Carmen Costilla

Towards a Web digital archive ontological unification

The Web is a universal space where a huge amount of information is daily published. Digital archives (DA) constitute a valuable documentary domain to be propagated through the Web. But the virtual integration of Web heterogeneous data sources is a difficult task nowadays. This paper deals with the semantic integration of many specific DA ontologies. Beforehand, we have proposed a virtual and dynamic Web integrated architecture, based on mediator and wrapper layers. This paper is focused on a unified DA ontological proposal allocated at the mediator layer. Coming from the ISAD(G) and ISAAR(CPF) International Archival standards, two specific archival ontologies: ISAD-0 and ISAAR-0 are introduced. Besides, we have built the integrated parliamentary management system, SIAPI (successfully running at the Asamblea of Madrid since 1999) that contains a powerful parliamentary archive system. From it, we have built the SIAP-0 specific parliamentary archive ontology. Above all these ontologies, a global ontological kernel (GOK) is here introduced. The GOK, as a unifying umbrella, provides the attachment of many pre-existing specific DA ontologies. In the future, this GOK will make possible that the user query will be firstly pre-processed against to a personalized ontology, inferred from the GOK and tailored to each Web user preferences profile.

e-Government: a legislative ontology for the ' SIAP ' parliamentary management system

The requirement of integrating, sharing and reusing legislative information is a research issue gaining priority for governments and institutions. The legal world is complex, heterogeneous and wide in scope. Therefore, we find convenient to define ontologies as a tool to decrease this complexity inherent to the legal domain. This paper is based on the Parliamentary Integrated Management System (SIAP) built for the Asamblea of Madrid and that is successfully running since 1999. In this context, we describe how SIAP manages the Legislative Initiative (LI) that arrives to a Parliament. Later, we propose an ontology in order to describe the LI, called Legislative Ontology (LO). This LO conceptually models theLI including the structure of the Emendations to this LI and is connected with the act of making and passing laws. So, this LO makes easier the organizing task in the LI and, in general, all the Legislative procedural steps. Besides, this ontology could be offered as a basis for other parliamentary systems (asSIAP) to improve their LI procedures.

SIRIO: a distributed information system over a heterogeneous computer network

This paper presents the SIRIO project, a commercial experience within Spanish industry, developed for Tecnatom S.A. by the Data and Knowledge Bases Research Group at the Technical University of Madrid. SIRIO runs over a heterogeneous local area network, with a client-server architecture, using the following tools: Oracle as RDBMS, running over a Unix server, TCP/IP as a communication protocol, Ethernet TOOLKIT for the distributed client-server architecture, and C as the host programming language for the distributed applications (every one of them is rather complex and very different from the rest). The system uses computers with MS-DOS, connected to the server over the LAN. SIRIO is mainly based on the conceptual design of an Rdb, upon which several distributed applications are operational as big software modules. These applications are: 1.- The inspection programs, the management of their corresponding criteria and the automatic generation of queries. 2.- Graphics processing and interface definition. 3.- Interactive Rdb updating. 4.- Historical db management. 5.- Massive load of on-field obtained data. 6.- Report and query application. The approach of the SIRIO integrated information system presented here is a pioneering one. There are about two dozen companies worldwide in this field and none has developed such an advanced system to this day. From 1992, SIRIO is totally operational in the Tecnatom S.A. industry. It constitutes an important tool to obtain the reports (from different plants) for the clients, for the State control organizations, and for the specialized analyst staff.

Mapping Techniques for an Ontology Network

We are researching a Web integrated reference architecture based on the mediator-wrapper approach. From a conceptual modeling point of view, this mediator is an architectural component defined by a semantic unification model composed of two layers. The lower layer, the specific ontological network (SON), is tailored to a concise application domain. It networks as many specific ontologies (SOs) (URIs of local semantic resources to collect) as necessary through horizontal mappings. The upper layer, the global ontological kernel (GOK), unifies SONs semantics through some global ontologies (GOs) that attach concepts according to a concise unification criterion through vertical mappings. In this context, this paper proposes mapping techniques to integrate these kinds of ontologies and its main contributions are: (1) a homogeneous mapping definition framework, (2) a technique for networking SOs by translating heterogeneous mapping definitions (resulting from current alignment tools) into C-OWL and (3) a unified semantics by means of GOs.

A grid semantic approach for a digital archive integrated architecture

Semantic Web and grid computing are critical factors in the next Web intelligence generation. A fundamental aspect inside this challenge is the provision of a wide disseminated platform of abstract resources that permit us to get the right information at the right time. Grid services could be understood as proper requesting resources (agents, databases, data-mining, ontologies, etc.), but also as the kind of the organization that a concise domain needs in order to offer its capabilities to other specific domains. In this sense, the goal of getting the best distributed cooperative scenario, starting from many pre-existing Web information systems, is a fundamental part of this important challenge. This paper proposes how to achieve a flexible cooperative assembly of grid components and resources applied to a digital archive semantic integrated architecture, we are researching since 2002.

Report on the workshop on wrapper techniques for legacy data systems

This report summarizes the presentations and discussions of the first workshop on Wrapper Techniques for Legacy Data Systems which was held in Delft on November 12 2004. This workshop was co-located with the 2004 WCRE conference. This workshop entails to our best knowledge the first in its kind, concentrating on challenging research issues regarding the development of wrappers for legacy data systems.

RedBD: the database research community in Spain

During the last decade, the Database research community in Spain has grown significantly in the quantity of groups interested in the area, and especially in the quality of those groups. Those database research groups are not in general very large; usually five or six full-time researchers compose them. The economic resources for supporting the researching activity came from public organisms like the Spanish government, the European Union or local governments, and in a less rate from the industry. Research is carried out mainly at the Informatics Departments of the Universities. As the different groups usually share research topics and also fields of applications, in the last years there has been an important movement to join research efforts.