Nadia Catenazzi

User-Friendly Ontology Editing and Visualization Tools: The OWLeasyViz Approach

This paper aims to propose solutions to the issue of ontology visualization, by presenting intuitive and user-friendly ontology editing and visualization environments mainly oriented to domain experts. It starts with an overview of existing ontology visualization methods; afterwards it describes the Semantic DB system and the OWLeasyViz ontology editor. Semantic DB is a web application framework to create simple complete semantic web applications, integrating an ontology editor, a resource editor, an inference rule editor, a reasoner, and a search engine. OWLeasyViz is an ontology editor that combines a textual and a graphical representation of OWL ontologies. It meets different user needs by providing a simple and intuitive interface to end-users who are not ontologists, and offering more advanced tools to ontology experts. The OWLeasyViz editor is intended to be a module of a semantic web integrated working environment, developed within the context of a Swiss Government funded CTI applied research project in the domain of waste water management.

The publishing process: the hyper-book approach

This paper presents a general overview of the publishing process, including both paper and electronic publishing. The main actors (e.g. authors, publishers and libraries) and the associated publications channels are discussed. One channel is discussed in more detail: this channel incorpo rates all the steps involved from the acquisition of a manu script in a generic mark-up language to the presentation of the final electronic publication to the user in the library. The use of a generic mark-up language (e.g. SGML - stan dard generalised mark-up language) is viewed as being an essential component for facilitating the exchange of elec tronic documents between different systems and applica tions. In addition, the use of a generic mark-up language allows several steps of the publishing process to be auto mated, from the production of electronic books, to the addi tion of the resulting books to a (electronic) library.

Generic environments for knowledge management and visualization

There is an increasing need for usable tools to support knowledge elicitation, formalization and management. As an answer to this need, this paper describes fully integrated semantic web frameworks, where users can represent and manage their knowledge in a visual way, without the need of semantic web experts as intermediaries. These frameworks typically incorporate an ontology editor, a resource editor, reasoning capabilities and intuitive interaction and visualization facilities. In particular, two frameworks are presented: IRCS, a system to semantically index, search, and navigate heterogeneous resources, and AWI, a collaborative environment aiming to collect and share knowledge of user communities. These generic frameworks were developed within applied research projects and used to create semantic web applications in different domains such as water management plants and business process management. An interesting aspect of these systems is that they provide visualization tools to present both ontologies and resources in a familiar and intuitive way in order to simplify their understanding. The use of effective visualization techniques is also investigated in the EasyOnto project, where a web application that graphically represents ontologies using different methods was developed.

The intelligent web: Tools for knowledge management and sharing

Modern companies and enterprises, to be competitive, need to be able to capture, integrate, connect, manage and share heterogeneous information and knowledge, about the different actors and elements involved in their systems: processes, activities, procedures, people, documents, etc. Knowledge comes from different sources, in different formats, and sometimes is implicit and not written; in addition, it dynamically evolves, it often requires the contribution of a collaborative team. This paper describes how intelligent web tools can provide new opportunities for knowledge representation, formalization, management and sharing. It firstly introduces the concept of “intelligent web” as a synergic combination of Web 2.0 and Semantic Web technologies. The second part of the paper presents the AWI environment to demonstrate the practical applicability of the intelligent web approach for knowledge management, in particular in the field of manufacturing and business process management.

From Practice to Theory in Designing Autonomous Agents

The purpose of this paper is to introduce some principles, in the form of assumptions, which could be useful to consider in developing agents architecture. These principles provide design guidelines concerning agent and group structuring, communication, decision making, and computational aspects for agent cooperation. They generate requirements and constraints for cooperative agents development.

Human centered design framework to generate novel ambient intelligence interface solutions

The emergent application area of Ambient Intelligence provides new opportunities in the field of social interaction, and new means to conceive and design novel interface solutions for accessing social technologies. The maturity of technologies such as motion tracking, gesture recognition, facial expression and emotion recognition facilitate natural interactions with intelligent environments by providing technology newbies with more inclusive and universal interaction modalities. The workshop proposes the application of a Human Centered Design framework useful to conceive and design novel interface solutions for human activity sharing. Through an iterative process, participants will practice HCD methodologies and techniques and will define visions and concepts for our future life environment. From this workshop, participants will acquire multidisciplinary knowledge related to the Ambient Intelligence area, experiment an iterative process that can be adapted to other research topics, and structure concepts useful to start new investigations and developments.

“Tagsonomy”: Easy Access to Web Sites through a Combination of Taxonomy and Folksonomy

This paper analyzes possible solutions and mechanisms to facilitate information retrieval in a corporate web site. It presents advantages and problems of taxonomies and folksonomies, and proposes a hybrid approach which combines their benefits to adaptively improve access to a web site. This approach has been tested in a real scenario by developing the Easy Access system. This practical experience introduces the “tagsonomy” mechanism, i.e. the controlled combination of a top-down classification defined by the web site content manager, and a bottom-up classification defined by users. The peculiar feature is that the folksonomy is automatically generated on the basis of the user interaction with the system, and not as the result of an explicit tagging process.

Tonal MIR: a music retrieval engine based on semantic web technologies

Within the Music Information Retrieval context, this paper describes an innovative approach to discovering music similarities. The Tonal MIR system has been designed and developed to provide a powerful and flexible music retrieval mechanism using semantic web technologies. The retrieval process is based on an algorithm consisting of two main phases: the preprocessing, that converts an audio file into an XML/RDF normalized form; the matching phase, based on inference rules, that compares the normalized music excerpt with the music items stored in a database, and produces as output a list of results ranked according to a similarity degree.

Guidelines to Design Inclusive Ambient Intelligence Solutions for Human Activity Sharing

The objective of this work is to suggest criteria and guidelines that can be used to design inclusive technological solutions to support human activity sharing in the context of Ambient Intelligence. These guidelines derive from the analysis of previous works in related fields such as cognitive engineering, usability, inclusive design and accessibility. The first step of this work was the definition of a number of principles that enable humans to interact with the environment and with other people through the environment. Each principle is further defined by a number of guidelines that more concretely explain how to satisfy it. The modular organization of the guidelines enables them to be applied for two purposes: the first six principles can be used to guide the design of a generic inclusive Ambient Intelligence system, all together are specifically oriented to the design of human activity sharing systems.

Experiences of Knowledge Visualization in Semantic Web Applications

There is an increasing need for usable tools to support knowledge elicitation, formalization and management. As an answer to this need, this paper describes fully integrated semantic web framework experiences, where users can represent and manage their data in a visual way, without the need of semantic web experts as intermediaries. These frameworks typically incorporate an ontology editor, a resource editor, reasoning capabilities and intuitive interaction and visualization facilities. The use of effective visualization techniques to graphically represent ontologies is investigated and the EasyOnto prototype is presented. In addition, different semantic web frameworks have been implemented as a result of research projects in different domains. In particular this paper presents the IRCS framework, an intelligent software to semantically index, search, and navigate the documentation used in water management plants, and the AWI environment, a collaborative environment aiming to collect and share knowledge of user communities, within the context of a digital factory.