services.

Semantic Annotation of Scholarly Documents and Citations

Scholarly publishing is in the middle of a revolution based on the use of Web-related technologies as medium of communication. In this paper we describe our ongoing study of semantic publishing and automatic annotation of scholarly documents, presenting several models and tools for the automatic annotation of structural and semantic components of documents. In particular, we focus on citations and their automatic classification obtained by CiTalO, a framework that combines ontology learning techniques with NLP techniques.

Recognising document components in XML-based academic articles

Recognising textual structures (paragraphs, sections, etc.) provides abstract and more general mechanisms for describing documents independent of the particular semantics of specific markup schemas, tools and presentation stylesheets. In this paper we propose an algorithm that allows us to identify the structural role of each element in a set of homogeneous scientific articles stored as XML files.

Structural patterns for descriptive documents

Combining expressiveness and plainness in the design of web documents is a difficult task. Validation languages are very powerful and designers are tempted to over-design specifications. This paper discusses an offbeat approach: describing any structured content of any document by only using a very small set of patterns, regardless of the format and layout of that document. The paper sketches out a formal analysis of some patterns, based on grammars and language theory. The study has been performed on XML languages and DTDs and has a twofold goal: coding empirical patterns in a formal representation, and discussing their completeness.

The Semantic Lancet Project: A Linked Open Dataset for Scholarly Publishing

In this poster we introduce the Semantic Lancet Project, whose goal is to make available rich data about scholarly publications and to provide users with sophisticated services on top of those data.