Valentina Presutti

Towards a pattern science for the Semantic Web

With the web of data, the semantic web can be an empirical science. Two problems have to be dealt with. The knowledge soup problem is about semantic heterogeneity, and can be considered a difficult technical issue, which needs appropriate transformation and inferential pipelines that can help making sense of the different knowledge contexts. The knowledge boundary problem is at the core of empirical investigation over the semantic web: what are the meaningful units that constitute the research objects for the semantic web? This question touches many aspects of semantic web studies: data, schemata, representation and reasoning, interaction, linguistic grounding, etc.

FRED: From Natural Language Text to RDF and OWL in One Click

FRED is an online tool for converting text into internally well-connected and quality linked-data-ready ontologies in web-service-acceptable time. It implements a novel approach for ontology design from natural language sentences. In this paper we present a demonstration of such tool combining Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), linguistic frame semantics, and Ontology Design Patterns (ODP). The tool is based on Boxer which implements a DRT-compliant deep parser. The logical output of Boxer enriched with semantic data from Verbnet or Framenet frames is transformed into RDF/OWL by means of a mapping model and a set of heuristics following ODP best-practice [5] of OWL ontologies and RDF data design.

Correct Components Assembly for a Product Data Management Cooperative System

In this paper we report on a case study of correct automatic assembly of software components. We show the application of our tool (called Synthesis) for correct components assembly to a software system in the area of CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work). More specifically we consider a product data management (PDM) cooperative system which has been developed by the company Think3 in Bologna, ITALY (www.think3.com). In the area of CSCW, the automatic enforcing of desired interactions among the components forming the system requires the ability to properly manage the dynamic interactions of the components. Moreover once a customer acquires a CSCW system, the vendor of the CSCW system has to spend many further resources in order to integrate the CSCW system with the client applications used by the customer organization. Thus the full automation of the phase of integration code development has a great influence for a good setting of a CSCW system on the market. We present the application of our approach and we describe our experience in automatic derivation of the code which integrates the components forming the PDM cooperative system above mentioned. The case study we treat in this paper represent the first attempt to, successfully, apply Synthesis in real-scale contexts.

WikiFactory: an ontology-based application for creating domain-oriented wikis

Wikis play a leading role among the web publishing environments, being collaborative tools used for fast and easy writing and sharing of content. Although powerful and widely used, wikis do not support users in the aided generation of content specific for a given domain but they still require manual, time-consuming and error-prone interventions. On the other hand, semantic portals support users in browsing, searching and managing content related to a given domain, by exploiting ontologies. In this paper we propose a specific application of web ontologies, applied to the wikis: exploiting an ontological description of a domain in order to deploy a customized wiki for that specific domain. We describe the design of an ontology-based framework, named WikiFactory, that aids users to automatically generate a complex and complete wiki website related to a specific area of interest with few efforts. In order to show the applicability of our framework, we present a specific case study that describes the main WikiFactory capabilities in constructing the wiki website for a Computer Science Department in a University.

An OWL-S based approach to express grid services coordination

E-science and e-business share the need of a middleware that integrates dynamic services running on distributed, heterogeneous platforms. The Grid community is addressing this problem by moving towards Web services as it is proposed in the Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA). In this paper we discuss the benefits of using an ontology driven approach to Grid services in order to enhance their composability thus enabling the submission of multiple interoperating jobs. Specifically we introduce an OWL-S extension to describe relations among Grid jobs in order to express coordination-related aspects. This enables to expose coordination requirements in an orthogonal way with respect to single jobs management. As a proof of concept we use this extension to express relations among jobs in order to support the automation of the matchmaking of resources.

Towards Ontology Driven Software Design

The World Wide Web represents a new space through which any kind of organization can offer services and data. The huge diffusion of this Internet service has led to develop a new kind of software systems, called Web applications.

Legalo: Revealing the Semantics of Links

Links in webpages carry an intended semantics: usually, they indicate a relation between two things, a subject (something referenced to within the web page) and an object (the target webpage of the link, or something referred to within it). We designed and implemented a novel system, named Legalo, which uncovers the intended semantics of links by defining Semantic Web properties that capture its meaning. Legalo properties can be used for tagging links with semantic relations. The system can be used at http://wit.istc.cnr.it/stlab-tools/legalo.