http://staffwww.dcs.shef.ac.uk/people/F.Ciravegna/paperi/webSemantics2006.pdf

Semantic annotation for knowledge management: Requirements and a survey of the state of the art

We present a novel approach to the automatic acquisition of taxonomies or concept hierarchies from a text corpus. The approach is based on Formal Concept Analysis (FCA), a method mainly used for the analysis of data, i.e. for investigating and processing explicitly given information. We follow Harris' distributional hypothesis and model the context of a certain term as a vector representing syntactic dependencies which are automatically acquired from the text corpus with a linguistic parser. On the basis of this context information, FCA produces a lattice that we convert into a special kind of partial order constituting a concept hierarchy. The approach is evaluated by comparing the resulting concept hierarchies with hand-crafted taxonomies for two domains: tourism and finance. We also directly compare our approach with hierarchical agglomerative clustering as well as with Bi-Section-KMeans as an instance of a divisive clustering algorithm. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of using different measures weighting the contribution of each attribute as well as of applying a particular smoothing technique to cope with data sparseness.

/pdf/learning-concept-hierarchies-from-text-corpora-using-formal-2jhbdhcmw9.pdf

Learning concept hierarchies from text corpora using formal concept analysis

In this paper we provide a comprehensive introduction to knowledge graphs,
which have recently garnered significant attention from both industry and
academia in scenarios that require exploiting diverse, dynamic, large-scale
collections of data. After some opening remarks, we motivate and contrast
various graph-based data models and query languages that are used for knowledge
graphs. We discuss the roles of schema, identity, and context in knowledge
graphs. We explain how knowledge can be represented and extracted using a
combination of deductive and inductive techniques. We summarise methods for the
creation, enrichment, quality assessment, refinement, and publication of
knowledge graphs. We provide an overview of prominent open knowledge graphs and
enterprise knowledge graphs, their applications, and how they use the
aforementioned techniques. We conclude with high-level future research
directions for knowledge graphs.

Knowledge Graphs

This is a thought piece on data-intensive science requirements for databases and science centers. It argues that peta-scale datasets will be housed by science centers that provide substantial storage and processing for scientists who access the data via smart notebooks. Next-generation science instruments and simulations will generate these peta-scale datasets. The need to publish and share data and the need for generic analysis and visualization tools will finally create a convergence on common metadata standards. Database systems will be judged by their support of these metadata standards and by their ability to manage and access peta-scale datasets. The procedural stream-of-bytes-file-centric approach to data analysis is both too cumbersome and too serial for such large datasets. Non-procedural query and analysis of schematized self-describing data is both easier to use and allows much more parallelism.

Scientific Data Management in the Coming Decade

In order to obtain a machine understandable semantics for web resources, research on the Semantic Web tries to annotate web resources with concepts and relations from explicitly defined formal ontologies. This kind of formal annotation is usually done manually or semi-automatically. In this paper, we explore a complement approach that focuses on the "social annotations of the web" which are annotations manually made by normal web users without a pre-defined formal ontology. Compared to the formal annotations, although social annotations are coarse-grained, informal and vague, they are also more accessible to more people and better reflect the web resources' meaning from the users' point of views during their actual usage of the web resources. Using a social bookmark service as an example, we show how emergent semantics [2] can be statistically derived from the social annotations. Furthermore, we apply the derived emergent semantics to discover and search shared web bookmarks. The initial evaluation on our implementation shows that our method can effectively discover semantically related web bookmarks that current social bookmark service can not discover easily.

/pdf/exploring-social-annotations-for-the-semantic-web-3ntk53v51h.pdf

Exploring social annotations for the semantic web

Without the proliferation of formal semantic annotations, the Semantic Web is certainly doomed to failure. In earlier work we presented a new paradigm to avoid this: the 'Self Annotating Web', in which globally available knowledge is used to annotate resources such as web pages. In particular, we presented a concrete method instantiating this paradigm, called PANKOW (Pattern-based ANnotation through Knowledge On the Web). In PANKOW, a named entity to be annotated is put into several linguistic patterns that convey competing semantic meanings. The patterns that are matched most often on the Web indicate the meaning of the named entity --- leading to automatic or semi-automatic annotation.In this paper we present C-PANKOW (Context-driven PANKOW), which alleviates several shortcomings of PANKOW. First, by downloading abstracts and processing them off-line, we avoid the generation of large number of linguistic patterns and correspondingly large number of Google queries.Second, by linguistically analyzing and normalizing the downloaded abstracts, we increase the coverage of our pattern matching mechanism and overcome several limitations of the earlier pattern generation process. Third, we use the annotation context in order to distinguish the significance of a pattern match for the given annotation task. Our experiments show that C-PANKOW inherits all the advantages of PANKOW (no training required etc.), but in addition it is far more efficient and effective.

/pdf/gimme-the-context-context-driven-automatic-semantic-3yfoc6sxlc.pdf

Gimme' the context: context-driven automatic semantic annotation with C-PANKOW

In this paper we present FedBench, a comprehensive benchmark suite for testing and analyzing the performance of federated query processing strategies on semantic data. The major challenge lies in the heterogeneity of semantic data use cases, where applications may face different settings at both the data and query level, such as varying data access interfaces, incomplete knowledge about data sources, availability of different statistics, and varying degrees of query expressiveness. Accounting for this heterogeneity, we present a highly flexible benchmark suite, which can be customized to accommodate a variety of use cases and compare competing approaches. We discuss design decisions, highlight the flexibility in customization, and elaborate on the choice of data and query sets. The practicability of our benchmark is demonstrated by a rigorous evaluation of various application scenarios, where we indicate both the benefits as well as limitations of the state-of-the-art federated query processing strategies for semantic data.

/pdf/fedbench-a-benchmark-suite-for-federated-semantic-data-query-4ss9n0hb69.pdf

FedBench: a benchmark suite for federated semantic data query processing

Recently, processing of queries on linked data has gained attention. We identify and systematically discuss three main strategies: a bottom-up strategy that discovers new sources during query processing by following links between sources, a top-down strategy that relies on complete knowledge about the sources to select and process relevant sources, and a mixed strategy that assumes some incomplete knowledge and discovers new sources at run-time. To exploit knowledge discovered at run-time, we propose an additional step, explicitly scheduled during query processing, called correct source ranking. Additionally, we propose the adoption of stream-based query processing to deal with the unpredictable nature of data access in the distributed Linked Data environment. In experiments, we show that our implementation of the mixed strategy leads to early reporting of results and thus, more responsive query processing, while not requiring complete knowledge.

/pdf/linked-data-query-processing-strategies-412fx4dxmp.pdf

Linked data query processing strategies

The amount of Linked Data is increasing steadily. Optimized top-down Linked Data query processing based on complete knowledge about all sources, bottom-up processing based on run-time discovery of sources as well as a mixed strategy that combines them have been proposed. A particular problem with Linked Data processing is that the heterogeneity of the sources and access options lead to varying input latency, rendering the application of blocking join operators infeasible. Previous work partially address this by proposing a non-blocking iterator-based operator and another one based on symmetric-hash join. Here, we propose detailed cost models for these two operators to systematically compare them, and to allow for query optimization. Further, we propose a novel operator called the Symmetric Index Hash Join to address one open problem of Linked Data query processing: to query not only remote, but also local Linked Data. We perform experiments on real-world datasets to compare our approach against the iterator-based baseline, and create a synthetic dataset to more systematically analyze the impacts of the individual components captured by the proposed cost models.

/pdf/sihjoin-querying-remote-and-local-linked-data-3cgfi6999i.pdf

SIHJoin: querying remote and local linked data

We propose the use of a structure index for RDF. It can be used for querying RDF data for which the schema is incomplete or not available. More importantly, we leverage it for a structure-oriented approach to RDF data partitioning and query processing. Based on information captured by the structure index, similarly structured data elements are physically grouped and stored contiguously on disk. At querying time, the index is used for "structure-level" processing to identify the groups of data that match the query structure. Structure-level processing is then combined with standard "data-level" operations that involve retrieval and join procedures executed against the data. In the experiment, our solution provides several times faster performance than a state-of-the-art technique for data partitioning and query processing, and compares favorably with full-fledged RDF stores.

Günter Ladwig

Papers

Gimme' the context: context-driven automatic semantic annotation with C-PANKOW

FedBench: a benchmark suite for federated semantic data query processing

Linked data query processing strategies

SIHJoin: querying remote and local linked data

Managing Structured and Semistructured RDF Data Using Structure Indexes