Csaba Veres

The prime lexicality effect: Form-priming as a function of prime awareness, lexical status, and discrimination difficulty.

G. W. Humphreys, D. Besner, and P. T. Quinlan (1988) found that form-primes (e.g., contrast-CONTRACT) were effective only with masked primes. C. Veres (1986) obtained the same effect for word primes but found that nonword primes (e.g., controct) were effective regardless of masking. In a lexical-decision task, the present study failed to find any priming with word primes but only when the nonword distractors were very close to a particular word (e.g., UNIVORSE). With more distant nonword distractors (e.g., ANIVORSE), priming with word primes was restored in the masked condition. In terms of an entry-opening model of priming, this effect was interpreted as a blocking of priming by a postaccess checking operation. Alternatively, in an interactive activation model, this effect could be modeled either by decreasing the strength of lexical competition or by changing the decision criterion from local to global activation.

The language of folksonomies: what tags reveal about user classification

Folksonomies are classification schemes that emerge from the collective actions of users who tag resources with an unrestricted set of key terms. There has been a flurry of activity in this domain recently with a number of high profile web sites and search engines adopting the practice. They have sparked a great deal of excitement and debate in the popular and technical literature, accompanied by a number of analyses of the statistical properties of tagging behavior. However, none has addressed the deep nature of folksonomies. What is the nature of a tag? Where does it come from? How is it related to a resource? In this paper we present a study in which the linguistic properties of folksonomies reveal them to contain, on the one hand, tags that are similar to standard categories in taxonomies. But on the other hand, they contain additional tags to describe class properties. The implications of the findings for the relationship between folksonomy and ontology are discussed.

Integrating Semantic Web Technology, Web Services, and Workflow Modeling: Achieving System and Business Interoperability

Much of the early focus in the area of Semantic Web has been on the development of representation languages for static conceptual information, while there has been less emphasis on how to make Semantic Web applications practically useful in the context of knowledge work. To achieve this, a better coupling is needed between ontology, service descriptions and workflow modeling, including both traditional production workflow and interactive workflow techniques This article reviews the basic technologies involved in this area to provide system and business interoperability, and outlines what can be achieved by merging them in the context of real world workflow descriptions.

Aggregation in ontologies: practical implementations in OWL

Data modeling for Web Applications needs to be guided not only by the specific requirements of a particular application, but also by the goal of maximizing interoperability between systems. This necessitates the adoption of widely accepted design methods and a set of rich, theoretically motivated principles for organizing data in ontologies. This paper presents one set of such principles. It is based on the observation that current ontologies emphasize the abstraction mechanism of generalization but ignore the various forms of aggregation. We explore possible techniques for modeling aggregation with OWL, investigate the semantics of aggregation, and consider the merits of aggregation over generalization for modeling knowledge in particular situations.

Interoperability through integrating Semantic Web Technology, Web Services, and Workflow Modeling

A number of technologies are mentioned under the rubric of “The Semantic Web”, but good overviews of these technologies with an eye toward practical applications are scarce. Moreover, much of the early focus in this field has been on the development of representation languages for static conceptual information, while there has been less emphasis on how to make semantic web applications practically useful in the context of knowledge work. To achieve this, a better coupling is needed between ontology, service descriptions and workflow modeling. This paper reviews all the basic technologies involved in this, and outlines what can be achieved by merging them in the context of real world workflow descriptions.

Using Semantic Technologies to Enhance a Requirements Engineering Approach for Alignment of IT with Business Strategy

B-SCP is a promising framework addressing alignment of IT with business strategy from a requirements engineering persective. A problem with the B-SCP framework is that it is extremely difficult to track dependencies between requirements in a project of realistic complexity. We discuss how the RDF data model with OWL semantics, will greatly benefit an implementation using B-SCP. Our contribution is to extend B-SCP by describing an ontology data structure for representing the requirements and the complex rules which map them together. Seven Eleven-Japan is used as an exemplar to demonstrate improved productivity and consistency of B-SCP.

Browsing and Visualizing Semantically Enriched Information Resources

We are developing an approach to organizing bookmarks and other information resources by annotating them with metadata in the form of synsets taken from WordNet. This paper shows how a collection of annotated bookmarks can be semantically enriched by adding hyper-/hyponym relations from WordNet. It then illustrates how the semantically enriched bookmark collection can be browsed and visualized using the Longwell faceted browser. Our initial investigation suggests that the rich semantics of WordNet synsets combined with Longwell’s faceted browsing provide users with a useful aid for navigating and comprehending complex annotated information resources.

An Ontology-Based Approach for Supporting Business-IT Alignment

B-SCP (Business Strategy, Context, and Process) is a promising framework addressing alignment of IT with business strategy from a requirements engineering perspective. The B-SCP approach combines goal and context modeling, and business processes, into a generic modeling framework that deconstructs these to IT requirements and context. However, a problem with the B-SCP framework is that it is difficult to track dependencies between requirements in a project of realistic complexity. To address this we discuss how the RDF (Resource Description Framework) data model with OWL (Web Ontology Language) semantics will greatly benefit an implementation using B-SCP. Our contribution is to extend B-SCP by describing an ontology data structure for representing the requirements and the complex rules which map them together. The benefit in our approach is that it provides a comprehensive way to validate the decomposition of the requirements. Seven–Eleven Japan is used as an exemplar to demonstrate improved productivity and consistency of B-SCP.

Psychological foundations for concept modeling

A fundamental research activity in the field of Information Systems involves the proper design of data based systems. An important stage in construction is to determine the relevant, meaningful information structures in a domain, and to document these in an accurate and unambiguous way. Diagrammatic modeling notations have evolved as tools to facilitate this process. However an appropriate formal semantics to clarify the interpretation of these notations is difficult to define. This can result in models that are subjective and difficult to interpret by external parties. Recently, philosophical ontologies that provide a taxonomy of elements in the world have been proposed as a foundation to ground the symbols in diagrams. We argue that models represent a designer‘s psychological perception of the world rather than some abstract description of that world. An ontology of these perceptions is therefore more relevant for the design of diagrammatic notations used in documenting and unambiguously communicating the analysis of a domain. We present an ontology of mental concepts from cognitive science, and find support for a prediction concerning ternary relations. Importantly, an influential thesis based on a philosophy of ”real world” ontology makes the opposite prediction. We show that properties of the mind, rather than the world, should guide diagramming convention.

Task Specific Disambiguation in a Web Page: Towards Symbiotic Annotation

We describe Information Systems where users employ semantic tagging to annotate resources accessible through a web browser. Semantic tags are disambiguated key terms assigned by users. To facilitate the procedure for human users, we investigated algorithms which automatically disambiguate words selected from the text, using the surrounding context. We found existing generic methods of Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) to be insufficient, and developed several new algorithms which take into consideration the specific structural properties of the annotated resources. Our preliminary findings are that it is relatively straightforward to hand craft simple task specific disambiguation algorithms using freely available libraries. However it is difficult to surpass the performance of state-of-the-art general algorithms. We observe that part of the problem is caused by the fine grained word senses used in disambiguation, which makes agreement difficult. We propose a task specific measure of accuracy which, combined with the task specific disambiguation algorithm, provides a more satisfactory solution to the problem than generic approaches. That is, while the hand crafted disambiguation algorithm could not out-perform standard algorithms in a general measure of accuracy, it did lead to an overall solution for the tagging task which proved superior to the standard algorithms. The final solution is an example of symbiotic computing, in which the human and machine actors interact in a mutually beneficent manner to achieve an outcome.