More than three years have passed since the release of the second edition of VocBench, an open so... more More than three years have passed since the release of the second edition of VocBench, an open source collaborative web platform for the development of thesauri complying with Semantic Web standards. In these years, a vibrant user community has gathered around the system, consisting of public organizations, companies and independent users looking for open source solutions for maintaining their thesauri, code lists and authority resources. The focus on collaboration, the differentiation of user roles and the workflow management for content validation and publication have been the strengths of the platform, especially for those organizations requiring a centralized and controlled publication environment. Now the time has come to widen the scope of the platform: funded by the ISA2programme of the European Commission, VocBench 3 will offer a general-purpose collaborative environment for development of any kind of RDF dataset, improving the editing capabilities of its predecessor, while ...
Ontologies are commonly used resources: we are witnessing to the constant grow, in number and het... more Ontologies are commonly used resources: we are witnessing to the constant grow, in number and heterogeneity, of communities working with large volumes of data. Researchers, practitioners, developers and end users deal with a huge amount of data from different perspective, topics, cultures, languages. For people involved in governing both data and processes this remains a difficult task. End users and practitioners are usually interested in merging, data generated from connected objects in customizable ways. Even if a lot of algorithms and tools have been created to achieve such goal in a full automatic manner, human contribution is nonetheless still important. On the way to reach the aforementioned results, researchers concentrated their effort in making easier both representation and visualization of data, thus simplifying user interaction with the system. The main aspect to deal with is how to represent an ontology alignment providing a good overview of the alignment and whatever ...
In this paper we present a language, PEARL, for projecting annotations based on the Unstructured ... more In this paper we present a language, PEARL, for projecting annotations based on the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) over RDF triples. The language offer is twofold: first, a query mechanism, built upon (and extending) the basic FeaturePath notation of UIMA, allows for efficient access to the standard annotation format of UIMA based on feature structures. PEARL then provides a syntax for projecting the retrieved information onto an RDF Dataset, by using a combination of a SPARQL-like notation for matching pre-existing elements of the dataset and of meta-graph patterns, for storing new information into it. In this paper we present the basics of this language and how a PEARL document is structured, discuss a simple use-case and introduce a wider project about automatic acquisition of knowledge, in which PEARL plays a pivotal role.
The Semantic Web dream of a real world-wide graph of interconnected resources is – slowly but ste... more The Semantic Web dream of a real world-wide graph of interconnected resources is – slowly but steadily – becoming a concrete reality. Still, the whole range of models and technologies which will change forever the way we interact with the web, seems to be missing from every-day technologies available on our personal computers. Ontologies, annotation facilities and semantic querying could (and should) bring new life to Personal Information Management, supporting users in contrasting the ever-growing information overload they are facing in these years, overwhelmed by plethora of communication channels and media. In this paper we present our attempt in bringing the Semantic Web Knowledge Management paradigm at the availability of diverse personal desktop tools (Web Browser, Mail clients, Agenda etc...), by evolving Web Browser Semantic extension Semantic Turkey to an extensible framework providing RDF data access at different levels: java access through OSGi extensions, HTTP access or ...
AGROVOC is the multilingual thesaurus managed and published by the Food and Agriculture Organizat... more AGROVOC is the multilingual thesaurus managed and published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Its content is available in more than 40 languages and covers all the FAO’s areas of interest. The structural basis is a resource description framework (RDF) and simple knowledge organization system (SKOS). More than 39,000 concepts identified by a uniform resource identifier (URI) and 800,000 terms are related through a hierarchical system and aligned to knowledge organization systems. This paper aims to illustrate the recent developments in the context of AGROVOC and to present use cases where it has contributed to enhancing the interoperability of data shared by different information systems.
In recent years, artificial intelligence technologies were introduced in medicine as a support to... more In recent years, artificial intelligence technologies were introduced in medicine as a support to the diagnostic process. Among others, the multi-systemic and multi-factorial disorders, that involve different aspects of human anatomy and could be triggered by many factors, genetic and environmental, became a challenging application field for AI. The analysis of those factors, in fact, requires the integration of heterogeneous information coming from different fields (genome screening, neuroimaging, environmental risk factors, etc.). The support of artificial intelligence technologies becomes crucial for a better understanding of this kind of diseases, not only for the identification of the factors but also to explain how these factors can impact on the disease. In this paper we present EMMI (Enquiry Model for Medical Investigation): an ontology-driven automatic medical inquirer that (in a first application context), leveraging an Interrogative Model of Inquiry, is able to selectivel...
The Semantic Web is facing the important challenge to maintain its promise of a real world-wide g... more The Semantic Web is facing the important challenge to maintain its promise of a real world-wide graph of interconnected resources. Unfortunately, while URIs almost guarantee a direct reference to entities, the relation between the two is not bijective. Many different URI references to same concepts and entities can arise when - in such a heterogeneous setting as the WWW - people independently build new ontologies, or populate shared ones with new arbitrarily identified individuals. The proliferation of URIs is an unwanted, though natural effect strictly bound to the same principles which characterize the Semantic Web; reducing this phenomenon will improve the recall of Semantic Search engines, which could rely on explicit links between heterogeneous information sources. To address this problem, in this paper we present an integrated environment combining the semantic annotation and ontology building features available in the Semantic Turkey web browser extension, with globally uniqu...
This paper introduces HORUS (Human-readable Ontology Reasoner Unit System), a configurable reason... more This paper introduces HORUS (Human-readable Ontology Reasoner Unit System), a configurable reasoner which provides the user the motivations for every inferred knowledge in the context of a reasoning process. We describe the reasoner, how to write an inference rule and check which explicit knowledge was used to infer a new one. Real cases examples will be provided to show the capabilities of our reasoner and the associated language developed to express inference rules. We show how HORUS allows the user to understand the logical process over which each new RDF triple has been generated.
The result of the EU is a complex, multilingual, multicultural and yet united environment, requir... more The result of the EU is a complex, multilingual, multicultural and yet united environment, requiring solid integration policies and actions targeted at simplifying cross-language and cross-cultural knowledge access. The legal domain is a typical case in which both the linguistic and the conceptual aspects mutually interweave into a knowledge barrier that is hard to break. In the context of the ISA2 funded project “Public Multilingual Knowledge Infrastructure” (PMKI) we are addressing Semantic Interoperability at both the conceptual and lexical level, by developing a set of coordinated instruments for advanced lexicalization of RDF resources (be them ontologies, thesauri and datasets in general) and for alignment of their content. In this paper, we describe the objectives of the project and the concrete actions, specifically in the legal domain, that will create a platform for multilingual cross-jurisdiction accessibility to legal content in the EU.
The dynamic and distributed nature of the Semantic Web demands for methodologies and systems fost... more The dynamic and distributed nature of the Semantic Web demands for methodologies and systems fostering collective participation to the evolution of datasets. In collaborative and iterative processes for dataset development, it is important to keep track of individual changes for provenance. Different scenarios may require mechanisms to foster consensus, resolve conflicts between competing changes, reversing or ignoring changes etc. In this paper, we perform a landscape analysis of version control for RDF datasets, emphasizing the importance of change reversion to support validation. Firstly, we discuss different representations of changes in RDF datasets and introduce higher-level perspectives on change. Secondly, we analyze diverse approaches to version control. We conclude by focusing on validation, characterizing it as a separate need from the mere preservation of different versions of a dataset.
OntoLex-Lemon is a collection of RDF vocabularies for specifying the verbalization of ontologies ... more OntoLex-Lemon is a collection of RDF vocabularies for specifying the verbalization of ontologies in natural language. Beyond its original scope, OntoLex-Lemon, as well as its predecessor Monnet lemon, found application in the Linguistic Linked Open Data cloud to represent and interlink language resources on the Semantic Web. Unfortunately, generic ontology and RDF editors were considered inconvenient to use with OntoLex-Lemon because of its complex design patterns and other peculiarities, including indirection, reification and subtle integrity constraints. This perception led to the development of dedicated editors, trading the flexibility of RDF in combining different models (and the features already available in existing RDF editors) for a more direct and streamlined editing of OntoLex-Lemon patterns. In this paper, we investigate on the benefits gained by extending an already existing RDF editor, VocBench 3, with capabilities closely tailored to OntoLex-Lemon and on the challenge...
More than three years have passed since the release of the second edition of VocBench, an open so... more More than three years have passed since the release of the second edition of VocBench, an open source collaborative web platform for the development of thesauri complying with Semantic Web standards. In these years, a vibrant user community has gathered around the system, consisting of public organizations, companies and independent users looking for open source solutions for maintaining their thesauri, code lists and authority resources. The focus on collaboration, the differentiation of user roles and the workflow management for content validation and publication have been the strengths of the platform, especially for those organizations requiring a centralized and controlled publication environment. Now the time has come to widen the scope of the platform: funded by the ISA2programme of the European Commission, VocBench 3 will offer a general-purpose collaborative environment for development of any kind of RDF dataset, improving the editing capabilities of its predecessor, while ...
Ontologies are commonly used resources: we are witnessing to the constant grow, in number and het... more Ontologies are commonly used resources: we are witnessing to the constant grow, in number and heterogeneity, of communities working with large volumes of data. Researchers, practitioners, developers and end users deal with a huge amount of data from different perspective, topics, cultures, languages. For people involved in governing both data and processes this remains a difficult task. End users and practitioners are usually interested in merging, data generated from connected objects in customizable ways. Even if a lot of algorithms and tools have been created to achieve such goal in a full automatic manner, human contribution is nonetheless still important. On the way to reach the aforementioned results, researchers concentrated their effort in making easier both representation and visualization of data, thus simplifying user interaction with the system. The main aspect to deal with is how to represent an ontology alignment providing a good overview of the alignment and whatever ...
In this paper we present a language, PEARL, for projecting annotations based on the Unstructured ... more In this paper we present a language, PEARL, for projecting annotations based on the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) over RDF triples. The language offer is twofold: first, a query mechanism, built upon (and extending) the basic FeaturePath notation of UIMA, allows for efficient access to the standard annotation format of UIMA based on feature structures. PEARL then provides a syntax for projecting the retrieved information onto an RDF Dataset, by using a combination of a SPARQL-like notation for matching pre-existing elements of the dataset and of meta-graph patterns, for storing new information into it. In this paper we present the basics of this language and how a PEARL document is structured, discuss a simple use-case and introduce a wider project about automatic acquisition of knowledge, in which PEARL plays a pivotal role.
The Semantic Web dream of a real world-wide graph of interconnected resources is – slowly but ste... more The Semantic Web dream of a real world-wide graph of interconnected resources is – slowly but steadily – becoming a concrete reality. Still, the whole range of models and technologies which will change forever the way we interact with the web, seems to be missing from every-day technologies available on our personal computers. Ontologies, annotation facilities and semantic querying could (and should) bring new life to Personal Information Management, supporting users in contrasting the ever-growing information overload they are facing in these years, overwhelmed by plethora of communication channels and media. In this paper we present our attempt in bringing the Semantic Web Knowledge Management paradigm at the availability of diverse personal desktop tools (Web Browser, Mail clients, Agenda etc...), by evolving Web Browser Semantic extension Semantic Turkey to an extensible framework providing RDF data access at different levels: java access through OSGi extensions, HTTP access or ...
AGROVOC is the multilingual thesaurus managed and published by the Food and Agriculture Organizat... more AGROVOC is the multilingual thesaurus managed and published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Its content is available in more than 40 languages and covers all the FAO’s areas of interest. The structural basis is a resource description framework (RDF) and simple knowledge organization system (SKOS). More than 39,000 concepts identified by a uniform resource identifier (URI) and 800,000 terms are related through a hierarchical system and aligned to knowledge organization systems. This paper aims to illustrate the recent developments in the context of AGROVOC and to present use cases where it has contributed to enhancing the interoperability of data shared by different information systems.
In recent years, artificial intelligence technologies were introduced in medicine as a support to... more In recent years, artificial intelligence technologies were introduced in medicine as a support to the diagnostic process. Among others, the multi-systemic and multi-factorial disorders, that involve different aspects of human anatomy and could be triggered by many factors, genetic and environmental, became a challenging application field for AI. The analysis of those factors, in fact, requires the integration of heterogeneous information coming from different fields (genome screening, neuroimaging, environmental risk factors, etc.). The support of artificial intelligence technologies becomes crucial for a better understanding of this kind of diseases, not only for the identification of the factors but also to explain how these factors can impact on the disease. In this paper we present EMMI (Enquiry Model for Medical Investigation): an ontology-driven automatic medical inquirer that (in a first application context), leveraging an Interrogative Model of Inquiry, is able to selectivel...
The Semantic Web is facing the important challenge to maintain its promise of a real world-wide g... more The Semantic Web is facing the important challenge to maintain its promise of a real world-wide graph of interconnected resources. Unfortunately, while URIs almost guarantee a direct reference to entities, the relation between the two is not bijective. Many different URI references to same concepts and entities can arise when - in such a heterogeneous setting as the WWW - people independently build new ontologies, or populate shared ones with new arbitrarily identified individuals. The proliferation of URIs is an unwanted, though natural effect strictly bound to the same principles which characterize the Semantic Web; reducing this phenomenon will improve the recall of Semantic Search engines, which could rely on explicit links between heterogeneous information sources. To address this problem, in this paper we present an integrated environment combining the semantic annotation and ontology building features available in the Semantic Turkey web browser extension, with globally uniqu...
This paper introduces HORUS (Human-readable Ontology Reasoner Unit System), a configurable reason... more This paper introduces HORUS (Human-readable Ontology Reasoner Unit System), a configurable reasoner which provides the user the motivations for every inferred knowledge in the context of a reasoning process. We describe the reasoner, how to write an inference rule and check which explicit knowledge was used to infer a new one. Real cases examples will be provided to show the capabilities of our reasoner and the associated language developed to express inference rules. We show how HORUS allows the user to understand the logical process over which each new RDF triple has been generated.
The result of the EU is a complex, multilingual, multicultural and yet united environment, requir... more The result of the EU is a complex, multilingual, multicultural and yet united environment, requiring solid integration policies and actions targeted at simplifying cross-language and cross-cultural knowledge access. The legal domain is a typical case in which both the linguistic and the conceptual aspects mutually interweave into a knowledge barrier that is hard to break. In the context of the ISA2 funded project “Public Multilingual Knowledge Infrastructure” (PMKI) we are addressing Semantic Interoperability at both the conceptual and lexical level, by developing a set of coordinated instruments for advanced lexicalization of RDF resources (be them ontologies, thesauri and datasets in general) and for alignment of their content. In this paper, we describe the objectives of the project and the concrete actions, specifically in the legal domain, that will create a platform for multilingual cross-jurisdiction accessibility to legal content in the EU.
The dynamic and distributed nature of the Semantic Web demands for methodologies and systems fost... more The dynamic and distributed nature of the Semantic Web demands for methodologies and systems fostering collective participation to the evolution of datasets. In collaborative and iterative processes for dataset development, it is important to keep track of individual changes for provenance. Different scenarios may require mechanisms to foster consensus, resolve conflicts between competing changes, reversing or ignoring changes etc. In this paper, we perform a landscape analysis of version control for RDF datasets, emphasizing the importance of change reversion to support validation. Firstly, we discuss different representations of changes in RDF datasets and introduce higher-level perspectives on change. Secondly, we analyze diverse approaches to version control. We conclude by focusing on validation, characterizing it as a separate need from the mere preservation of different versions of a dataset.
OntoLex-Lemon is a collection of RDF vocabularies for specifying the verbalization of ontologies ... more OntoLex-Lemon is a collection of RDF vocabularies for specifying the verbalization of ontologies in natural language. Beyond its original scope, OntoLex-Lemon, as well as its predecessor Monnet lemon, found application in the Linguistic Linked Open Data cloud to represent and interlink language resources on the Semantic Web. Unfortunately, generic ontology and RDF editors were considered inconvenient to use with OntoLex-Lemon because of its complex design patterns and other peculiarities, including indirection, reification and subtle integrity constraints. This perception led to the development of dedicated editors, trading the flexibility of RDF in combining different models (and the features already available in existing RDF editors) for a more direct and streamlined editing of OntoLex-Lemon patterns. In this paper, we investigate on the benefits gained by extending an already existing RDF editor, VocBench 3, with capabilities closely tailored to OntoLex-Lemon and on the challenge...
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Papers by Andrea Turbati