Reasoning Web Semantic Technologies For Information Systems

This book contains a collection of revised tutorial papers based on lectures given by researchers at the 5th International Summer School on the Reasoning Web. It introduces semantic web methods and research issues with a particular emphasis on reasoning.

This book contains a collection of revised tutorial papers based on lectures given by researchers at the 5th International Summer School on the Reasoning Web. It introduces semantic web methods and research issues with a particular emphasis on reasoning.

Welcome to the proceedings of Reasoning Web 2010 which was held in Dresden. Reasoning Web is a summer school series on theoretical foundations,contemporary approaches, and practical solutions for reasoning in a Web of Semantics. It has est- lished itself as a meeting point for experts from research institutes and industry, as well as students undertakingtheir PhDs in related ?elds. This volume contains tutorial notes of the sixth school in the series, held from August 30 to September 3, 2010. This year, the school focused on applications of semantic technologies in software engineeringandthereasoningtechnologiesappropriateforsuchanendeavor. Asit turns out, semantic technologies in software engineering are not so easily applied, and s- eral issues mustbe resolvedbeforesoftware modelingcanbene?t fromreasoning. First, reasoning has to be fast and scalable, since models and programscan be quite large and voluminous. SincemanyreasoninglanguagesareexponentialorNP-complete,appro- mation, incrementalization,and other optimizationtechniques are extremelyimportant. Second, software engineering needs to model software systems, in contrast to mod- ing domains of the world. Thus, the modeling techniques are prescriptive rather than descriptive [1], which in?uences the way models are reasoned about. When a software system is modeled, its behavior is prescribed by the model, that is, “the truth is in the model”[2]; when a domainof the world is described,its behaviorcannotbe prescribed, only described by the model (“the truth is in the world”). Therefore, reasoning has to distinguish between prescriptiveness and descriptiveness, leading to different assu- tions about the closeness or openness of the world (closed-world assumption, CWA vs. open-world assumption, OWA).

The Semantic Web aims at enriching the existing Web with meta-data and processing methods so as to provide web-based systems with advanced capabilities, in particular with context awareness and decision support. The objective of this book is to provide a coherent introduction to semantic web methods and research issues with a particular emphasis on reasoning. The 7th reasoning web Summer School, held in August 2011, focused on the central topic of applications of reasoning for the emerging “Web of Data”. The 12 chapters in the present book provide excellent educational material as well as a number of references for further reading. The book not only addresses students working in the area, but also those seeking an entry point to various topics related to reasoning over Web data.

This volume contains the lecture notes of the 9th Reasoning Web Summer School 2013, held in Mannheim, Germany, in July/August 2013. The 2013 summer school program covered diverse aspects of Web reasoning, ranging from scalable lightweight formalisms such as RDF to more expressive ontology languages based on description logics. It also featured foundational reasoning techniques used in answer set programming and ontology-based data access as well as emerging topics like geo-spatial information handling and reasoning-driven information extraction and integration.

This volume contains the lecture notes of the 8th Reasoning Web Summer School 2012, held in Vienna, Austria, in September 2012, in the form of worked out tutorial papers on the various topics that have been covered in that school. The 2012 summer school program had been put together under the general leitmotif of advanced query answering topics for the Web. The idea was to address on the one hand foundations and computational aspects of query answering, in formalisms, methods and technology, and on the other hand to also spotlight some rising or emerging application fields relating to the Semantic Web in which query answering plays a role, and which by their nature also pose new challenges and problems for this task; linked stream processing, geospatial data, semantic wikis, and argumentation on the web fall in this category.