Papers by Christopher Brewster
IOCAG 2022
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
ITM Web of Conferences, 2017
Emergency logistics is acquiring a crucial role aiming to provide adequate care and support for p... more Emergency logistics is acquiring a crucial role aiming to provide adequate care and support for people affected by catastrophic situations; dealing with a large number of stakeholders, scarcity of resources and high stakes. Considering the importance of balancing resources from different participants to improve operations, this research introduces a bi-criteria response optimisation model aiming to maximise the service provided to disaster victims while making efficient use of resources. The model provides support for relief distribution, inventory management and resource allocation. But beyond the optimisation of logistical decisions, the model is able to determine which organisations to use at the appropriate timeframe, so as to prevent shortages and convergence. The model is applied to a case study on a flood in Mexico in order to compare its results with real activities performed by authorities and draw conclusions.
This paper provides a summary of the Social Media and Linked Data for Emergency Response (SMILE) ... more This paper provides a summary of the Social Media and Linked Data for Emergency Response (SMILE) workshop, co-located with the Extended Semantic Web Conference, at Montpellier, France, 2013. Following paper presentations and question answering sessions, an extensive discussion and roadmapping session was organised which involved the workshop chairs and attendees. Three main topics guided the discussion - challenges, opportunities and showstoppers. In this paper, we present our roadmap towards effectively exploiting social media and semantic web techniques for emergency response and crisis management.
During the past few years a significant number of agriculture-related research and development pr... more During the past few years a significant number of agriculture-related research and development projects have been implemented by receiving funding from the European Commission. All these projects have aimed to address specific problems and have produced solutions documented in the digital objects created in their context. However, the uptake of the existing information and knowledge by the concerned stakeholders is not yet adequate. On the other hand, the divergence of the available digital objects in terms of their types and formats poses significant challenges in homogeneously describing them with metadata. The Horizon 2020 EUREKA project aims to make a contribution towards this direction by developing a FAIR digital repository based on a semantic data model. The present document focusses on the design decisions related to it, as well as the rationale for the need to develop FAIR digital repositories based on formal data models.
The increasing number of victims from disasters in recent years results in several challenges for... more The increasing number of victims from disasters in recent years results in several challenges for authorities aiming to protect and provide support to affected people. Humanitarian logistics represents one of the most important fields during preparedness and response in cases of disaster, seeking to provide relief, information and services to disaster victims. However, on top of the challenges of logistical activities, the successful completion of operations depends to a large extent on coordination. This is particularly important for developing countries, where disasters occur very often and resources are even scarcer. This paper assumes a multi-agency approach to disaster preparedness that combines geographical information systems (GIS) and multi-objective optimization. The purpose of the tool is to determine the location of emergency facilities, stock prepositioning and distribution allocation for floods. We illustrate the application and the results using a case study centred on...
We present a practical method for explaining deep learningbased text mining with ontology-based i... more We present a practical method for explaining deep learningbased text mining with ontology-based information. Our approach uses the recently proposed OntoSenticNet ontology for sentiment mining, and consists of a composite deep learning classifier for sentiment mining, endowed with an ontology-driven attention module. The attention module analyzes the attention the neural network pays to semantic labels assigned to bigrams in input texts.
Data Intelligence, 2019
This paper focuses on fine-grained, secure access to FAIR data, for which we propose ontology-bas... more This paper focuses on fine-grained, secure access to FAIR data, for which we propose ontology-based data access policies. These policies take into account both the FAIR aspects of the data relevant to access (such as provenance and licence), expressed as metadata, and additional metadata describing users. With this tripartite approach (data, associated metadata expressing FAIR information, and additional metadata about users), secure and controlled access to object data can be obtained. This yields a security dimension to the “A” (accessible) in FAIR, which is clearly needed in domains like security and intelligence. These domains need data to be shared under tight controls, with widely varying individual access rights. In this paper, we propose an approach called Ontology-Based Access Control (OBAC), which utilizes concepts and relations from a data set's domain ontology. We argue that ontology-based access policies contribute to data reusability and can be reconciled with priv...
Geosciences, 2016
Floods are one of the most dangerous and common disasters worldwide, and these disasters are clos... more Floods are one of the most dangerous and common disasters worldwide, and these disasters are closely linked to the geography of the affected area. As a result, several papers in the academic field of humanitarian logistics have incorporated the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) for disaster management. However, most of the contributions in the literature are using these systems for network analysis and display, with just a few papers exploiting the capabilities of GIS to improve planning and preparedness. To show the capabilities of GIS for disaster management, this paper uses raster GIS to analyse potential flooding scenarios and provide input to an optimisation model. The combination is applied to two real-world floods in Mexico to evaluate the value of incorporating GIS for disaster planning. The results provide evidence that including GIS analysis for a decision-making tool in disaster management can improve the outcome of disaster operations by reducing the number of facilities used at risk of flooding. Empirical results imply the importance of the integration of advanced remote sensing images and GIS for future systems in humanitarian logistics.
The possibility of crowdsourced information, multi-geographical and multi-organisational informat... more The possibility of crowdsourced information, multi-geographical and multi-organisational information flows during emergencies and crises provided by web 2.0 tools are providing emergency management centres with new communication challenges and opportunities. Building on the existing emergency management and social media literature, this article explores how institutions are using and adopting social media for emergency communication. By examining the drivers and barriers of social media adoption in two European governmental agencies dealing with emergencies, the paper aims to establish a framework to examine whether and how institutional resilience could be improved.
The performance of a supply chain depends critically on the coordinating actions and decisions un... more The performance of a supply chain depends critically on the coordinating actions and decisions undertaken by the trading partners. The sharing of product and process information plays a central role in the coordination and is a key driver for the success of the supply chain. In this paper we propose the concept of "Linked pedigrees" -linked datasets, that enable the sharing of traceability information of products as they move along the supply chain. We present a distributed and decentralised, linked data driven architecture that consumes real time supply chain linked data to generate linked pedigrees. We then present a communication protocol to enable the exchange of linked pedigrees among trading partners. We exemplify the utility of linked pedigrees by illustrating examples from the perishable goods logistics supply chain.
The growing use of a variety of information systems in crisis management both by non-governmental... more The growing use of a variety of information systems in crisis management both by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and emergency management agencies makes the challenges of information sharing and interoperability increasingly important. The use of semantic web technologies is a growing area and is a technology stack specifically suited to these challenges. This paper presents a review of ontologies, vocabularies and taxonomies that are useful in crisis management systems. We identify the different subject areas relevant to crisis management based on a review of the literature. The different ontologies and vocabularies available are analysed in terms of their coverage, design and usability. We also consider the use cases for which they were designed and the degree to which they follow a variety of standards. While providing comprehensive ontologies for the crisis domain is not feasible or desirable there is considerable scope to develop ontologies for the subject areas not currently covered and for the purposes of interoperability.
Automatic (or semi-automatic) ontology building is a current issue in many application fields whe... more Automatic (or semi-automatic) ontology building is a current issue in many application fields where ontologies are currently built manually. This paper presents a user-centred methodology for ontology construction based on the use of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. In our approach, the user starts the process by initially sketching a preliminary ontology (or selecting an existing one) and a corpus of relevant texts. Then the learner uses the ontology in order to retrieve examples of lexicalisation of relations (e.g. ISA relation) in the corpus. Retrieved examples are validated by the user and used by the learner to generate patterns to discover other instances of the same relation. New instances added to the existing ontology or used to tune the existing ontology. The discovering process is repeated until a satisfying ontology is obtained. The methodology largely automate the building process. It focuses the expensive user activity on sketching the initial ontology, validating textual examples and the final ontology, while the system performs the tedious and expensive activity of searching a large corpus for knowledge discovery. Moreover the output of the process is not only an ontology, but also a system trained to rebuild and eventually retune the ontology, as the learner is adapted by the user feedback. This simplifies ontology maintenance, a major problem in ontology-based methodologies.
Contents 1 Introduction 2 The Semantic Web as Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence 2.1 The ... more Contents 1 Introduction 2 The Semantic Web as Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence 2.1 The SW Blurs the Text-Program Distinction 2.2 An Information Retrieval Critique of the Semantics of the SW 3 The SW as Trusted Databases 3.1 A Second View of the SW 3.2 The SW and the Representation of Tractable Scientific Knowledge 3.3 The Need for a Third View of the SW 4 The SW Underpinned by Natural Language Processing 4.1 Natural Language and the SW: Annotation and the Lower End of the SW Diagram 4.2 The Whole Web as a Corpus and a Move to Much Larger Language Models 4.3 The SW and Point-of-View Phenomena 4.4 Using NLP to Build Ontologies 5 Conclusion Foundations and Trends R in
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2006
Ontology search and reuse is becoming increasingly important as the quest for methods to reduce t... more Ontology search and reuse is becoming increasingly important as the quest for methods to reduce the cost of constructing such knowledge structures continues. A number of ontology libraries and search engines are coming to existence to facilitate locating and retrieving potentially relevant ontologies. The number of ontologies available for reuse is steadily growing, and so is the need for methods to evaluate and rank existing ontologies in terms of their relevance to the needs of the knowledge engineer. This paper presents AKTiveRank, a prototype system for ranking ontologies based on a number of structural metrics.
Proceedings CLUK Research Colloquium, 2002
Ontologies have become widely accepted as the main method for representing knowledge in Knowledge... more Ontologies have become widely accepted as the main method for representing knowledge in Knowledge Management (KM) applica-tions. Given the continuous and rapid change and dynamic nature of knowledge in all fields, automated methods for construct-ing ontologies are of ...
Representing knowledge using domain ontologies has shown to be a useful mechanism and format for ... more Representing knowledge using domain ontologies has shown to be a useful mechanism and format for managing and exchanging information. Due to the difficulty and cost of building ontologies, a number of ontology libraries and search engines are coming to existence to facilitate reusing such knowledge structures. The need for ontology ranking techniques is becoming crucial as the number of ontologies available for reuse is continuing to grow. In this paper we present AKTiveRank, a prototype system for ranking ontologies based on the analysis of their structures. We describe the metrics used in the ranking system and present an experiment on ranking ontologies returned by a popular search engine for an example query.
In this paper we present a new approach to ontology learning. Its basis lies in a dynamic and ite... more In this paper we present a new approach to ontology learning. Its basis lies in a dynamic and iterative view of knowledge acquisition for ontologies. The Abraxas approach is founded on three resources, a set of texts, a set of learning patterns and a set of ontological triples, each of which must remain in equilibrium. As events occur which disturb this equilibrium various actions are triggered to re-establish a balance between the resources. Such events include acquisition of a further text from external resources such as the Web or the addition of ontological triples to the ontology. We develop the concept of a knowledge gap between the coverage of an ontology and the corpus of texts as a measure triggering actions. We present an overview of the algorithm and its functionalities.
The evaluation of ontologies is vital for the growth of the Semantic Web. We consider a number of... more The evaluation of ontologies is vital for the growth of the Semantic Web. We consider a number of problems in evaluating a knowledge artifact like an ontology. We propose in this paper that one approach to ontology evaluation should be corpus or data driven. A corpus is the most accessible form of knowledge and its use allows a measure to be derived of the 'fit' between an ontology and a domain of knowledge. We consider a number of methods for measuring this 'fit' and propose a measure to evaluate structural fit, and a probabilistic approach to identifying the best ontology.
Photo annotation is a resource-intensive task, yet is increasingly essential as image archives an... more Photo annotation is a resource-intensive task, yet is increasingly essential as image archives and personal photo collections grow in size. There is an inherent conflict in the process of describing and archiving personal experiences, because casual users are generally unwilling to spend large amounts of effort on creating the annotations which are required to manage their collections. This poster outlines Photocopain, a semi-automatic image annotation system which combines information about the context in which a ...
Proc. Semantic Web …, 2006
Photo annotation is a resource-intensive task, yet is increasingly essential as image archives an... more Photo annotation is a resource-intensive task, yet is increasingly essential as image archives and personal photo collections grow in size. There is an inherent conflict in the process of describing and archiving personal experiences, because casual users are generally unwilling to expend large amounts of effort on creating the annotations which are required to organise their collections so that they can make best use of them. This paper describes the Photocopain system, a semi-automatic image annotation system which ...
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Papers by Christopher Brewster