Internet

  2011 JAN 3 - (VerticalNews.com) -- According to recent research from Karlsruhe, Germany, "Web standards such as RDF (Resource Description Framework) facilitate data integration over large number of sources. The resulting interlinked datasets describe objects, their attributes and links to other objects."

  "Such datasets are amenable for queries beyond traditional keyword search and for visualisation beyond a simple list of links to documents. Given that data integrated from the open web exhibits enormous variety in scope and structure, the mechanisms for interacting with such data have to be generic and agnostic to the vocabularies used. Ideally, a system operating on web data is easy to use without upfront training. To this end, we present VisiNav, a system based on an interaction model designed to easily search and navigate large amounts of web data (the current system contains over 18.5m RDF triples aggregated from 70k sources). In this paper we introduce a formal query model comprising four atomic operations over object-structured datasets: keyword search, object focus, path traversal, and facet specification. From these atomic operations, users incrementally assemble complex queries that yield trees of objects as result. These results can then be either directly visualised or exported to application programs or online services for further processing," wrote A. Harth and colleagues ...read more

  2011 JAN 3 - (VerticalNews.com) -- According to a study from Istanbul, Turkey, "The aim of service discovery is to find services that satisfy user requests in a precise and effective manner. An important aspect of service discovery is service matchmaking, which constitutes the mechanism to map appropriate services to requests."

  "Current service matchmaking approaches mostly use the knowledge about the interface descriptions of services. However, these approaches suffer from lack of precision since they do not consider the internal processes of services. This paper proposes a novel service matchmaking approach that uses the internal process models of services as primary source of knowledge. To reason about the internal process models and to identify matching services to requests, we use model checking as a reasoning mechanism. In order to facilitate partial matches, we use ontologies and relaxation techniques to generate alternative requests. Hence, even when a request cannot be satisfied by a service, our approach can identify which similar requests are satisfied by the service. This important information can enable better service selection for the service consumers," wrote A. Gunay and colleagues, Bogazici University ...read more

  2011 JAN 3 - (VerticalNews.com) -- "This paper describes a novel approach to the description and discovery of Semantic Web services," researchers in the United States report.

  "We propose SPARQL as a formal language to describe the preconditions and postconditions of services, as well as the goals of agents. In addition, we show that SPARQL query evaluation can be used to check the truth of preconditions in a given context, construct the postconditions that will result from the execution of a service in a context, and determine whether a service execution with those results will satisfy the goal of an agent," wrote M.L. Sbodio and colleagues ...read more