Lorenzino Vaccari

An evaluation of ontology matching in geo-service applications

Matching between concepts describing the meaning of services representing heterogeneous information sources is a key operation in many application domains, including web service coordination, data integration, peer-to-peer information sharing, query answering, and so on. In this paper we present an evaluation of an ontology matching approach, specifically of structure-preserving semantic matching (SPSM) solution. In particular, we discuss the SPSM approach used to reduce the semantic heterogeneity problem among geo web services and we evaluate the SPSM solution on real world GIS ESRI ArcWeb services. The first experiment included matching of original web service method signatures to synthetically alterated ones. In the second experiment we compared a manual classification of our dataset to the automatic (unsupervised) classification produced by SPSM. The evaluation results demonstrate robustness and good performance of the SPSM approach on a large (ca. 700 000) number of matching tasks.

An interaction-centric approach to support peer coordination in distributed emergency response management

Modern information systems are required to operate in distributed and dynamic environments. In such open settings, coordination technologies play a crucial role in the design of flexible software systems. Research efforts in different areas are converging to devise suitable mechanisms for process and peer coordination: in particular, current results on service-oriented computing and multi-agent systems are being integrated to support dynamic decision-making processes among autonomous components in large, open systems. This paper addresses how agent technologies can be designed, applied, and eventually integrated with standard technologies, in order to build more robust and intelligent systems. The focus of our research is on the engineering, exploitation and evaluation of an agent protocol language in realistic contexts. In particular, a specific executable protocol language is adopted to specify simulated interactions among distributed processes which will be tested in emergency response domain activities (that we will refer to hereafter as e-Response activities), chosen as an example of knowledge-intensive and dynamic application domain where intelligent decision making is crucial. We present a novel approach based on shared protocols models distributed through a peer-to-peer infrastructure and we show how it can be applied in the context of crisis management to support coalition formation and process coordination in open environments. Specifically, a prototype e-Response simulation system - built on a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) infrastructure - has been developed to execute interaction models describing common coordination tasks in the emergency response domain. Preliminary evaluation of the proposed framework demonstrates its capability to support such e-Response tasks.

A Web Service Approach to Geographical Data Distribution Among Public Administrations

In this paper a service-oriented architecture (SOA) is proposed to support the interaction with legacy Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and the implementation of value added data sharing services. In particular, we base our proposed architecture both on the standardization effort carried out by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and on current state-of-the-art Web Service middleware infrastructure. We have evaluated the proposed architecture in the context of GIS application integration in a departmental back-office scenario. The advantages of a service-oriented architecture are twofold: on one hand, it is possible to integrate several GIS application and data sources simply by wrapping their (legacy) services with appropriate interface and registering them in Web Service directories; on the other hand, this new service paradigm can be used to support the creation of completely new cartographic data sharing services.

Opening Public Deliberations: Transparency, Privacy, Anonymisation

The open data movement is demanding publication of data withheld by public institutions. Wide access to government data improves transparency and also fosters economic growth. Still, careless publication of personal data can easily lead to privacy violations. Due to these concerns, the Italian law states that even public deliberations must be anonymised for long term publication. In the context of the Trentino Open Data Project Italy, we first analyse privacy legislation and anonymisation techniques. Then, we propose a semantic open source stack based on entity and word sense disambiguation techniques for publishing anonymised deliberations edited with Norme in Rete software.