Paolo Pareti

Integrating Know-How into the Linked Data Cloud

This paper presents the first framework for integrating procedural knowledge, or “know-how”, into the Linked Data Cloud. Know-how available on the Web, such as step-by-step instructions, is largely unstructured and isolated from other sources of online knowledge. To overcome these limitations, we propose extending to procedural knowledge the benefits that Linked Data has already brought to representing, retrieving and reusing declarative knowledge. We describe a framework for representing generic know-how as Linked Data and for automatically acquiring this representation from existing resources on the Web. This system also allows the automatic generation of links between different know-how resources, and between those resources and other online knowledge bases, such as DBpedia. We discuss the results of applying this framework to a real-world scenario and we show how it outperforms existing manual community-driven integration efforts.

A Linked Data Scalability Challenge: Concept Reuse Leads to Semantic Decay

The increasing amount of available Linked Data resources is laying the foundations for more advanced Semantic Web applications. One of their main limitations, however, remains the general low level of data quality. In this paper we focus on a measure of quality which is negatively affected by the increase of the available resources. We propose a measure of semantic richness of Linked Data concepts and we demonstrate our hypothesis that the more a concept is reused, the less semantically rich it becomes. This is a significant scalability issue, as one of the core aspects of Linked Data is the propagation of semantic information on the Web by reusing common terms. We prove our hypothesis with respect to our measure of semantic richness and we validate our model empirically. Finally, we suggest possible future directions to address this scalability problem.

Linking Data, Services and Human Know-How

An increasing number of everyday tasks involve a mixture of human actions and machine computation. This paper presents the first framework that allows non-programmer users to create and execute workflows where each task can be completed by a human or a machine. In this framework, humans and machines interact through a shared knowledge base which is both human and machine understandable. This knowledge base is based on the prohow Linked Data vocabulary that can represent human instructions and link them to machine functionalities. Our hypothesis is that non-programmer users can describe how to achieve certain tasks at a level of abstraction which is both human and machine understandable. This paper presents the prohow vocabulary and describes its usage within the proposed framework. We substantiate our claim with a concrete implementation of our framework and by experimental evidence.

A Linked Data Approach to Know-How

The Web is one of the major repositories of human generated know-how, such as step-by-step videos and instructions. This knowledge can be potentially reused in a wide variety of applications, but it currently suffers from a lack of structure and isolation from related knowledge. To overcome these challenges we have developed a Linked Data framework which can automate the extraction of know-how from existing Web resources and generate links to related knowledge on the Linked Data Cloud. We have implemented our framework and used it to extract a Linked Data representation of two of the largest know-how repositories on the Web. We demonstrate two possible uses of the resulting dataset of real-world know-how. Firstly, we use this dataset within a Web application to offer an integrated visualization of distributed know-how resources. Lastly, we show the potential of this dataset for inferring common sense knowledge about tasks.