Dario Cerizza

Model-driven design and development of semantic Web service applications

This article proposes a model-driven methodology to design and develop semantic Web service applications and their components, described according to the emerging WSMO standard. In particular, we show that business processes and Web engineering models have sufficient expressive power to support the semiautomatic extraction of semantic descriptions (i.e., WSMO ontologies, goals, Web services, and mediators), thus partially hiding the complexity of dealing with semantics. Our method is based on existing models for the specification of business processes (BPMN) combined with Web engineering models for designing and developing semantically rich Web applications (WebML). The proposed approach leads from an abstract view of the business needs to a concrete implementation of the application by means of several design steps; high-level models are transformed into software components. Our framework increases the efficiency of the whole design process, yielding to the construction of semantic Web service applications spanning over several enterprises.

Urbanopoly -- A Social and Location-Based Game with a Purpose to Crowdsource Your Urban Data

Checking-in various venues in our surrounding environment via location-based apps like foursquare is becoming more and more popular; this behaviour makes people share some “bits” of their location with their friends. Exploiting this trend in a Human Computation fashion to collect information about urban environments is the aim of the Urbanopoly Android app - a social, mobile and location-based Game with a Purpose designed around the idea of the “monopoly” board game. In this paper, we illustrate the main design choices for Urbanopoly - including the use of social media like Facebook in the context of a Human Computation approach - and we explain the gameplay.

SEEMP: An Semantic Interoperability Infrastructure for e-Government Services in the Employment Sector

This paper presents SEEMP, a marketplace to coordinate and integrate public and private employment services (ESs) around the EU Member States. The need for flexible collaboration in the marketplace gives rise to the issue of interoperability in both data exchange and share of services. SEEMP proposes a mixed approach that relies on the concepts of services and semantics. SEEMP approach combines Software Engineering and Semantic Web methodologies/tools in an infrastructure that allows for a meaningful service-based communication among ESs.

Squiggle: an experience in model-driven development of real-world semantic search engines

Search engines are becoming such an easy way to find textual resources that we wish to use them also for multimedia content; however, syntactic techniques, even if promising, are not up to the task: future search engines must consider new approaches. In order to prove that Semantic Web technologies provide real benefits to end users in terms of an easier and more effective access to information, we designed and developed Squiggle, a Semantic Web framework that eases the deployment of semantic search engines. Following a model-driven approach to application development, Squiggle makes ontologies part of the running code. We evaluate the advantages of Squiggle against traditional approaches in real world deployments.

Analyzing User Actions within a Web 2.0 Portal to Improve a Collaborative Filtering Recommendation System

The current Web manifests the problem of information overload, especially due to the success of the Web 2.0 paradigm, in which users provide new contents quickly. To help people find the most valuable information, many Web sites include a recommendation system based on a rating mechanism. However, such approach cannot be used when a rating mechanism is not present and, in addition, it does not take into account all the actions performed by the users. We propose an extension of the collaborative filtering approach to design a more effective recommendation system that overcomes those limitations.

WebML and Glue: An Integrated Discovery Approach for the SWS Challenge

In this paper we describe the improvements on our approach to the old discovery scenario of the SWS Challenge and our current solution for the new discovery and composition scenario. The mediation scenario is not included in this paper since there were no changes to it from the edition of the SWS Challenge workshop in Athens. The solution proposed is based on the WebML design methodology and the Glue WSMO discovery engine.

SEEMP: A Networked Marketplace for Employment Services

Human capital is more and more the key factor of economic growth and competitiveness in the information age and knowledge economy. But due to a still fragmented employment market compounded by the enlargement of the EU, the human resources are not effectively exchanged and deployed. The business innovation of SEEMP1 develops a vision of an Employment Mediation Marketplace (EMM) for market transparency and effic ient mediation. Its technological innovation provides a federated marketplace of employment agencies through a peer-to-peer network of employment data and mediation services. In other words, the solution under development is a de-fragmentation of the employment market by a web-based collaborative network. The SEEMP-enabled employment marketplace will strengthen the social organization of public employment administration, maximize the business turnover of private employment agencies, improve citizens’ productivity and welfare, and increase the competitiveness and performance of business.

Agreeing While Disagreeing, a Best Practice for Business Ontology Development

The agreement is a crucial part of our living together. Important opportunities for sharing resources, integrating systems and collaborating depend on our ability to agree. While we are interested in methods and technologies that support shared agreement, we somehow tend to forget the disagreement; indeed, it is also a part of reality.

Experiences in the Design of Semantic Services Using Web Engineering Methods and Tools

Although Semantic Web Services are expected to produce a revolution in the development of Web-based systems, very few concrete design experiences are available; only recently, Software Engineering methods and tools have started to embrace the deployment of Semantic Web applications. In this paper, we show how classical Software Engineering methods (i.e., formal business process development, computer-aided and component-based software design, and automatic code generation) combine with semantic methods and tools (i.e., ontology engineering, semantic service annotation and discovery) to forge a new approach to software development for the Semantic Web. In particular, we present our experience in the participation to the Semantic Web Service (SWS) challenge 2006, where the proposed approach achieved very good results in solving the proposed problems.

STAR:chart - Preserving Data Semantics in Web-Based Applications

Every time a Web-based interface is built upon pre-existing data-sources, the result comes often from a difficult and painful process of negotiation between the data manager – who knows the “semantics” of the data to be exposed, but cannot build the UI on his own – and the Web designer – who cares a lot about the presentation and the rendering, but often is not an expert about the content to be displayed.