TOC: IJ on Semantic Web and Information Systems: Vol. 2 Issue 1, 2006

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The contents of the latest issue of:

International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems (IJSWIS)
Official Publication of the Information Resources Management Association
Inaugural Issue: Volume 2, Issue 1, January-March 2006
Publshished: Quarterly in Print and Electronically
ISSN: 1552-6283
EISSN: 1552-6291

Editor-In-Chief:
Amit Sheth, University of Georgia, USA and Semagix, Inc., USA
Executive Editor:
Miltiadis Lytras, Computer Engineering and Informatics Department, University of Patras, Greece, and AIS SIGSEMIS

EDITORIAL PREFACE:

This issue is the first of the second volume. The journal has reached this
second year milestone with improving quality and quantity of submissions.
These improve the chances that the journal will find a key position among
scientific literature.

RESEARCH PAPERS

PAPER ONE:

"A Defeasible Logic Reasoner for the Semantic Web"

Nick Bassiliades, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Grigoris Antoniou, F.O.R.T.H., Greece
Ioannis Vlahavas, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

Defeasible reasoning is a rule-based approach for efficient reasoning with
incomplete and inconsistent information. Such reasoning is, among others,
useful for ontology integration, where conflicting information arises
naturally; and for the modeling of business rules and policies, where rules
with exceptions are often used. This paper describes these scenarios and
reports on the implementation of a system for defeasible reasoning on the
Web. The system, DR-DEVICE, is capable of reasoning about RDF metadata over
multiple Web sources using defeasible logic rules. It is implemented on top
of CLIPS production rule system and builds upon R-DEVICE, an earlier
deductive rule system over RDF metadata that also supports derived
attribute and aggregate attribute rules. Rules can be expressed either in a
native CLIPS-like language, or in an extension of the OO-RuleML syntax. The
operational semantics of defeasible logic are implemented through
compilation into the generic rule language of R-DEVICE. The paper also
presents a full semantic Web broker example for apartment renting.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.idea-group.com/articles/details.asp?id=5575

PAPER TWO:

"Unraveling the Taste Fabric of Social Networks"

Hugo Liu, The Media Laboratory, USA
Pattie Maes, The Media Laboratory, USA
Glorianna Davenport, The Media Laboratory, USA

Popular online social networks such as Friendster and MySpace do more than
simply reveal the superficial structure of social connectedness  the rich
meanings bottled within social network profiles themselves imply deeper
patterns of culture and taste.  If these latent semantic fabrics of taste
could be harvested formally, the resultant resource would afford completely
novel ways for representing and reasoning about web users and people in
general.  This paper narrates the theory and technique of such a feat  the
natural language text of 100,000 social network profiles were captured,
mapped into a diverse ontology of music, books, films, foods, etc., and
machine learning was applied to infer a semantic fabric of taste. Taste
fabrics bring us closer to improvisational manipulations of meaning, and
afford us at least three semantic functions  the creation of semantically
flexible user representations, cross-domain taste-based recommendation, and
the computation of taste-similarity between people  whose use cases are
demonstrated within the context of three applications  the InterestMap,
Ambient Semantics, and IdentityMirror.  Finally, the authors evaluate the
quality of the taste fabrics, and distill from this research reusable
methodologies and techniques of consequence to the semantic mining and
Semantic Web communities.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.idea-group.com/articles/details.asp?id=5576

PAPER THREE:

"Products and Services Ontologies: A Methodology for Deriving OWL
Ontologies from Industrial Categorization Standards"

Martin Hepp, Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), University of
Innsbruck, Austria & Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Myers, USA

Using Semantic Web technologies for e-business tasks, like product search
or content integration, requires ontologies for products and services.
Their manual creation is problematic due to (1) the high specificity,
resulting in a large number of concepts, and (2) the need for timely
ontology maintenance due to product innovation; and due to cost, since
building such ontologies from scratch requires significant resources. At
the same time, industrial categorization standards, like UNSPSC, eCl@ss,
eOTD, or the RosettaNet Technical Dictionary, reflect some degree of
consensus and contain a wealth of concept definitions plus a hierarchy.
They can thus be valuable input for creating domain ontologies. However,
the transformation of existing standards, originally developed for some
purpose other than ontology engineering, into useful ontologies is not as
straightforward as it appears. In this paper, (1) the author argues that
deriving products and services ontologies from industrial taxonomies is
more feasible than manual ontology engineering; (2) shows that the
representation of the original semantics of the input standard, especially
the taxonomic relationship, is an important modeling decision that
determines the usefulness of the resulting ontology; (3) illustrates the
problem by analyzing existing ontologies derived from UNSPCS and eCl@ss;
(4) presents a methodology for creating ontologies in OWL based on the
reuse of existing standards; and (5) demonstrates this approach by
transforming eCl@ss 5.1 into a practically useful products and services
ontology.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.idea-group.com/articles/details.asp?id=5577

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For full copies of the above articles, check for this issue of
International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems (IJSWIS) in
your Institution's library. If your library is not currently subscribed to
this journal, please recommend IJSWIS subscription to your librarian.
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single journal articles available electronically by visiting
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CALL FOR PAPERS

Mission of IJSWIS:

The International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems is an
open forum aiming to cultivate the semantic Web vision within the
information systems research community. In the common practice of
anticipating Semantic Web as a technology driven phenomenon, a scientific
insight is provided, which reveals the practical implications and the
research challenges of SW in the context of information systems. It goes
beyond the traditional research agenda of information systems and critical
themes are analyzed through a semantic Web perspective in horizontal and
vertical pillars. The main idea is to communicate high quality research
findings in the leading edge aspects of semantic Web and information
systems convergence. This statement distinguishes the journal and
differentiates the publishing strategy from other publications:
Traditionally semantic Web is treated as a technological phenomenon with
the main emphasis on technologies, languages and tools without similar
attention given to theoretical constructions or linkages to
multidisciplinary references. The focus is on the information systems
discipline and working towards the delivery of the main implications that
the semantic Web brings to information systems and the
information/knowledge society.

Coverage of IJSWIS:

Semantic Web issues, challenges and implications in each of the IS research
streams
Real world applications towards the development of the knowledge society
New semantic Web enabled tools for the citizen/ learner/ organization/
business
New semantic Web enabled business models
New semantic Web enabled information systems
Integration with other disciplines
Intelligent systems
Standards
Semantic enabled business intelligence
Enterprise application integration
Metadata-driven (bottom-up) versus ontology-driven (top-down) SW development
 From e-Government to e-Democracy

Interested authors should consult the Journal's manuscript
submission guidelines at http://www.idea-group.com/ijswis

All inquiries and submissions should be sent to:
Dr. Miltiadis Lytras at
mdl@aueb.gr or  mdl@eltrun.gr