7627284
Information Retrieval and the Semantic Web
Information retrieval technology has been central to the success of the Web. For semantic web documents or annotations to have an impact, they will have to be compatible with Web based indexing and retrieval technology. We discuss some of the underlying problems and issues central to extending information retrieval systems to handle annotations in semantic web languages. We also describe three prototype systems that we have implemented to explore these ideas.
8623137
Semantic analytics on social networks: experiences in addressing the problem of conflict of interest detection
In this paper, we describe a Semantic Web application that detects Conflict of Interest (COI) relationships among potential reviewers and authors of scientific papers. This application discovers various 'semantic associations' between the reviewers and authors in a populated ontology to determine a degree of Conflict of Interest. This ontology was created by integrating entities and relationships from two social networks, namely "knows," from a FOAF (Friend-of-a-Friend) social network and "co-author," from the underlying co-authorship network of the DBLP bibliography. We describe our experiences developing this application in the context of a class of Semantic Web applications, which have important research and engineering challenges in common. In addition, we present an evaluation of our approach for real-life COI detection.
14330906
Creating Context-Aware Software Agents
Sharing ontologies, sensing context and reasoning are crucial to the realization of context-aware software agents. This document de- scribes our efforts in using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Prolog Forward Chaining (Pfc) system to provide support for ontology sharing and reasoning in the CoolAgent Recommendation System (CoolAgent RS), a context-aware multi-agent system. We also describes the implementation of the CoolAgent RS document and cuisine recommendation services that provide tailored services by exploiting user's context.
31295380
Intelligent Agents for Mobile and Embedded Devices
The pervasive computing environments of the near future will involve the interactions, coordination and cooperation of numerous, casually accessible, and often invisible computing devices. These devices, whether carried on our person or embedded in our homes, businesses and classrooms, will connect via wireless and wired links to one another and to the global networking infrastructure. The result will be a networking milieu with a new level of openness. The localized and dynamic nature of their interactions raises many new issues that draw on and challenge the disciplines of agents, distributed systems, and security. This paper describes recent work by the UMBC Ebiquity research group which addresses some of these issues.
468262
Collaborative joins in a pervasive computing environment
Abstract.We present a collaborative query processing protocol based on the principles of Contract Nets. The protocol is designed for pervasive computing environments where, in addition to operating on limited computing and battery resources, mobile devices cannot always rely on being able to access the wired infrastructure. Devices, therefore, need to collaborate with each other in order to obtain data otherwise inaccessible due to the nature of the environment. Furthermore, by intelligently using answers cached by peers, devices can reduce their computation cost. We show the effectiveness of our approach by evaluating performance of devices querying for data while moving in a citylike environment.
1962537
Finding and Ranking Knowledge on the Semantic Web
Swoogle helps software agents and knowledge engineers find Semantic Web knowledge encoded in RDF and OWL documents on the Web. Navigating such a Semantic Web on the Web is difficult due to the paucity of explicit hyperlinks beyond the namespaces in URIrefs and the few inter-document links like rdfs:seeAlso and owl:imports. In order to solve this issue, this paper proposes a novel Semantic Web navigation model providing additional navigation paths through Swoogle's search services such as the Ontology Dictionary. Using this model, we have developed algorithms for ranking the importance of Semantic Web objects at three levels of granularity: documents, terms and RDF graphs. Experiments show that Swoogle outperforms conventional web search engine and other ontology libraries in finding more ontologies, ranking their importance, and thus promoting the use and emergence of consensus ontologies.
15654524
Illustration-inspired techniques for visualizing time-varying data
Traditionally, time-varying data has been visualized using snapshots of the individual time steps or an animation of the snapshots shown in a sequential manner. For larger datasets with many time-varying features, animation can be limited in its use, as an observer can only track a limited number of features over the last few frames. Visually inspecting each snapshot is not practical either for a large number of time-steps. We propose new techniques inspired from the illustration literature to convey change over time more effectively in a time-varying dataset. Speedlines are used extensively by cartoonists to convey motion, speed, or change over different panels. Flow ribbons are another technique used by cartoonists to depict motion in a single frame. Strobe silhouettes are used to depict previous positions of an object to convey the previous positions of the object to the user. These illustration-inspired techniques can be used in conjunction with animation to convey change over time.
39703480
Skeletal Structural Descriptions
In this paper we explore the idea of characterizing sentences by the shapes of their structural descriptions only; for example, in the case of context free grammars, by the shapes of the derivation trees only. Such structural descriptions will be called skeletons . A skeleton exhibits all of the grouping structure (phrase structure) of the sentence without naming the syntactic categories used in the description. The inclusion of syntactic categories as variables is primarily a question of economy of description. Every context free grammar is strongly equivalent to a skeletal grammar, in a sense made precise in the paper. Besides clarifying the role of skeletons in mathematical linguistics, we show that skeletal automata provide a characterization of local sets, remedying a “defect” in the usual tree automata theory. We extend the method of skeletal structural descriptions to other forms of tree describing systems. We also suggest a theoretical basis for grammatical inference based on grouping structure only.
7140689
Long-Distance Scrambling and Tree Adjoining Grammars
Scrambling, both local and long-distance, has recently attracted considerable attention among linguists and computational linguists. In this paper, we will explore the adequacy of the Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) formalism for dealing with long-distance scrambling I in German. We will show that TAGs cannot capture the full range of constructions derived by scrambling. I[owever, Multi-Component TAGs (MC-TAG), an extension of TAGs introduced earlier [Joshi 1987a, Weir 1988] and utilized for linguistic purposes (e.g. for extraposition [Kroch and Joshi 1986]), can indeed capture the full range of constructions derived by scrambling. We will also present an ID/LP variant of TAG to capture the same constructions, and then comment on the relationship between the two systems.
2954113
Tree Adjunct Grammars
In this paper, a tree generating system called a tree adjunct grammar is described and its formal properties are studied relating them to the tree generating systems of Brainerd (Information and Control14 (1969), 217-231) and Rounds (Mathematical Systems Theory 4 (1970), 257-287) and to the recognizable sets and local sets discussed by Thatcher (Journal of Computer and System Sciences1 (1967), 317-322; 4 (1970), 339-367) and Rounds. Linguistic relevance of these systems has been briefly discussed also.
6625273
Wave-pipelined 2-slot time division multiplexed (WP/2-TDM) routing
The ever-increasing number of transistors on a chip has resulted in very large scale integration (VLSI) systems whose performance and manufacturing costs are driven by on-chip wiring needs. This paper proposes a low overhead wave-pipelined two-slot time division multiplexed (WP/2-TDM) routing technique that harnesses the inherent intra-clock period wire idleness to implement wire sharing in combination with wave-pipelined circuit techniques. It is illustrated in this paper that WP/2-TDM routing can be readily incorporated into future gigascale integration (GSI) systems to reduce the number of interconnect routing channels in an attempt to contain escalating manufacturing costs. Two case studies, one at the circuit level and one at the system level, are presented to illustrate the advantages of WP/2-TDM routing. The circuit level implementation exhibits more than 40% reduction in wire area, a 30% reduction in silicon area with no increase in dynamic power and no loss of throughput performance.