2567867
The Fuzzy Description Logic f-SHIN
In the Semantic Web information would be retrieved, processed, combined, shared and reused in the maximum automatic way possible. Obviously, such procedures involve a high degree of uncertainty and imprecision. For example ontology alignment or information retrieval are rarely true or false procedures but usually involve confidence degrees or provide rankings. Furthermore, it is often the case that information itself is imprecise and vague like the concept of a "tall" person, a "hot" place and many more. In order to be able to represent and reason with such type of information in the Semantic Web (SW), as well as, enhance SW applications we present an extension of the Description Logic SHIN with fuzzy set theory. We present the semantics as well as detailed reasoning algorithms for the extended language.
171830
Inconsistencies, Negations and Changes in Ontologies
Ontology management and maintenance are considered cornerstone issues in current Semantic Web applications in which semantic integration and ontological reasoning play a fundamental role. The ability to deal with inconsistency and to accommodate change is of utmost importance in real-world applications of ontological reasoning and management, wherein the need for expressing negated assertions also arises naturally. For this purpose, precise, formal definitions of the the different types of inconsistency and negation in ontologies are required. Unfortunately, ontology languages based on Description Logics (DLs) do not provide enough expressive power to represent axiom negations. Furthermore, there is no single, well-accepted notion of inconsistency and negation in the Semantic Web community, due to the lack of a common and solid foundational framework. In this paper, we propose a general framework accounting for inconsistency, negation and change in ontologies. Different levels of negation and inconsistency in DL-based ontologies are distinguished. We demonstrate how this framework can provide a foundation for reasoning with and management of dynamic ontologies.
64356
Querying the Semantic Web with Preferences
Ranking is an important concept to avoid empty or overfull and unordered result sets. However, such scoring can only express total orders, which restricts its usefulness when several factors influence result relevance. A more flexible way to express relevance is the notion of preferences. Users state which kind of answers they ‘prefer’ by adding soft constraints to their queries. 
 
Current approaches in the Semantic Web offer only limited facilities for specification of scoring and result ordering. There is no common language element to express and formalize ranking and preferences. We present a comprehensive extension of SPARQL which directly supports the expression of preferences. This includes formal syntax and semantics of preference expressions for SPARQL. Additionally, we report our implementation of preference query processing, which is based on the ARQ query engine.
17950526
RDFS(FA) and RDF MT: Two Semantics for RDFS
RDF Schema (RDFS) has a non-standard metamodeling architecture, which makes some elements in the model have dual roles in the RDFS specification. As a result, this can be confusing and difficult to understand and, more importantly, the specification of its semantics requires a non-standard model theory. This leads to semantic problems when trying to layer conventional first order languages, like DAML+OIL, on top of RDFS. In this paper we will first demonstrate how this problem with RDFS can be solved in a sub-language of RDFS - RDFS(FA), which introduces a Fixed layer metamodeling Architecture to RDFS, based on a (relatively) standard model-theoretic semantics. Logical layer Semantic Web languages such as DAML+OIL and OWL can, therefore, be built on top of both the syntax and semantics of RDFS(FA). We will also compare this approach with the existing RDF Model Theory and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the two approaches.
15823770
Supporting Semi-Automatic Semantic Annotation of Multimedia Resources
Ontologies provide an attractive basis for the representation of semantic information to be attached to multimedia information. However, the flexibility available to develop one’s own ontology or partially reuse an existing ontology means that human input is unavoidable in the process of creating the annotations. We address the issue of how to use ontology reasoning services and natural language generation to provide presentations of relevant ontology structures for human use.
6604472
A Fine-Grained Approach to Resolving Unsatisfiable Ontologies
In the semantic Web, inconsistencies in OWL ontologies may easily occur. Existing approaches either identify the minimally unsatisfiable sub-ontologies or calculate the maximally satisfiable sub-ontologies. However practical problems remain; it is not clear which axioms or which parts of axioms should be selected for repair, and how to repair those axioms. In this paper, we address this limitation by proposing a fine-grained approach to resolving unsatisfiable ontologies. We revise the axiom tracing technique first proposed by Baader and Hollunder, so as to track which parts of the problematic axioms cause the unsatisfiability. Moreover, we support ontology users in rewriting problematic axioms. In order to minimise the impact of changes and prevent unintended entailment loss, harmful and helpful changes are identified and provided as guidelines. Based on the methods described we present a preliminary version of an interactive debugging tool and demonstrate its applicability in practice
10310546
Towards auto-documentary: tracking the evolution of news stories
News videos constitute an important source of information for tracking and documenting important events. In these videos, news stories are often accompanied by short video shots that tend to be repeated during the course of the event. Automatic detection of such repetitions is essential for creating auto-documentaries, for alleviating the limitation of traditional textual topic detection methods. In this paper, we propose novel methods for detecting and tracking the evolution of news over time. The proposed method exploits both visual cues and textual information to summarize evolving news stories. Experiments are carried on the TREC-VID data set consisting of 120 hours of news videos from two different channels.
16470845
Dynamic server selection using fuzzy inference in content distribution networks
To accommodate the exponential growth of Web traffic, Content Distribution Networks (CDN) have been designed and deployed to distribute content to different cache servers, and to transparently and dynamically redirect user requests to the cache servers according to the latest network and server status. Server selection therefore is vital and crucial to both the functionality and performance of any CDN systems. An appropriate server should be selected by taking estimated user location, measured round-trip time, and advertised server load into account. However, it is unlikely to obtain accurate and timely inputs of these parameters in practice, so that the effectiveness and efficiency of CDN cannot be fully achieved by traditional means. In this paper, a novel CDN server selection scheme using fuzzy inference is proposed. The scheme selects appropriate servers based on partial round-trip time measurements and historical server load information, and it can be implemented generically wherever the decision is made. It is shown that the fuzzy inference-based scheme is inherently capable of handling multiple decision inputs efficiently, tolerable to measurement noise and errors, and able to deal with network dynamics. Simulation results demonstrate that, compared with other server selection schemes, the proposed scheme can achieve higher resource utilization, provide better user-perceived Quality of Service (QoS), and efficiently deal with network dynamics.
3926195
Fast Random Walk with Restart and Its Applications
How closely related are two nodes in a graph? How to compute this score quickly, on huge, disk-resident, real graphs? Random walk with restart (RWR) provides a good relevance score between two nodes in a weighted graph, and it has been successfully used in numerous settings, like automatic captioning of images, generalizations to the "connection subgraphs", personalized PageRank, and many more. However, the straightforward implementations of RWR do not scale for large graphs, requiring either quadratic space and cubic pre-computation time, or slow response time on queries. We propose fast solutions to this problem. The heart of our approach is to exploit two important properties shared by many real graphs: (a) linear correlations and (b) block- wise, community-like structure. We exploit the linearity by using low-rank matrix approximation, and the community structure by graph partitioning, followed by the Sherman- Morrison lemma for matrix inversion. Experimental results on the Corel image and the DBLP dabasets demonstrate that our proposed methods achieve significant savings over the straightforward implementations: they can save several orders of magnitude in pre-computation and storage cost, and they achieve up to 150x speed up with 90%+ quality preservation.
2109911
Serialized optimal relay schedules in two-tiered wireless sensor networks
In two-tiered wireless sensor networks (WSNs), sensor nodes (SNs) are scattered in clusters, and are responsible for collecting relevant information from designated areas and transmitting to an application node (AN) in the cluster. The AN then constructs a local-view for the cluster by exploring correlations among information received from nearby SNs, and sends the local-view toward a base-station that creates a global-view for the entire WSN. ANs can also relay local-views for other ANs, if the resultant network lifetime is longer. In this paper, we want to arrange inter-AN relaying optimally, which is an important process in topology control for maximizing the topological lifetime of a WSN with regard to a certain amount of initial energy provisioning. We first propose some criteria on relay candidates preselection, which can considerably reduce the overhead of obtaining an optimal relaying. We then design an algorithm to serialize the parallel relay allocation, so that each AN only needs to have one relaying AN at any time. Finally, we demonstrate the equivalency in network lifetime of the serialized inter-AN relay schedules.
6653256
Domain-constrained semi-supervised mining of tracking models in sensor networks
Accurate localization of mobile objects is a major research problem in sensor networks and an important data mining application. Specifically, the localization problem is to determine the location of a client device accurately given the radio signal strength values received at the client device from multiple beacon sensors or access points. Conventional data mining and machine learning methods can be applied to solve this problem. However, all of them require large amounts of labeled training data, which can be quite expensive. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic semi supervised learning approach to reduce the calibration effort and increase the tracking accuracy. Our method is based on semi-supervised conditional random fields which can enhance the learned model from a small set of training data with abundant unlabeled data effectively. To make our method more efficient, we exploit a Generalized EM algorithm coupled with domain constraints. We validate our method through extensive experiments in a real sensor network using Crossbow MICA2 sensors. The results demonstrate the advantages of methods compared to other state-of-the-art object-tracking algorithms.