Michele Nucci

Enabling semantic web communities with DBin: an overview

In this paper we give an overview of the DBin Semantic Web information manager. Then we describe how it enables users to create and experience the Semantic Web by exchanging RDF knowledge in P2P “topic” channels. Once sufficient information has been collected locally, rich and fast browsing of the Semantic Web becomes possible without generating external traffic or computational load. In this way each client builds and populates a ’personal semantic space’ on which user defined rules, trust metrics and filtering can be freely applied. We also discuss issues such as end user interaction and the social aggregation model induced by this novel application.

Towards an ontology framework for intelligent smart home management and energy saving

Energetic efficiency has become a mandatory requirement for buildings. Several efforts have been done both to reduce energy consumption and to promote alternative generation sources. In most of the existing proposals these two facets of energy conservation are handled singularly. We believe that energy production and consumption need to be managed in a unique perspective to enable a more efficient energy administration. In this paper, we briefly introduce a novel holistic vision for smart home environments and present an ontology framework conceived to provide the necessary information modelling in its implementation. In particular, we focus on two of the composing ontologies that we are currently developing for describing devices and power generation/consumption, in order to enable intelligent task management for energy consumption optimisation.

Pundit: augmenting web contents with semantics

Scholars are using the Web every day to search, read, collaborate, and ultimately do their research. While some of the basic activities that the scholars do, such as reading and writing papers, are already well supported in the digital world, some essential scholarly primitives, such as annotation, augmentation, contextualiza- tion, and externalization, do not yet have clear support in terms of software tools. What scholars ultimately do during their research activity is to iteratively and collaboratively create new knowledge. With the advent of the Digital Humanities, we now have the opportunity—and technology—to capture at least a part of this knowledge and make it available as machine-processable data so to be better explorable and discoverable. In this paper, we present and discuss Pundit: a novel semantic annotation tool that enables scholars to collect, annotate, and contextualize Web resources. Deep-linking is used in conjunction with an RDF- based data model to allow granular selection of content (e.g. text excerpts, image fragments). Pundit aims at enabling scholars to produce meaningful machine- readable data that captures the semantics of their annotations. By providing a customizable annotation environment, where domain specific vocabularies can be loaded, and easy ways of integrating with existing Web archives or libraries, Pundit enables users to publish their annotations and collaboratively build a semantic graph. Such a graph can be consumed via HTTP APIs and standard SPARQL, thus allowing existing Linked Data applications to easily work with the data and Web clients in general to build specific visualizations.

Ontologies for Smart Homes and energy management: An implementation-driven survey

Semantic Web technologies have become a reference technology for information modelling and reasoning support in Smart Homes. This paper provides an extensive review of the ontologies developed in this scenario. Also, it discusses how they can be connected and expanded to create a complete framework that covers all the aspects of a Smart Home, ranging from device description to energy management, under a unifying holistic vision.

A Collaborative Video Annotation System Based on Semantic Web Technologies

In recent years, videos have become more and more a familiar multimedia format for common users. In particular, the advent of Web 2.0 and the spreading of video-sharing services over the Web have led to an explosion of online video content. The capability to provide broader support in accessing and exploring video content, and in general other kind of multimedia formats as images and documents, is becoming more and more important. In this context, the value of semantically structured data and metadata is recognized as a key factor both to improve search efficiency and to guarantee data interoperability. This latter aspect is critical to connect different, heterogeneous content coming from a variety of data sources. On the other hand, the annotation of video resources has been increasingly understood as a medium factor to enable deep analysis of contents and collaborative study of online digital objects. However, as existing annotation tools provide poor support for semantically structured content or in some cases express the semantics in proprietary and non-interoperable formats, such knowledge that users build by carefully annotating contents hardly crosses the boundaries of a single system and often cannot be reused by different communities (e.g., to classify content or to discover new relations among resources). In this paper, a novel Semantic Web-based annotation system is presented that enables user annotations to form semantically structured knowledge at different levels of granularity and complexity. Annotation can be reused by external applications and mixed with Web of Data sources to enable “serendipity,” the reuse of data produced for a specific task (annotation) by different people and in different contexts from the one data originated from. The main ideas behind the approach are to build on ontologies and support linking, at data level, to precise thesauri and vocabularies, as well as to the Linked Open Data cloud. By describing the software model, developed in the context of SemLib EU project, and by providing an implementation of an online video annotation tool, the main aim of this paper is to demonstrate how such technologies can enable a scenario where users annotations are created while browsing the Web, naturally shared among users, stored in machine readable format and then possibly recombined with external data and ontologies to enhance end-user experience.

Towards a semantically-enabled holistic vision for energy optimisation in smart home environments

Nowadays energy-saving represents a mandatory requirement for building. Several efforts have been done both to reduce energy consumption and to promote alternative generation sources. By the way, in most of the existing systems these two faces of energy-conservation are managed in isolation. In this paper, we propose a novel holistic vision for a smart home environment, in which energy administration embraces both energy production and consumption and its handled in conjunction with services management. The proposed system uses an IP-based network as main communication channel and a semantic extension of the UPnP protocol for devices auto-configuration and control. An ontology framework is used to encode all the relevant information about devices, services and context, including energy status and user preferences, into a global knowledge base. Using the inference capabilities provided by the used rich semantic descriptions, such gKB can be used to support efficient control logics and intelligent decision making, that can be exploited also for a more effective energy management.

Ontology-Based Device Configuration and Management for Smart Homes

Energy saving is nowadays a mandatory requirement for buildings. In this paper, a novel holistic system for intelligent Smart Home environments is introduced, which is able to embrace energy production and consumption in a unique perspective and to handle them in conjunction with device and services management. Semantic Web technologies are employed to foster data interoperability and to supply inference power for intelligent tasks management, decisions making and energy saving. The proposed system uses an IP-based network as main communication channel and a semantic extension of the UPnP technology, to support zero-configuration, automatic discovering and intelligent control. The ontology framework, used to formally describe all relevant information of the Smart Home environment like devices, services and context, is also presented focusing on the device and the energy ontology. In addition, the issue of the lack of Semantic Web compliant device descriptions that currently are not provided by device vendors, posing a serious barrier toward the practical application of semantic technologies in Smart Home scenario, is also tackled.

Semantic web techniques application for video fragment annotation and management

The amount of videos loaded every day on the web is constantly growing and in a close future videos will constitute the primary Web content. However, video resources are currently handled only through the use of plugins and result therefore scarcely integrated on the World Wide Web. Standards as HTML 5 and Media Fragment URI, actually under development, promise to enhance video accessibility and to allow a more effective management of video fragments. On the other hand, the need for annotating digital objects, possibly at a low granularity level, is being highlighted in various scientific communities. User created annotation, if properly structured and machine processable, can enrich web content and enhance search and browsing capabilities. Providing full support for video fragments tagging, linking, annotation and retrieval represents therefore a key-factor for the development of a new generation of Web applications. In this paper, we discuss the feasibility of Semantic Web techniques in this scenario and introduce a novel Web application for semantic multimodal video fragment annotation and management that we are currently developing.

New Prospects in Territorial Resource Management: The Semantic Web GIS

Traditional GIS and Web GIS solutions are showing considerable limitations in terms of IT technologies and knowledge management as well as in the ability to reconcile flexibility and interoperability. The Geospatial Semantic Web is a novel, fast-evolving territorial resource management application that uses advanced geographical data processing technologies based on semantic rules and specific geo-ontologies to overcome the rigid relational structures of traditional geographical databases. The work proposes a methodological reflection on the applicative potential of Semantic Web GIS (SWGIS) in territorial resource management and provides examples. A collaborative project between the SeMedia/3mediaLabs and SAIFET-Agrur research groups of the Polytechnic University of Marches (Italy) was devised to design a tool using a data management multiplatform desktop system based on Semantic Web initiative-defined standards in different scale test areas in the Como Lake area, Italy.

Supporting Geo-Semantic Web Communities with the DBin Platform: Use Cases and Perspectives

The aim of this chapter is to show how the need for advanced cooperative annotation and information exchange can be addressed using a paradigm called “Interconnected Geo-Semantic Web Communities”. The use cases and its associated needs are highlighted, and then the base tool for this work, the DBin Semantic Web information manager, is focused on. DBin enables users to create and experience the Semantic Web by exchanging RDF knowledge in peer-to-peer (P2P) “topic” channels. Once sufficient information has been collected locally, rich and fast browsing of semantically structured knowledge becomes possible, even offline, without generating external traffic or computational load. DBin has a number of modules to support cooperative tagging and annotations of geographical objects. Different communities of users, e.g., concerned with different kinds of geographic objects, can each exploit DBin to cooperate in enriched geo-semantic spaces. Advanced users, e.g., cultural heritage agencies, can join multiple groups at the same time and use collective cross-domain knowledge.