Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Welcome to the Proceedings of the first IFIP WG 2.12 & WG 12.4 International Workshop on Web Semantics (SWWS’05). This book reflects the issues raised and presented during the SWWS workshop which proves to be an interdisciplinary forum for subject matters involving the theory and practice of web semantics. A special session on Regulatory Ontologies has been organized to allow researcher of different backgrounds (such as Law, Business, Ontologies, artificial intelligence, philosophy, and lexical semantics) to meet and exchange ideas.

This first year, a total of 35 papers were submitted to SWWS. Each submission was reviewed by at least two experts. The papers were judged according to their originality, validity, significance to theory and practice, readability and organization, and relevancy to the workshop topics and beyond. This resulted in the selection of 18 papers for presentation at the workshop and publication in this proceedings. We feel that these Proceedings will inspire further research and create an intense following. The Program Committee comprised: Aldo Gangemi, Amit Sheth, Androod Nikvesh, Mihaela Ulieru, Mohand-Said Hacid, Mukesh Mohania, Mustafa Jarrar, Nicola Guarino, Peter Spyns, Pieree Yves Schobbens, Qing Li, Radboud Winkels, Ramasamy Uthurusamy, Richard Benjamins, Rita Temmerman, Robert Meersman, Robert Tolksdorf, Said Tabet, Stefan Decker, Susan Urban, Tharam Dillon, Trevor Bench-Capon, Usuama Fayed, Valentina Tamma, Wil van der Aalst, York Sure, and Zahir Tari.

In this paper we outline the architecture of a peer-to-peer Trust Layer that can be superimposed to metadata generators producing classifications, like our ClassBuilder and BTExact’s iPHI tools. Different techniques for aggregating trust values are also discussed. Our ongoing experimentation is aimed at validating the role of a Trust Layer as a non-intrusive, peer-to-peer technique for improving quality of automatically generated metadata.

In automated and unsupervised multi-agent environments, where agents act on behalf of their stakeholders, the measurement and computation of trust is a key building block upon which all business interaction scenarios rely. In environments, where the individual and independent calculation of trustworthiness values for future negotiation partners is desired, flexible algorithms and models imitating human reasoning are crucial. This paper introduces a trust evaluation model that imitates human reasoning by using fuzzy logic concepts. Furthermore, post-interaction processes such as business interaction reviews and credibility adjustment are used to continuously build and refine an information repository for future trust evaluation processes. Fuzzy logic offers a mathematical approach encompassing uncertainty and tolerance of imprecise data, and combined with our highly customizable model, it allows to meet the security needs of different stakeholders.

Semantic Web provides tools for expressing information in a machine accessible form where agents (human or software) can understand it. Ontology is required to describe the semantics of concepts and properties used in web documents. Ontology is needed to describe products, services, processes and practices in any e-commerce application. Ontology plays an essential role in recognizing the meaning of the information in Web documents. This paper attempts to deploy these concepts in an e-law application. E-laws ontology has been built using existing resources. It has been shown that extracting concepts is less hard than building relationships among them. A new algorithm has been proposed to reduce the number of relationships, so the domain knowledge expert (i.e. lawyer) can refine these relationships.

Distribution of multimedia copyrighted material is a hot topic for the music and entertainment industry. Piracy, peer to peer networks and portable devices make multimedia content easily transferable without respecting the associated rights and protection mechanisms. Standard and industry-led initiatives try to prevent this unauthorised usage by means of electronic protection and governance mechanisms. On the other hand, different organisations have been handling related legal issues by means of paper contracts. Now, the question is: How can we relate electronic protection measures with the paper contracts behind them?

This paper presents an analysis of current contract clauses and an approach to generate, from them, standardised rights expressions, or licenses, in an as automatic as possible way. A mapping between those contract clauses and MPEG-21 REL (Rights Expression Language), the most promising rights expressions standard, is also proposed, including an initial relational model database structure. An ontology-based approach for the problem is also pointed out. If contract clauses could be expressed as part of an ontology, this would facilitate the automatic licenses generation. Generic contracts ontologies and specific intellectual property rights ontologies would be the starting point, together with the presented analysis.

The SEKT Project aims at developing and exploiting the knowledge technologies which underlie the Next Generation Knowledge Management, connecting complementary know-how of key European centers in three areas: Ontology Management Technology, Knowledge Discovery and Human Language Technology. This paper describes the development of PROTON, an upper-level ontology developed by Ontotext, and of the Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge (OPJK), modeled by a team of legal experts form the Institute of Law and Technology (IDT-UAB) for the prototype (a webbased intelligent FAQ for the Spanish judges on their first appointment designed by iSOCO). The paper focuses on the work done towards the integration of the OPJK built using a middle-out strategy into the system and top modules of PROTON, illustrating the flexibility of this independent upper-level ontology.

Web services have become the predominant paradigm for the development of distributed software systems. Web services provide the means to modularize software in a way that functionality can be described, discovered and deployed in a platform independent manner over a network (e.g., intranets, extranets and the Internet). The representation of web services by current industrial practice is predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinnings required to fulfill the goals of the emerging Semantic Web. This paper proposes a framework aimed at (1) modeling the semantics of syntactically defined web services through a process of interpretation, (2) scoping the derived concepts within domain ontologies, and (3) harmonizing the semantic web services with the domain ontologies. The framework was validated through its application to web services developed for a large financial system. The worked example presented in this paper is extracted from the semantic modeling of these financial web services.

To remain competitive, enterprises have to mesh their business processes with their customers, suppliers and business partners. Increasing collaboration includes not only a global multi-national enterprise, but also an organization with its relationship to and business processes with its business partners. Standards and technologies permit business partners to exchange information, collaboration and carry out business transaction in a pervasive Web environment. There is however still very limited research activity on modeling multi-party Web-based business collaboration underlying semantics. In this paper, we demonstrate that an in-house business process has been gradually outsourced to third-parties and analyze how task delegations cause commitments between multiple business parties. Finally we provide process semantics for modeling multi-party Web-based collaborations.

Mobile access to the Internet is increasing drastically, and this is raising the importance of information retrieval via mobile units. We have developed a task-oriented service navigation system [6] that allows a user to find the mobile contents desired from the viewpoint of the task that the user wants to do. However, the user is still faced with the problem of having to select the most appropriate task from among the vast number of task candidates; this is difficult due to the fact that mobile devices have several limitations such as small displays and poor input methods. This paper tackles this issue by proposing a framework for retrieving only those tasks that suit the abstraction level of the user’s intention. If the user has settled on a specific object, the abstraction level is concrete, and tasks related to the handling of the specific object are selected; if not, tasks related to general objects are selected. Finally, we introduce two task retrieval applications that realize the proposed framework. By using this framework, we can reduce the number of retrieved tasks irrelevant to the user; simulations show that roughly 30% fewer tasks are displayed to the user as retrieval results.

The Business Case for Semantic Web requires reports on its usefulness in real-life scenarios. In this study we introduce a framework for analysing potential application scenarios of the Semantic Web, which is based on the concept of added value. Based on this analysis, we have formulated a hypothetical life cycle of Semantic Web technologies in corporate IT infrastructures. It identifies corporate knowledge management as the application area, where a killer application is most likely to be developed. As a proof of concept the design, deployment and evaluation of a Skills Management system is presented.