John Domingue

Semantic business process management: a vision towards using semantic Web services for business process management

Business process management (BPM) is the approach to manage the execution of IT-supported business operations from a business experts view rather than from a technical perspective. However, the degree of mechanization in BPM is still very limited, creating inertia in the necessary evolution and dynamics of business processes, and BPM does not provide a truly unified view on the process space of an organization. We trace back the problem of mechanization of BPM to an ontological one, i.e. the lack of machine-accessible semantics, and argue that the modeling constructs of semantic Web services frameworks, especially WSMO, are a natural fit to creating such a representation. As a consequence, we propose to combine SWS and BPM and create one consolidated technology, which we call semantic business process management (SBPM)

MnM: Ontology Driven Semi-automatic and Automatic Support for Semantic Markup

An important precondition for realizing the goal of a semantic web is the ability to annotate web resources with semantic information. In order to carry out this task, users need appropriate representation languages, ontologies, and support tools. In this paper we present MnM, an annotation tool which provides both automated and semi-automated support for annotating web pages with semantic contents. MnM integrates a web browser with an ontology editor and provides open APIs to link to ontology servers and for integrating information extraction tools. MnM can be seen as an early example of the next generation of ontology editors, being web-based, oriented to semantic markup and providing mechanisms for large-scale automatic markup of web pages.

Artificial Intelligence: methodology, systems, and applications

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence: Methodology, Systems, and Applications, AIMSA 2006, held in Varna, Bulgaria in September 2006. The 28 revised full papers presented together with the abstracts of 2 invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 81 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on agents, constraints and optimization, user concerns, decision support, models and ontologies, machine learning, ontology manipulation, natural language processing, and applications.

IRS-II: a framework and infrastructure for semantic web services

In this paper we describe IRS-II (Internet Reasoning Service) a framework and implemented infrastructure, whose main goal is to support the publication, location, composition and execution of heterogeneous web services, augmented with semantic descriptions of their functionalities. IRS-II has three main classes of features which distinguish it from other work on semantic web services. Firstly, it supports one-click publishing of standalone software: IRS-II automatically creates the appropriate wrappers, given pointers to the standalone code. Secondly, it explicitly distinguishes between tasks (what to do) and methods (how to achieve tasks) and as a result supports capability-driven service invocation; flexible mappings between services and problem specifications; and dynamic, knowledge-based service selection. Finally, IRS-II services are web service compatible - standard web services can be trivially published through the IRS-II and any IRS-II service automatically appears as a standard web service to other web service infrastructures. In the paper we illustrate the main functionalities of IRS-II through a scenario involving a distributed application in the healthcare domain.

Approaches to semantic web services: An overview and comparisons

The next Web generation promises to deliver Semantic Web Services (SWS); services that are self-described and amenable to automated discovery, composition and invocation. A prerequisite to this, however, is the emergence and evolution of the Semantic Web, which provides the infrastructure for the semantic interoperability of Web Services. Web Services will be augmented with rich formal descriptions of their capabilities, such that they can be utilized by applications or other services without human assistance or highly con-strained agreements on interfaces or protocols. Thus, Semantic Web Services have the potential to change the way knowledge and business services are consumed and provided on the Web. In this paper, we survey the state of the art of current enabling technologies for Semantic Web Services. In addition, we characterize the infrastructure of Semantic Web Services along three orthogonal dimensions: activities, architecture and service ontology. Further, we examine and contrast three current approaches to SWS according to the proposed dimensions.

ScholOnto: an ontology-based digital library server for research documents and discourse

Abstract.The internet is rapidly becoming the first place for researchers to publish documents, but at present they receive little support in searching, tracking, analysing or debating concepts in a literature from scholarly perspectives. This paper describes the design rationale and implementation of ScholOnto, an ontology-based digital library server to support scholarly interpretation and discourse. It enables researchers to describe and debate via a semantic network the contributions a document makes, and its relationship to the literature. The paper discusses the computational services that an ontology-based server supports, alternative user interfaces to support interaction with a large semantic network, usability issues associated with knowledge formalisation, new work practices that could emerge, and related work.

IRS-III: A broker-based approach to semantic Web services

A factor limiting the take up of Web services is that all tasks associated with the creation of an application, for example, finding, composing, and resolving mismatches between Web services have to be carried out by a software developer. Semantic Web services is a combination of semantic Web and Web service technologies that promise to alleviate these problems. In this paper we describe IRS-III, a framework for creating and executing semantic Web services, which takes a semantic broker-based approach to mediating between service requesters and service providers. We describe the overall approach and the components of IRS-III from an ontological and architectural viewpoint. We then illustrate our approach through an application in the eGovernment domain.

Ontology-driven document enrichment

In this paper, we present an approach to document enrichment, which consists of developing and integrating formal knowledge models with archives of documents, to provide intelligent knowledge retrieval and (possibly) additional knowledge-intensive services, beyond what is currently available using “standard” information retrieval and search facilities. Our approach is ontology-driven, in the sense that the construction of the knowledge model is carried out in a top-down fashion, by populating a given ontology, rather than in a bottom-up fashion, by annotating a particular document. In this paper, we give an overview of the approach and we examine the various types of issues (e.g. modelling, organizational and user interface issues) which need to be tackled to effectively deploy our approach in the workplace. In addition, we also discuss a number of technologies we have developed to support ontology-driven document enrichment and we illustrate our ideas in the domains of electronic news publishing, scholarly discourse and medical guidelines.

An outlook on semantic business process mining and monitoring

Semantic Business Process Management (SBPM) has been proposed as an extension of BPM with Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services (SWS) technologies in order to increase and enhance the level of automation that can be achieved within the BPM life-cycle. In a nutshell, SBPM is based on the extensive and exhaustive conceptualization of the BPM domain so as to support reasoning during business processes modelling, composition, execution, and analysis, leading to important enhancements throughout the life-cycle of business processes. An important step of the BPM life-cycle is the analysis of the processes deployed in companies. This analysis provides feedback about how these processes are actually being executed (like common control-flow paths, performance measures, detection of bottlenecks, alert to approaching deadlines, auditing, etc). The use of semantic information can lead to dramatic enhancements in the state-of-the-art in analysis techniques. In this paper we present an outlook on the opportunities and challenges on semantic business process mining and monitoring, thus paving the way for the implementation of the next generation of BPM analysis tools.

The Future Internet

Irrespective of whether we use economic or societal metrics, the Internet is one of the most important technical infrastructures in existence today. It will be a catalyst for much of our innovation and prosperity in the future. A competitive Europe will require Internet connectivity and services beyond the capabilities offered by current technologies. Future Internet research is therefore a must. This book is published in full compliance with the Open Access publishing initiative; it is based on the research carried out within the Future Internet Assembly (FIA). It contains a sample of representative results from the recent FIA meetings spanning a broad range of topics, all being of crucial importance for the future Internet. The book includes 32 contributions and has been structured into the following sections, each of which is preceded by a short introduction: Foundations: architectural issues; socio-economic issues; security and trust; and experiments and experimental design. Future Internet Areas: networks, services, and content; and applications.