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Journal ArticleDOI

Building a Pragmatic Semantic Web

01 May 2008-IEEE Intelligent Systems (IEEE)-Vol. 23, Iss: 3, pp 61-68
TL;DR: A practical approach to adopting semantic Web technologies enables large organizations to share data while achieving clear private as well as public reuse benefits.
Abstract: Many real-world tasks require the acquisition and integration of information from a distributed set of heterogeneous sources. Hence, there's no shortage of opportunities for applications using Semantic Web (SW) technologies. The power of publishing and linking data in a way that machines can automatically interpret through ontologies is beginning to materialize. However, market penetration level is relatively low, and it's still no routine matter for an enterprise, organization, governmental agency, or business with large distributed databases to add them to the Web of linked and semantically enriched data. In part, they may suspect that they're expected to pioneer an approach in which quick wins are few. Moreover, cost and privacy issues arise when ever-increasing amounts of information are linked into the Web. A practical approach to adopting semantic Web technologies enables large organizations to share data while achieving clear private as well as public reuse benefits.

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Citations
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Book
09 Oct 2020
TL;DR: The State of Open Data brings together over 60 authors from around the world to address these questions and to take stock of real progress made to date across sectors and around the globe, uncovering the issues that will shape the future of open data in the years to come as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: It's been ten years since open data first broke onto the global stage. Over the past decade, thousands of programmes and projects around the world have worked to open data and use it to address a myriad of social and economic challenges. Meanwhile, issues related to data rights and privacy have moved to the centre of public and political discourse. As the open data movement enters a new phase in its evolution, shifting to target real-world problems and embed open data thinking into other existing or emerging communities of practice, big questions still remain. How will open data initiatives respond to new concerns about privacy, inclusion, and artificial intelligence? And what can we learn from the last decade in order to deliver impact where it is most needed? The State of Open Data brings together over 60 authors from around the world to address these questions and to take stock of the real progress made to date across sectors and around the world, uncovering the issues that will shape the future of open data in the years to come.

71 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Surveying the recommended and emerging W3C standards, presenting an overview of the state-of-the-art in the Semantic Web research in the European Union, analysing the W 3C collection of Case studies and Use Cases, and discussing the extent of adoption ofSemantic Web technologies are shown.
Abstract: The Semantic Web is one of the fastest developing fields within the Information and Communication Technology sector and, as such, under constant examination by scientists and IT professionals. This article aims to provide a better understanding of the applicability of Semantic Web tools and technologies in practice. This aim will be achieved by surveying the recommended and emerging W3C standards, presenting an overview of the state-of-the-art in the Semantic Web research in the European Union, analysing the W3C collection of Case studies and Use Cases, and discussing the extent of adoption of Semantic Web technologies. The overall technology maturity level assessment has shown that Semantic Web technologies are finding their ways into real-world applications, and that, rather than being merely a fashionable research issue, the Semantic Web, slowly but surely, becomes our reality.

58 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The propositions that metadata, interaction mechanisms, and data quality indicators contribute to making OGD use easier and faster, and enhance the user experience are supported.
Abstract: The use of Open Government Data (OGD) has not kept pace with the expectations as existing OGD infrastructures mainly serve as data repositories. Many OGD infrastructures do not stimulate or support OGD use processes, and there is a lack of research regarding which functionalities can stimulate such processes. The objective of this study is to use a design science approach to evaluate whether metadata, interaction mechanisms, and data quality indicators can improve OGD use. OGD use comprises five main activities, namely searching for and finding OGD, OGD analysis, visualizing OGD, interacting about OGD, and OGD quality analysis. We expect that three OGD key infrastructure elements—metadata, interaction mechanisms, and data quality indicators—allow for improving these five OGD use activities. A prototype of an advanced OGD infrastructure was created, which implements the three OGD infrastructure elements. Three quasi-experiments with a pretest posttest control group design were conducted. The quasi-experiments showed that the prototype facilitated the usability of the novel OGD use functionalities. Our quasi-experiments supported our propositions that metadata, interaction mechanisms, and data quality indicators contribute to making OGD use easier and faster, and enhance the user experience. The infrastructure elements improved OGD use by better enabling searching, analyzing, visualizing, discussing, giving feedback on, and assessing the quality of open data. Hence, we plea for integrating metadata, interaction mechanisms, and data quality indicators in open data infrastructures to advance open data usage.

45 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
Jaehun Joo1
TL;DR: This paper examines the factors that affect the adoption and diffusion of the Semantic Web by using a grounded theory approach and identified five factors including demand pull including requirements for solving search and integration problems of existing systems and for creating new services.
Abstract: This paper examines the factors that affect the adoption and diffusion of the Semantic Web by using a grounded theory approach. Grounded theory, a qualitative research methodology, is appropriate to achieve this, because the Semantic Web is currently at an early introduction stage. Data was gathered through in-depth interviews with fifteen informants from user organizations adopted the Semantic Web and suppliers that supported the implementation of the projects. The interview transcripts were analyzed by using the open coding scheme of grounded theory. Five factors affecting the adoption and infusion of the Semantic Web were identified. The first factor is demand pull including requirements for solving search and integration problems of existing systems and for creating new services. Second, such things as environmental conduciveness, potential business value, government sponsorship programs, active roles of suppliers, etc. affect the adoption of the Semantic Web from the perspective of technology push. Third, organizational competence including communication and absorptive capacity plays an important role in its adoption. Fourth, user's over-expectation has a negative impact on its adoption. Finally, various factors affect the infusion of the Semantic Web, such as additional investment budget for extending systems based on the Semantic Web, sharing ontologies, and demonstrable effects.

41 citations


Cites background or methods from "Building a Pragmatic Semantic Web"

  • ...According to Alani et al. (2008), many organizations still view the Semantic Web with some skepticism and are wary of being early adopters, although there are many opportunities for applications using the Semantic Web....

    [...]

  • ...Section 4 discusses the results of analysis and proposes propositions that can be considered as guidelines for theorists and practitioners....

    [...]

Book
19 Dec 2013
TL;DR: This monograph considers the development of Web Science since the publication of 'A Framework for Web Science' and shows not only how research has addressed the gap between the micro-level processes and the macro-level Web-scale phenomena to which they give rise but also why research is still needed to do that.
Abstract: Understanding the Web is a problem on a par with other complex scientific challenges such as climate change or the human genome. The requirement for understanding should ideally be accompanied by some measure of control, which makes Web Science crucial in the future provision of tools for managing our interactions, our politics, our economics, our entertainment, and - not least - our knowledge and data sharing. The Web is a critical infrastructure that underpins increasingly many of our transactions, and yet is barely understood by policymakers. This monograph considers the development of Web Science since the publication 'A Framework for Web Science' (Berners-Lee et al., 2006). The theme of emergence is discussed as the characteristic phenomenon of web-scale applications, where many unrelated micro-level actions and decisions, uninformed by knowledge about the macro-level, still produce noticeable and coherent effects at the scale of the Web. A model of emergence is mapped onto the multitheoretical multilevel (MTML) model of communication networks explained by Monge and Contractor (2003). Four specific types of theoretical problem are outlined. First, there is the need to explain local action. Second, the global patterns that form when local actions are repeated at scale have to be detected and understood. Third, those patterns feed back into the local, with intricate and often fleeting causal connections to be traced. Finally, as Web Science is an engineering discipline, issues of control of this feedback must be addressed. The idea of a social machine is introduced, where networked interactions at scale can help to achieve goals for people and social groups in civic society; an important aim of Web Science is to understand how such networks can operate, and how they can control the effects they produce on their own environment. Web Science explains the motivating issues for Web Science. It shows not only how research has addressed the gap between the micro-level processes and the macro-level Web-scale phenomena to which they give rise but also why research is still needed to do that.

32 citations


Cites background from "Building a Pragmatic Semantic Web"

  • ...It follows that quick wins and a lowering of ambition (for example, not using a single elaborate ontology, but multiple overlapping smallscale ontologies) will be important factors here [7]....

    [...]

References
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: It is argued that agents can only flourish when standards are well established and that the Web standards for expressing shared meaning have progressed steadily over the past five years.
Abstract: The article included many scenarios in which intelligent agents and bots undertook tasks on behalf of their human or corporate owners. Of course, shopbots and auction bots abound on the Web, but these are essentially handcrafted for particular tasks: they have little ability to interact with heterogeneous data and information types. Because we haven't yet delivered large-scale, agent-based mediation, some commentators argue that the semantic Web has failed to deliver. We argue that agents can only flourish when standards are well established and that the Web standards for expressing shared meaning have progressed steadily over the past five years

1,830 citations

01 Jan 2008
TL;DR: This tutorial will provide participants with a solid foundation from which to begin publishing Linked Data on the Web, as well as to implement applications that consume Linked data from the Web.
Abstract: The Web is increasingly understood as a global information space consisting not just of linked documents, but also of Linked Data. The Linked Data principles provide a basis for realizing this Web of Data, or Semantic Web. Since early 2007 numerous data sets have been published on the Web according to these principles, in domains as broad as music, books, geographical information, films, people, events, reviews and photos. In combination these data sets consist of over 2 billion RDF triples, interlinked by more than 3 million triples that cross data sets. As this Web of Linked Data continues to grow, and an increasing number of applications are developed that exploit these data sets, there is a growing need for data publishers, researchers, developers and Web practitioners to understand Linked Data principles and practice. Run by some of the leading members of the Linked Data community, this tutorial will address those needs, and provide participants with a solid foundation from which to begin publishing Linked Data on the Web, as well as to implement applications that consume Linked Data from the Web.

377 citations

Book
01 Jan 2006
TL;DR: This text sets out a series of approaches to the analysis and synthesis of the World Wide Web, and other web-like information structures, and a comprehensive set of research questions is outlined, together with a sub-disciplinary breakdown, emphasising the multi-faceted nature of the Web.
Abstract: This text sets out a series of approaches to the analysis and synthesis of the World Wide Web, and other web-like information structures. A comprehensive set of research questions is outlined, together with a sub-disciplinary breakdown, emphasising the multi-faceted nature of the Web, and the multi-disciplinary nature of its study and development. These questions and approaches together set out an agenda for Web Science, the science of decentralised information systems. Web Science is required both as a way to understand the Web, and as a way to focus its development on key communicational and representational requirements. The text surveys central engineering issues, such as the development of the Semantic Web, Web services and P2P. Analytic approaches to discover the Web's topology, or its graph-like structures, are examined. Finally, the Web as a technology is essentially socially embedded; therefore various issues and requirements for Web use and governance are also reviewed.

343 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The paper concludes by stating that the Web has succeeded as a single global information space that has dramatically changed the way the authors use information, disrupted business models, and led to profound societal change.
Abstract: The paper discusses the semantic Web and Linked Data. The classic World Wide Web is built upon the idea of setting hyperlinks between Web documents. These hyperlinks are the basis for navigating and crawling the Web.Technologically, the core idea of Linked Data is to use HTTP URLs not only to identify Web documents, but also to identify arbitrary real world entities.Data about these entities is represented using the Resource Description Framework (RDF). Whenever a Web client resolves one of these URLs, the corresponding Web server provides an RDF/ XML or RDFa description of the identified entity. These descriptions can contain links to entities described by other data sources.The Web of Linked Data can be seen as an additional layer that is tightly interwoven with the classic document Web. The author mentions the application of Linked Data in media, publications, life sciences, geographic data, user-generated content, and cross-domain data sources. The paper concludes by stating that the Web has succeeded as a single global information space that has dramatically changed the way we use information, disrupted business models, and led to profound societal change.

293 citations

01 Jan 2008
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the Web has been transformational and we need to understand it, we need anticipate future developments and identify opportunities and threats, and that we need a new discipline: Web Science.
Abstract: Our motivation is that the Web has been transformational and we need to understand it, we need to anticipate future developments and identify opportunities and threats. We need a new discipline: Web Science

282 citations