The Case for Explicit Knowledge In Documents

2008

Abstract. The Wiki and the Semantic Web can be compared as two different approaches to capturing knowledge, where the former trades away precise, explicit, and internally consistent semantics for speed and simplicity. Any attempt to bridge these two approaches has to either somehow reconcile these trades-off or make compromises one way or the other. This paper describes how Rhizome, an open source application framework for developing “Semantic Wiki ” applications, attempts to bridge these approaches. Rhizome includes a text formatting language called ZML whose syntax is similar to text formatting languages found in most Wikis but with enhancement to make it easy for users to express explicit and arbitrary semantics. Rhizome relies on “shredding”, a flexible framework for specifying rules for characterizing semi-structured content with RDF and providing an ontology that can precisely describe the relationship between the source content and the resulting statements. 1

2009

ABSTRACT A foreseeable incarnation of Web 3.0 could inherit machine understandability from the Semantic Web, and collaborative editing from Web 2.0 applications. We review the research and development trends which are getting today Web nearer to such an incarnation. We present semantic wikis, microformats, and the so-called “lowercase semantic web”: they are the main approaches at closing the technological gap between content authors and Semantic Web technologies.

2004

We suggest to employ techniques from Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Knowledge Representation (KR) to transform existing documents into documents amenable for the Semantic Web. Semantic Web documents have at least part of their semantics and pragmatics marked up explicitly in both a machine processable as well as human readable manner. XML and its related standards (XSLT, RDF, Topic Maps etc.) are the unifying platform for the tools and methodologies developed for different application scenarios.

2008

This paper describes a technique for embedding document metadata, and potentially other semantic references inline in word processing documents, which the authors have implemented with the help of a software development team. Several assumptions underly the approach; It must be available across computing platforms and work with both Microsoft Word (because of its user base) and OpenOffice.org (because of its free availability). Further the application needs to be acceptable to and usable by users, so the initial implementation covers only small number of features, which will only be extended after user-testing. Within these constraints the system provides a mechanism for encoding not only simple metadata, but for inferring hierarchical relationships between metadata elements from a 'flat' word processing file. The paper includes links to open source code implementing the techniques as part of a broader suite of tools for academic writing. This addresses tools and software, semantic web and data curation, integrating curation into research workflows and will provide a platform for integrating work on ontologies, vocabularies and folksonomies into word processing tools. Abstract: This is the abstract. Does this belong here, or is this mechanism unsuitable for abstracts, especially since they can have multiple paragraphs? {style: p-meta-abstract} This is the second paragraph of the abstract. {style: p-meta-abstract}

This paper reports on the development of a prototype authoring tool developed as part of ongoing research around the needs of the ARKive project. The project holds text, rich-media and descriptions of factual statements about biodiversity and conservation information. A key user community is that of school age children, requiring the markup of educational metadata in open standards, such as IEEE LOM (Learning Objects Metadata). This publishing architecture is intended to serve a range of audiences (ages, language and level of language skills). By storage of the content as discrete units, with extensive metadata describing each one, units may be retrieved and served to the audience as appropriate. Future developments may extend this to support ad hoc queries, not just rigidly predefined standard pages. Authoring development has shown that a simple and pragmatic tool based on Microsoft Word may still address advanced technologies, such as RDF, DAML and the future of the Semantic Web. Careful design has separated the process of describing a museum's exhibits, and the problem domain of the museum's area of interest. This improves the flexibility of solving the initial problem, allows the same code to be reused on other projects, and assists publishing into other metadata formats. (Contains 10 references.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2005

The Intelligence Community, among others, is increasingly using document metadata to improve document search and discovery on intranets and extranets. Document markup is still often incomplete, inconsistent, incorrect, and limited to keywords via HTML and XML tags. OWL promises to bring semantics to this markup to improve its machine understandability. A usable markup tool is becoming a barrier to the more widespread use of OWL markup in operational settings. This paper describes some of our attempts at building markup tools, lessons learned, and our latest markup tool, the Semantic Markup Tool (SMT). SMT uses automatic text extractors and templates to hide ontological complexity from end users and helps them quickly specify events and relationships of interest in the document. SMT automatically generates correct and consistent OWL markup. This comes at a cost to expressivity. We are evaluating SMT on several pilot semantic web efforts.

Advanced Learning Technologies, …, 2007

Authors who make courses for the Semantic Web should be able to create, annotate and update their documents in an efficient way. Several tools are available to create electronic annotations in web pages but these tools suffer from severe limitations that make documents difficult to update. In this paper, we present a Java application that allows authors to create, annotate, exchange and update documents on the Semantic Web without the limitations of current systems.

2005

This paper presents the general objectives of the ONTOTEXT project (From Text to Knowledge for the Semantic Web), and the activities carried out during the first year of its development cycle. First, the task of annotating huge amounts of textual data (e.g. those available on the Web or in local document collections) will be introduced, focusing on its importance in order to enhance the interoperability of such data through ontology-based reasoning. Then, the main issues related to the annotation task will be discussed. These include the choice of an adequate formalism to capture and describe different types of relevant information contained in a text, and the adaptation of existing languagespecific markup formalisms to a new language (Italian in our case). Finally, the results of our experience in the concrete annotation of information about people and temporal expressions for the Italian Content Annotation Bank (I-CAB) being developed at ITC-irst and CELCT will be reported.