KMi Seminars
Conceptual Situation Spaces for Situation-Driven Processes
This event took place on Wednesday 21 May 2008 at 11:30

Dr. Stefan Dietze Knowledge Media Institute (KMi)

Context-awareness is a highly desired feature across several application domains. Semantic Web Services (SWS) technologies address context-adaptation by enabling the automatic discovery of distributed Web services for a given task based on comprehensive semantic representations. Whereas SWS technology supports the allocation of resources based on semantics, it does not entail the discovery of appropriate SWS representations for a given situation. Describing the complex notion of a situation in all its facets through symbolic SWS representation facilities is a costly task which may never lead to semantic completeness and introduces ambiguity issues. Moreover, even though not any real-world situation completely equals another, it has to be matched to a finite set of parameter descriptions within SWS representations to enable context-adaptability. To overcome these issues, we propose Conceptual Situation Spaces (CSS) to facilitate the description of situation characteristics as members in geometrical vector spaces following the idea of Conceptual Spaces. CSS enable fuzzy similarity-based matchmaking between real-world situation characteristics and predefined situation descriptions. Following our vision, the latter are part of semantic Situation-Driven Process (SDP) descriptions, which define a composition of SWS Goals suitable to support the course of an evolving situation. Particularly, we refer to the WSMO approach for SWS. Consequently, our approach extends the expressiveness of WSMO by enabling the automatic discovery, composition and execution of achievable goals for a given situation. To prove the feasibility, we provide a proof-of-concept prototype.

 
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Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...


Semantic Web and Knowledge Services
"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation" (Berners-Lee et al., 2001).

Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...

Our aim is to be at the forefront of both theoretical and practical developments on the Semantic Web not only by developing theories and models, but also by building concrete applications, for a variety of domains and user communities, including KMi and the Open University itself.