The Epistemology Of Intelligent Semantic Web Systems

The Semantic Web is a young discipline, even if only in comparison to other areas of computer science. Nonetheless, it already exhibits an interesting history and evolution. This book is a reflection on this evolution, aiming to take a snapshot of where we are at this specific point in time, and also showing what might be the focus of future research. This book provides both a conceptual and practical view of this evolution, especially targeted at readers who are starting research in this area and as support material for their supervisors. From a conceptual point of view, it highlights and discusses key questions that have animated the research community: what does it mean to be a Semantic Web system and how is it different from other types of systems, such as knowledge systems or web-based information systems? From a more practical point of view, the core of the book introduces a simple conceptual framework which characterizes Intelligent Semantic Web Systems. We describe this framework, the components it includes, and give pointers to some of the approaches and technologies that might be used to implement them. We also look in detail at concrete systems falling under the category of Intelligent Semantic Web Systems, according to the proposed framework, allowing us to compare them, analyze their strengths and weaknesses, and identify the key fundamental challenges still open for researchers to tackle.

In this book, internationally recognized experts in philosophy of science, computer science, and modeling and simulation are contributing to the discussion on how ontology, epistemology, and teleology will contribute to enable the next generation of intelligent modeling and simulation applications. It is well understood that a simulation can provide the technical means to display the behavior of a system over time, including following observed trends to predict future possible states, but how reliable and trustworthy are such predictions? The questions about what we can know (ontology), how we gain new knowledge (epistemology), and what we do with this knowledge (teleology) are therefore illuminated from these very different perspectives, as each experts uses a different facet to look at these challenges. The result of bringing these perspectives into one book is a challenging compendium that gives room for a spectrum of challenges: from general philosophy questions, such as can we use modeling and simulation and other computational means at all to discover new knowledge, down to computational methods to improve semantic interoperability between systems or methods addressing how to apply the recent insights of service oriented approaches to support distributed artificial intelligence. As such, this book has been compiled as an entry point to new domains for students, scholars, and practitioners and to raise the curiosity in them to learn more to fully address the topics of ontology, epistemology, and teleology from philosophical, computational, and conceptual viewpoints.

This volume contains the papers presented at IALCCE2018, the Sixth International Symposium on Life-Cycle Civil Engineering (IALCCE2018), held in Ghent, Belgium, October 28-31, 2018. It consists of a book of extended abstracts and a USB device with full papers including the Fazlur R. Khan lecture, 8 keynote lectures, and 390 technical papers from all over the world. Contributions relate to design, inspection, assessment, maintenance or optimization in the framework of life-cycle analysis of civil engineering structures and infrastructure systems. Life-cycle aspects that are developed and discussed range from structural safety and durability to sustainability, serviceability, robustness and resilience. Applications relate to buildings, bridges and viaducts, highways and runways, tunnels and underground structures, off-shore and marine structures, dams and hydraulic structures, prefabricated design, infrastructure systems, etc. During the IALCCE2018 conference a particular focus is put on the cross-fertilization between different sub-areas of expertise and the development of an overall vision for life-cycle analysis in civil engineering. The aim of the editors is to provide a valuable source of cutting edge information for anyone interested in life-cycle analysis and assessment in civil engineering, including researchers, practising engineers, consultants, contractors, decision makers and representatives from local authorities.

This book introduces core natural language processing (NLP) technologies to non-experts in an easily accessible way, as a series of building blocks that lead the user to understand key technologies, why they are required, and how to integrate them into Semantic Web applications. Natural language processing and Semantic Web technologies have different, but complementary roles in data management. Combining these two technologies enables structured and unstructured data to merge seamlessly. Semantic Web technologies aim to convert unstructured data to meaningful representations, which benefit enormously from the use of NLP technologies, thereby enabling applications such as connecting text to Linked Open Data, connecting texts to each other, semantic searching, information visualization, and modeling of user behavior in online networks. The first half of this book describes the basic NLP processing tools: tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, and morphological analysis, in addition to the main tools required for an information extraction system (named entity recognition and relation extraction) which build on these components. The second half of the book explains how Semantic Web and NLP technologies can enhance each other, for example via semantic annotation, ontology linking, and population. These chapters also discuss sentiment analysis, a key component in making sense of textual data, and the difficulties of performing NLP on social media, as well as some proposed solutions. The book finishes by investigating some applications of these tools, focusing on semantic search and visualization, modeling user behavior, and an outlook on the future.

After a slow incubation period of nearly 15 years, a large and growing number of organizations now have one or more projects using the Semantic Web stack of technologies. The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is an essential ingredient in this stack, and the need for ontologists is increasing faster than the number and variety of available resources for learning OWL. This is especially true for the primary target audience for this book: modelers who want to build OWL ontologies for practical use in enterprise and government settings. The purpose of this book is to speed up the process of learning and mastering OWL. To that end, the focus is on the 30% of OWL that gets used 90% of the time. Others who may benefit from this book include technically oriented managers, semantic technology developers, undergraduate and post-graduate students, and finally, instructors looking for new ways to explain OWL. The book unfolds in a spiral manner, starting with the core ideas. Each subsequent cycle reinforces and expands on what has been learned in prior cycles and introduces new related ideas. Part 1 is a cook's tour of ontology and OWL, giving an informal overview of what things need to be said to build an ontology, followed by a detailed look at how to say them in OWL. This is illustrated using a healthcare example. Part 1 concludes with an explanation of some foundational ideas about meaning and semantics to prepare the reader for subsequent chapters. Part 2 goes into depth on properties and classes, which are the core of OWL. There are detailed descriptions of the main constructs that you are likely to need in every day modeling, including what inferences are sanctioned. Each is illustrated with real-world examples. Part 3 explains and illustrates how to put OWL into practice, using examples in healthcare, collateral, and financial transactions. A small ontology is described for each, along with some key inferences. Key limitations of OWL are identified, along with possible workarounds. The final chapter gives a variety of practical tips and guidelines to send the reader on their way.

The Semantic Web combines the descriptive languages RDF (Resource Description Framework) and OWL (Web Ontology Language), with the data-centric, customizable XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language) to provide descriptions of the content of Web documents. These machine-interpretable descriptions allow more intelligent software systems to be written, automating the analysis and exploitation of web-based information. Software agents will be able to create automatically new services from already published services, with potentially huge implications for models of e-Business. Semantic Web Technologies provides a comprehensive overview of key semantic knowledge technologies and research. The authors explain (semi-)automatic ontology generation and metadata extraction in depth, along with ontology management and mediation. Further chapters examine how Semantic Web technology is being applied in knowledge management (“Semantic Information Access”) and in the next generation of Web services. Semantic Web Technologies: Provides a comprehensive exposition of the state-of-the art in Semantic Web research and key technologies. Explains the use of ontologies and metadata to achieve machine-interpretability. Describes methods for ontology learning and metadata generation. Discusses ontology management and evolution, covering ontology change detection and propagation, ontology dependency and mediation. Illustrates the theoretical concepts with three case studies on industrial applications in digital libraries, the legal sector and the telecommunication industry. Graduate and advanced undergraduate students, academic and industrial researchers in the field will all find Semantic Web Technologies an essential guide to the technologies of the Semantic Web.

Ontologies have become increasingly important as the use of knowledge graphs, machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and the amount of data generated on a daily basis has exploded. As of 2014, 90% of the data in the digital universe was generated in the two years prior, and the volume of data was projected to grow from 3.2 zettabytes to 40 zettabytes in the next six years. The very real issues that government, research, and commercial organizations are facing in order to sift through this amount of information to support decision-making alone mandate increasing automation. Yet, the data profiling, NLP, and learning algorithms that are ground-zero for data integration, manipulation, and search provide less than satisfactory results unless they utilize terms with unambiguous semantics, such as those found in ontologies and well-formed rule sets. Ontologies can provide a rich "schema" for the knowledge graphs underlying these technologies as well as the terminological and semantic basis for dramatic improvements in results. Many ontology projects fail, however, due at least in part to a lack of discipline in the development process. This book, motivated by the Ontology 101 tutorial given for many years at what was originally the Semantic Technology Conference (SemTech) and then later from a semester-long university class, is designed to provide the foundations for ontology engineering. The book can serve as a course textbook or a primer for all those interested in ontologies.