Tim Finin

Why we twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities

Microblogging is a new form of communication in which users can describe their current status in short posts distributed by instant messages, mobile phones, email or the Web. Twitter, a popular microblogging tool has seen a lot of growth since it launched in October, 2006. In this paper, we present our observations of the microblogging phenomena by studying the topological and geographical properties of Twitters social network. We find that people use microblogging to talk about their daily activities and to seek or share information. Finally, we analyze the user intentions associated at a community level and show how users with similar intentions connect with each other.

KQML as an agent communication language

This paper describes the design of and experimentation with the Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language (KQML), a new language and protocol for exchanging information and knowledge. This work is part of a larger effort, the ARPA Knowledge Sharing Effort which is aimed at developing techniques and methodology for building large-scale knowledge bases which are sharable and reusable. KQML is both a message format and a message-handling protocol to support run-time knowledge sharing among agents. KQML focuses on an extensible set of performatives, which defines the permissible “speech acts” agents may use and comprise a substrate on which to develop higher-level models of interagent interaction such as contract nets and negotiation. In addition, KQML provides a basic architecture for knowledge sharing through a special class of agent called communication facilitors which coordinate the interactions of other agents. The ideas which underlie the evolving design of KQML are currently being explored through experimental prototype systems which are being used to support several testbeds in such areas as concurrent engineering, intelligent design and intelligent planning and scheduling.

Enabling technology for knowledge sharing

Building new knowledge-based systems today usually entails constructing new knowledge bases from scratch. It could instead be done by assembling reusable components. System developers would then only need to worry about creating the specialized knowledge and reasoners new to the specific task of their system. This new system would interoperate with existing systems, using them to perform some of its reasoning. In this way, declarative knowledge, problem- solving techniques, and reasoning services could all be shared among systems. This approach would facilitate building bigger and better systems cheaply. The infrastructure to support such sharing and reuse would lead to greater ubiquity of these systems, potentially transforming the knowledge industry. This article presents a vision of the future in which knowledge-based system development and operation is facilitated by infrastructure and technology for knowledge sharing. It describes an initiative currently under way to develop these ideas and suggests steps that must be taken in the future to try to realize this vision.

An ontology for context-aware pervasive computing environments

This document describes COBRA-ONT, an ontology for supporting pervasive context-aware systems. COBRA-ONT, expressed in the Web Ontology Language OWL, is a collection of ontologies for describing places, agents and events and their associated properties in an intelligent meeting-room domain. This ontology is developed as a part of the Context Broker Architecture (CoBrA), a broker-centric agent architecture that provides knowledge sharing, context reasoning and privacy protection supports for pervasive context-aware systems. We also describe an inference engine for reasoning with information expressed using the COBRA-ONT ontology and the ongoing research in using the DAML-Time ontology for context reasoning.

Swoogle: a search and metadata engine for the semantic web

Swoogle is a crawler-based indexing and retrieval system for the Semantic Web. It extracts metadata for each discovered document, and computes relations between documents. Discovered documents are also indexed by an information retrieval system which can use either character N-Gram or URIrefs as keywords to find relevant documents and to compute the similarity among a set of documents. One of the interesting properties we compute is <i>ontology rank</i>, a measure of the importance of a Semantic Web document.

SOUPA: standard ontology for ubiquitous and pervasive applications

We describe a shared ontology called SOUPA - standard ontology for ubiquitous and pervasive applications. SOUPA is designed to model and support pervasive computing applications. This ontology is expressed using the Web ontology language OWL and includes modular component vocabularies to represent intelligent agents with associated beliefs, desires, and intentions, time, space, events, user profiles, actions, and policies for security and privacy. We discuss how SOUPA can be extended and used to support the applications of CoBrA, a broker-centric agent architecture for building smart meeting rooms, and MoGATU, a peer-to-peer data management for pervasive environments.

A policy language for a pervasive computing environment

We describe a policy language designed for pervasive computing applications that is based on deontic concepts and grounded in a semantic language. The pervasive computing environments under consideration are those in which people and devices are mobile and use various wireless networking technologies to discover and access services and devices in their vicinity. Such pervasive environments lend themselves to policy-based security due to their extremely dynamic nature. Using policies allows the security functionality to be modified without changing the implementation of the entities involved. However, along with being extremely dynamic, these environments also tend to span several domains and be made up of entities of varied capabilities. A policy language for environments of this sort needs to be very expressive but lightweight and easily extensible. We demonstrate the feasibility of our policy language in pervasive environments through a prototype used as part of a secure pervasive system.

Agent communication languages: the current landscape

Despite the substantial number of multiagent systems that use an agent communication language, the dust has not yet settled over the ACL landscape. Although semantic specification issues have monopolized the debate, other important pragmatic issues must be resolved quickly if ACLs are to support the development of robust agent systems. We introduce some concepts useful in discussing agent communication languages and then compare and evaluate the two major ACLs.

The Semantic Web - ISWC 2008

Research Track.- Involving Domain Experts in Authoring OWL Ontologies.- Supporting Collaborative Ontology Development in Protege.- Identifying Potentially Important Concepts and Relations in an Ontology.- RoundTrip Ontology Authoring.- nSPARQL: A Navigational Language for RDF.- An Experimental Comparison of RDF Data Management Approaches in a SPARQL Benchmark Scenario.- Anytime Query Answering in RDF through Evolutionary Algorithms.- The Expressive Power of SPARQL.- Integrating Object-Oriented and Ontological Representations: A Case Study in Java and OWL.- Extracting Semantic Constraint from Description Text for Semantic Web Service Discovery.- Enhancing Semantic Web Services with Inheritance.- Using Semantic Distances for Reasoning with Inconsistent Ontologies.- Statistical Learning for Inductive Query Answering on OWL Ontologies.- Optimization and Evaluation of Reasoning in Probabilistic Description Logic: Towards a Systematic Approach.- Modeling Documents by Combining Semantic Concepts with Unsupervised Statistical Learning.- Comparison between Ontology Distances (Preliminary Results).- Folksonomy-Based Collabulary Learning.- Combining a DL Reasoner and a Rule Engine for Improving Entailment-Based OWL Reasoning.- Improving an RCC-Derived Geospatial Approximation by OWL Axioms.- OWL Datatypes: Design and Implementation.- Laconic and Precise Justifications in OWL.- Learning Concept Mappings from Instance Similarity.- Instanced-Based Mapping between Thesauri and Folksonomies.- Collecting Community-Based Mappings in an Ontology Repository.- Algebras of Ontology Alignment Relations.- Scalable Grounded Conjunctive Query Evaluation over Large and Expressive Knowledge Bases.- A Kernel Revision Operator for Terminologies - Algorithms and Evaluation.- Description Logic Reasoning with Decision Diagrams.- RDF123: From Spreadsheets to RDF.- Evaluating Long-Term Use of the Gnowsis Semantic Desktop for PIM.- Bringing the IPTC News Architecture into the Semantic Web.- RDFS Reasoning and Query Answering on Top of DHTs.- An Interface-Based Ontology Modularization Framework for Knowledge Encapsulation.- On the Semantics of Trust and Caching in the Semantic Web.- Semantic Web Service Choreography: Contracting and Enactment.- Formal Model for Semantic-Driven Service Execution.- Efficient Semantic Web Service Discovery in Centralized and P2P Environments.- Exploring Semantic Social Networks Using Virtual Reality.- Semantic Grounding of Tag Relatedness in Social Bookmarking Systems.- Semantic Modelling of User Interests Based on Cross-Folksonomy Analysis.- ELP: Tractable Rules for OWL 2.- Term Dependence on the Semantic Web.- Semantic Relatedness Measure Using Object Properties in an Ontology.- Semantic Web in Use Track.- Thesaurus-Based Search in Large Heterogeneous Collections.- Deploying Semantic Web Technologies for Work Integrated Learning in Industry - A Comparison: SME vs. Large Sized Company.- Creating and Using Organisational Semantic Webs in Large Networked Organisations.- An Architecture for Semantic Navigation and Reasoning with Patient Data - Experiences of the Health-e-Child Project.- Requirements Analysis Tool: A Tool for Automatically Analyzing Software Requirements Documents.- OntoNaviERP: Ontology-Supported Navigation in ERP Software Documentation.- Market Blended Insight: Modeling Propensity to Buy with the Semantic Web.- DogOnt - Ontology Modeling for Intelligent Domotic Environments.- Introducing IYOUIT.- A Semantic Data Grid for Satellite Mission Quality Analysis.- A Process Catalog for Workflow Generation.- Inference Web in Action: Lightweight Use of the Proof Markup Language.- Supporting Ontology-Based Dynamic Property and Classification in WebSphere Metadata Server.- Towards a Multimedia Content Marketplace Implementation Based on Triplespaces.- Doctoral Consortium Track.- Semantic Enrichment of Folksonomy Tagspaces.- Contracting and Copyright Issues for Composite Semantic Services.- Parallel Computation Techniques for Ontology Reasoning.- Towards Semantic Mapping for Casual Web Users.- Interactive Exploration of Heterogeneous Cultural Heritage Collections.- End-User Assisted Ontology Evolution in Uncertain Domains.- Learning Methods in Multi-grained Query Answering.

Social networks applied

Social networks have interesting properties. They influence our lives enormously without us being aware of the implications they raise. The authors investigate the following areas concerning social networks: how to exploit our unprecedented wealth of data and how we can mine social networks for purposes such as marketing campaigns; social networks as a particular form of influence, i.e.., the way that people agree on terminology and this phenomenons implications for the way we build ontologies and the Semantic Web; social networks as something we can discover from data; the use of social network information to offer a wealth of new applications such as better recommendations for restaurants, trustworthy email senders, or (maybe) blind dates; investigation of the richness and difficulty of harvesting FOAF (friend-of-a-friend) information; and by looking at how information processing is bound to social context, the resulting ways that network topologys definition determines its outcomes.