There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Knowledge Management

The major change in the second edition of this book is the addition of a new chapter on probabilistic retrieval. This chapter has been included because I think this is one of the most interesting and active areas of research in information retrieval. There are still many problems to be solved so I hope that this particular chapter will be of some help to those who want to advance the state of knowledge in this area. All the other chapters have been updated by including some of the more recent work on the topics covered. In preparing this new edition I have benefited from discussions with Bruce Croft, The material of this book is aimed at advanced undergraduate information (or computer) science students, postgraduate library science students, and research workers in the field of IR. Some of the chapters, particularly Chapter 6 * , make simple use of a little advanced mathematics. However, the necessary mathematical tools can be easily mastered from numerous mathematical texts that now exist and, in any case, references have been given where the mathematics occur. I had to face the problem of balancing clarity of exposition with density of references. I was tempted to give large numbers of references but was afraid they would have destroyed the continuity of the text. I have tried to steer a middle course and not compete with the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology. Normally one is encouraged to cite only works that have been published in some readily accessible form, such as a book or periodical. Unfortunately, much of the interesting work in IR is contained in technical reports and Ph.D. theses. For example, most the work done on the SMART system at Cornell is available only in reports. Luckily many of these are now available through the National Technical Information Service (U.S.) and University Microfilms (U.K.). I have not avoided using these sources although if the same material is accessible more readily in some other form I have given it preference. I should like to acknowledge my considerable debt to many people and institutions that have helped me. Let me say first that they are responsible for many of the ideas in this book but that only I wish to be held responsible. My greatest debt is to Karen Sparck Jones who taught me to research information retrieval as an experimental science. Nick Jardine and Robin …

Information retrieval

Though research on the Semantic Web has progressed at a steady pace, its promise has yet to be realized. One major difficulty is that, by its very nature, the Semantic Web is a large, uncensored system to which anyone may contribute. This raises the question of how much credence to give each source. We cannot expect each user to know the trustworthiness of each source, nor would we want to assign top-down or global credibility values due to the subjective nature of trust. We tackle this problem by employing a web of trust, in which each user maintains trusts in a small number of other users. We then compose these trusts into trust values for all other users. The result of our computation is not an agglomerate "trustworthiness" of each user. Instead, each user receives a personalized set of trusts, which may vary widely from person to person. We define properties for combination functions which merge such trusts, and define a class of functions for which merging may be done locally while maintaining these properties. We give examples of specific functions and apply them to data from Epinions and our BibServ bibliography server. Experiments confirm that the methods are robust to noise, and do not put unreasonable expectations on users. We hope that these methods will help move the Semantic Web closer to fulfilling its promise.

Trust management for the Semantic Web

A systematic review of open government data initiatives

Modern question answering (QA) systems need to flexibly integrate a number of components specialised to fulfil specific tasks in a QA pipeline. Key QA tasks include Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation, Relation Extraction, and Query Building. Since a number of different software components exist that implement different strategies for each of these tasks, it is a major challenge to select and combine the most suitable components into a QA system, given the characteristics of a question. We study this optimisation problem and train classifiers, which take features of a question as input and have the goal of optimising the selection of QA components based on those features. We then devise a greedy algorithm to identify the pipelines that include the suitable components and can effectively answer the given question. We implement this model within Frankenstein, a QA framework able to select QA components and compose QA pipelines. We evaluate the effectiveness of the pipelines generated by Frankenstein using the QALD and LC-QuAD benchmarks. These results not only suggest that Frankenstein precisely solves the QA optimisation problem but also enables the automatic composition of optimised QA pipelines, which outperform the static Baseline QA pipeline. Thanks to this flexible and fully automated pipeline generation process, new QA components can be easily included in Frankenstein, thus improving the performance of the generated pipelines.

Why Reinvent the Wheel: Let's Build Question Answering Systems Together

Mathematics is a ubiquitous foundation of science, technology, and engineering. Specific areas of mathematics, such as numeric and symbolic computation or logics, enjoy considerable software support. Working mathematicians have recently started to adopt Web 2.0 environments, such as blogs and wikis, but these systems lack machine support for knowledge organization and reuse, and they are disconnected from tools such as computer algebra systems or interactive proof assistants. We argue that such scenarios will benefit from Semantic Web technology.Conversely, mathematics is still underrepresented on the Web of [Linked] Data. There are mathematics-related Linked Data, for example statistical government data or scientific publication databases, but their mathematical semantics has not yet been modeled. We argue that the services for the Web of Data will benefit from a deeper representation of mathematical knowledge.Mathematical knowledge comprises structures given in a logical language --formulae, statements e.g. axioms, and theo-ries --, a mixture of rigorous natural language and symbolic notation in documents, application-specific metadata, and discussions about conceptualizations, formalizations, proofs, and counter-examples. Our review of vocabularies for representing these structures covers ontologies for mathematical problems, proofs, interlinked scientific publications, scientific discourse, as well as mathematical metadata vocabularies and domain knowledge from pure and applied mathematics.Many fields of mathematics have not yet been implemented as proper Semantic Web ontologies; however, we show that MathML and OpenMath, the standard XML-based exchange languages for mathematical knowledge, can be fully integrated with RDF representations in order to contribute existing mathematical knowledge to the Web of Data.We conclude with a roadmap for getting the mathematical Web of Data started: what datasets to publish, how to interlink them, and how to take advantage of these new connections.

/pdf/ontologies-and-languages-for-representing-mathematical-k9hlqe04tc.pdf

Ontologies and languages for representing mathematical knowledge on the Semantic Web

The increasing variety of Linked Data on the Web makes it challenging to determine the quality of this data and, subsequently, to make this information explicit to data consumers. Despite the availability of a number of tools and frameworks to assess Linked Data Quality, the output of such tools is not suitable for machine consumption, and thus consumers can hardly compare and rank datasets in the order of fitness for use. This article describes a conceptual methodology for assessing Linked Datasets, and Luzzu; a framework for Linked Data Quality Assessment. Luzzu is based on four major components: (1) an extensible interface for defining new quality metrics; (2) an interoperable, ontology-driven back-end for representing quality metadata and quality problems that can be re-used within different semantic frameworks; (3) scalable dataset processors for data dumps, SPARQL endpoints, and big data infrastructures; and (4) a customisable ranking algorithm taking into account user-defined weights. We show that Luzzu scales linearly against the number of triples in a dataset. We also demonstrate the applicability of the Luzzu framework by evaluating and analysing a number of statistical datasets against a variety of metrics. This article contributes towards the definition of a holistic data quality lifecycle, in terms of the co-evolution of linked datasets, with the final aim of improving their quality.

Luzzu—A Methodology and Framework for Linked Data Quality Assessment

The increasing adoption of the Linked Data principles brought with it an unprecedented dimension to the Web, transforming the traditional Web of Documents to a vibrant information ecosystem, also known as the Web of Data. This transformation, however, does not come without any pain points. Similar to the Web of Documents, the Web of Data is heterogenous in terms of the various domains it covers. The diversity of the Web of Data is also reflected in its quality. Data quality impacts the fitness for use of the data for the application at hand, and choosing the right dataset is often a challenge for data consumers. In this quantitative empirical survey, we analyse 130 datasets (≈ 3.7 billion quads), extracted from the latest Linked Open Data Cloud using 27 Linked Data quality metrics, and provide insights into the current quality conformance. Furthermore, we publish the quality metadata for each assessed dataset as Linked Data, using the Dataset Quality Vocabulary (daQ). This metadata is then used by data consumers to search and filter possible datasets based on different quality criteria. Thereafter, based on our empirical study, we present an aggregated view of the Linked Data quality in general. Finally, using the results obtained from the quality assessment empirical study, we use the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) test in order to identify the key quality indicators that can give us sufficient information about a dataset’s quality.

Evaluating the quality of the LOD cloud: An empirical investigation

SWiM is a semantic wiki for collaboratively building, editing and browsing mathematical knowledge represented in the domain-specific structural semantic markup language OMDoc. It motivates users to contribute to collections of mathematical knowledge by instantly sharing the benefits of knowledge-powered services with them. SWiM is currently being used for authoring content dictionaries, i. e. collections of uniquely identified mathematical symbols, and prepared for managing a large-scale proof formalisation effort.

http://www.ceur-ws.org/Vol-206/paper15.pdf

Christoph Lange

Papers

Why Reinvent the Wheel: Let's Build Question Answering Systems Together

Ontologies and languages for representing mathematical knowledge on the Semantic Web

Luzzu—A Methodology and Framework for Linked Data Quality Assessment

Evaluating the quality of the LOD cloud: An empirical investigation

SWiM - a semantic wiki for mathematical knowledge management