Explicit Semantic Representation

Search as we know it will change and improve as new and enhanced methodologies to accommodate the ever expanding semantically annotated WorldWide Web will be developed and fruitfully employed. While a lot of basic infrastructure has already been developed to prepare for the onset of the Semantic Web, like metalanguages , editors, inference engines, and others, other critical developments need to be put in place too. This short paper discusses the issues as well as the best application areas to 'Semantically Annotate Everything' and transform on a mass scale the wealth of knowledge on the web into information as semantic metadata on the Semantic web.

This paper introduces two important elements of our VNewsQA/ICT system: its semantic models of simple Vietnamese sentences and its semantic processing mechanism. The VNewsQA/ICT is a Vietnamese based Question Answering system which has the ability to gather information from some Vietnamese news title forms on the ICTnews websites (http://www.ictnews.vn), instead of using a database or a knowledge base, to answer the related Vietnamese questions in the domain of information and communications technology.

In the current literature of knowledge management and artificial intelligence, several different approaches to the problem have been carried out of developing domain ontologies from scratch. All these approaches deal fundamentally with three problems: (1) providing a collection of general terms describing classes and relations to be employed in the description of the domain itself; (2) organizing the terms into a taxonomy of the classes by the ISA relation; and (3) expressing in an explicit way the constraints that make the ISA pairs meaningful. Though a number of such approaches can be found, no systematic analysis of them exists which can be used to understand the inspiring motivation, the applicability context, and the structure of the approaches. In this paper, we provide a framework for analyzing the existing methodologies that compares them to a set of general criteria. In particular, we obtain a classification based upon the direction of ontology construction; bottom-up are those methodologies that start with some descriptions of the domain and obtain a classification, while top-down ones start with an abstract view of the domain itself, which is given a priori. The resulting classification is useful not only for theoretical purposes but also in the practice of deployment of ontologies in Information Systems, since it provides a framework for choosing the right methodology to be applied in the specific context, depending also on the needs of the application itself.

This article proposes an architecture to support information and knowledge exchange between collaborating business partners. The focus is on knowledge representation and exchange by intelligent agents to support collaborative business functions through agents that exchange problem-specific information in standardized formats. The article then shows the application of the proposed architecture in the context of an infomediarybased B2B E-marketplace. Article: Emergent internet technologies already have had significant impacts on the business processes of today's organizations. New ways of conducting business with other businesses (B2B), directly with end consumers (B2C), and via new E-marketplaces have been implemented to facilitate transaction processing and coordinate processes among business partners. Increasingly, the Internet is seen by business organizations as a vehicle to create value. With an increasing number of parties involved in managing such a complex supply chain, the timely sharing of accurate information among collaborating partners becomes crucial to the efficiency of workflows and business operations (Rabin. 2003). However, a lack of systems and process integration, and the resultant lack of end-to-end value chain visibility, continue to hinder collaborative and mutually beneficial partnerships (Rabin, 2003). Information exchange, facilitated through technologies such as the Internet with its global connectivity, enables the creation of information partnerships among participants engaged in collaborative work across the entire supply chain. Information partnerships require system models that enable and support information integration, knowledge exchange, and thus improved collaboration among business partners. Such systems must provide trusted collaborating partners with "intelligent" capabilities for the seamless and transparent exchange of dynamic market information, including supply and demand conditions both synchronously and asynchronously, to attain their full business potential. Weber and Aha (2003) identified requirements for organizational knowledge management systems (KMS) where the central unit is a repository of knowledge artifacts (Holsapple and Joshi, 2001) collected from internal or external organizational sources. Here, knowledge repositories play a central role in the storage, distribution, and management of knowledge in an organization (Bolloju et al., 2002). Implementing and managing such knowledge integration capabilities over distributed and heterogeneous information platforms, such as the Internet, is a challenging task; yet, realizing this task can have huge benefits for organizations that embrace collaborative business paradigms. Recently, intelligent agents have gained significant interest as powerful modeling abstractions for B2B applications (Papazoglou, 2001). The assumption here is that the usage of software agents for processing information and knowledge flows can help increase the efficacy of an E-marketplace for its participants. Software agents work together by sharing process knowledge to achieve operational synergies for the goaloriented activities of individual entities in the system. Together-with emerging technologies like extensible Markup Language (XML) and Web Services, they provide opportunities to develop integrative E-marketplaces with suppliers or customers. INTELLIGENT AGENTS AND THEIR APPLICATION An intelligent agent is "a computer system situated in some environment and that is capable of flexible autonomous action in this environment in order to meet its design objectives" (Jennings and Wooldridge, 1998). The terms agents, software agents and intelligent agents are often used interchangeably in the literature.

This paper aims to present a new algorithm implemented for detecting plagiarism using semantic web tools and notions. For increasing detection accuracy domain ontology could be used in addition to global semantic resources. Using global semantic resources increase the effect of ambiguity therefore disambiguation technique was used. Not all semantically similar texts are plagiarized. So, other detection techniques were used to reduce false positive results. Given that our work has been implemented in medical disciplines and for texts written in English, it presents a generic algorithm that can be adapted for different disciplines and languages. For medical discipline, a set of medical Ontologies were used for enriching extracted medical terms. In addition, WordNet was used for enriching global terms. The test results of the algorithm shows that it was able to detect advanced types of plagiarism that are out of the reach of classical methods such as: using word synonyms, word reordering , text re-styling and other natural languages techniques which are usually used to hide the plagiarism action.

The technological pace and the advent of the knowledge society will set in the next years the new context for e-learning evolution: The convergence of learning and daily life of citizens worldwide will be evident in new services and transparent technologies. Pervasive or ubiquitous learning will be a critical cornerstone and an ultimate achievement of the e-learning research community. Additionally, worldwide efforts will define the social responsibility character of elearning. In this short visioning paper, we try to address two critical questions: How will knowledge management and relevant technologies affect e-learning in the forthcoming six years? and What are the critical research questions for the new period of e-learning evolution? Many of these aspects could initiate interesting PhD research.

and the transformation of working individually on a project or being part of a specialized team. In academia, this collaborative approach is born from the need for every scholar to define new applications for development within their specialization. Secondly, the interdisciplinary approach fosters a new multitude of problems that incite exploration of multidimensional and often multidisciplinary solutions. US VS. THEM Although collaboration is the goal, often artists and programmers stray from each other's tools, techniques, and processes. Therefore, the debate begins. Here is an example of a typical artist vs. techie debate; What is better to use in web design, HTML hand coding, or WYSIWYG software such as Macromedia Dreamweaver? Is HTML hand coding better than writing the code transparently within an intuitive user interface? Does it truly matter? The result is the same-a web page. Why the debate? Well, we all want to think that our discipline and approach is a better solution. One main cause for tech vs. art is the natural inclination of the masses to view technology as simply a term for computers and peripherals. When in fact, the Greek word technikos means of art. The word technical is also defined as: of or relating to technique. In addition, the word also carries the meaning: having special knowledge of a mechanical or scientific subject. Technology is defined by Merriam Webster as: a manner of accomplishing a task using technical methods or knowledge. If the word technology is so scientific, where did it find its way into art? Billy Kluver, a Swedish-born engineer in the late 1950s became a chief catalyst for the art and technology movement in the 1960s. Kulver was a pioneering proponent in the marriage between art and technology. Inspired by Aristotle's notion of Techne-in which there was no differentiation between the practice of art and science. Kluver was a crucial conduit in interdisciplinary collaboration between artists and scientists. In a 1996 essay titled, "The Great Northwestern Power Failure," Kluver states, "The artists work is like that of a scientist. It is an investigation which may or may not yield meaningful results; in many cases we only know many years later." Kluver was a visionary who understood the value of technology as a gathering force in collaboration, not a obstacle. The work Kluver accomplished with Robert Rauschenberg in their founded group Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) was critical to today's interdisciplinary collaborations. E.A.T. encouraged artists and engineers in interdisciplinary technology-based art projects (Packer, 2001). viii SHARING WORDS Highly shared words throughout many disciplines, computer graphics and multimedia have become foundations for scholars to explore within their own contexts. The terms are found universally throughout many disciplines that bear no resemblance to each other in purpose, process, and output. It is appropriate that the digital scholar is to understand, embrace, and explore the countless tributaries of opportunity that exist within computer graphics and multimedia. Within concentration areas, there exists a mountain of terms that has an immeasurable amount of specialization and hybrids. Each one is important in the unique function of a particular problem. Engagement of unknown areas is critical to developing a true meaning for the word technology. BOOK ORGANIZATION This book has a diverse authorship that spans several disciplines, countries, and levels. Specifically, three main areas are focused on. Section I is Digital Design. Chapters in this section explore topics within digital design education, production, culture, and techniques. Section II is Computer Science. Chapters in this section provide extensive insight into computer science research topics including 4d visualization, virtual environments, graph aesthetics, and video indexing. Section III is Multimedia and New Media. This section contains chapters that cross boundaries between digital design and computer science. However, because the chapters engage multiple media and integrate interactivity in the discussion, they are classified as multimedia or new media chapters within this text. The topic areas include Macromedia Flash programming, digital asset alignment and management, analysis of digital audio, and machine vision in the arts. This diverse array of art, technology, and science all come together to make up a small piece of the vast subject we know as computer graphics and multimedia. One major goal of this text is to enable the reader to open their minds to the extensive journeys that can be taken exploring merely one specialization in computer graphics and multimedia. This book also hopes to encourage artists to understand and embrace collaboration in science and technology. And to encourage scientists, engineers, and techies to open the doors to collaborative interdisciplinary projects allowing scientists and artists to come together as hybrid technologists who share the same vision and principles towards problem solving, but do not share the same educational, experiential, and technical backgrounds. There are 12 chapters in this book. They are fairly divided between digital design, computer science, and multimedia/new media. Here is a brief description of each chapter's significance. x To the editorial staff: Initially I must thank the superb staff at Idea Group Inc. for their invaluable support throughout this process.

and the transformation of working individually on a project or being part of a specialized team. In academia, this collaborative approach is born from the need for every scholar to define new applications for development within their specialization. Secondly, the interdisciplinary approach fosters a new multitude of problems that incite exploration of multidimensional and often multidisciplinary solutions. US VS. THEM Although collaboration is the goal, often artists and programmers stray from each other's tools, techniques, and processes. Therefore, the debate begins. Here is an example of a typical artist vs. techie debate; What is better to use in web design, HTML hand coding, or WYSIWYG software such as Macromedia Dreamweaver? Is HTML hand coding better than writing the code transparently within an intuitive user interface? Does it truly matter? The result is the same-a web page. Why the debate? Well, we all want to think that our discipline and approach is a better solution. One main cause for tech vs. art is the natural inclination of the masses to view technology as simply a term for computers and peripherals. When in fact, the Greek word technikos means of art. The word technical is also defined as: of or relating to technique. In addition, the word also carries the meaning: having special knowledge of a mechanical or scientific subject. Technology is defined by Merriam Webster as: a manner of accomplishing a task using technical methods or knowledge. If the word technology is so scientific, where did it find its way into art? Billy Kluver, a Swedish-born engineer in the late 1950s became a chief catalyst for the art and technology movement in the 1960s. Kulver was a pioneering proponent in the marriage between art and technology. Inspired by Aristotle's notion of Techne-in which there was no differentiation between the practice of art and science. Kluver was a crucial conduit in interdisciplinary collaboration between artists and scientists. In a 1996 essay titled, "The Great Northwestern Power Failure," Kluver states, "The artists work is like that of a scientist. It is an investigation which may or may not yield meaningful results; in many cases we only know many years later." Kluver was a visionary who understood the value of technology as a gathering force in collaboration, not a obstacle. The work Kluver accomplished with Robert Rauschenberg in their founded group Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) was critical to today's interdisciplinary collaborations. E.A.T. encouraged artists and engineers in interdisciplinary technology-based art projects (Packer, 2001). viii SHARING WORDS Highly shared words throughout many disciplines, computer graphics and multimedia have become foundations for scholars to explore within their own contexts. The terms are found universally throughout many disciplines that bear no resemblance to each other in purpose, process, and output. It is appropriate that the digital scholar is to understand, embrace, and explore the countless tributaries of opportunity that exist within computer graphics and multimedia. Within concentration areas, there exists a mountain of terms that has an immeasurable amount of specialization and hybrids. Each one is important in the unique function of a particular problem. Engagement of unknown areas is critical to developing a true meaning for the word technology. BOOK ORGANIZATION This book has a diverse authorship that spans several disciplines, countries, and levels. Specifically, three main areas are focused on. Section I is Digital Design. Chapters in this section explore topics within digital design education, production, culture, and techniques. Section II is Computer Science. Chapters in this section provide extensive insight into computer science research topics including 4d visualization, virtual environments, graph aesthetics, and video indexing. Section III is Multimedia and New Media. This section contains chapters that cross boundaries between digital design and computer science. However, because the chapters engage multiple media and integrate interactivity in the discussion, they are classified as multimedia or new media chapters within this text. The topic areas include Macromedia Flash programming, digital asset alignment and management, analysis of digital audio, and machine vision in the arts. This diverse array of art, technology, and science all come together to make up a small piece of the vast subject we know as computer graphics and multimedia. One major goal of this text is to enable the reader to open their minds to the extensive journeys that can be taken exploring merely one specialization in computer graphics and multimedia. This book also hopes to encourage artists to understand and embrace collaboration in science and technology. And to encourage scientists, engineers, and techies to open the doors to collaborative interdisciplinary projects allowing scientists and artists to come together as hybrid technologists who share the same vision and principles towards problem solving, but do not share the same educational, experiential, and technical backgrounds. There are 12 chapters in this book. They are fairly divided between digital design, computer science, and multimedia/new media. Here is a brief description of each chapter's significance. x To the editorial staff: Initially I must thank the superb staff at Idea Group Inc. for their invaluable support throughout this process.

Software engineers and programmers will probably find themselves needing to manage multiple versions of their software. This entails, among others, managing source codes, inserting metadata tags for annotation, tracing source changes from current to previous versions, checking respective change logs, retrieving different versions of the source code, etc. The issues are more pronounced for software teams and especially those working in distributed development environments. Similar issues are observed in the case of dealing with OWL files and other enterprise systems documentation resources. It is noted that, although currently not being practiced, ontology-based annotation techniques in revision control can be influential in surmounting many of the problems associated with such issues. These issues and related new approaches on revision control are considered in this paper. We introduce a novel revision control approach based on semantic ontology annotation in distributed environments.

In the current literature of knowledge management and artificial intelligence, several different approaches to the problem have been carried out of developing domain ontologies from scratch. All these approaches deal fundamentally with three problems: (1) providing a collection of general terms describing classes and relations to be employed in the description of the domain itself; (2) organizing the terms into a taxonomy of the classes by the ISA relation; and (3) expressing in an explicit way the constraints that make the ISA pairs meaningful. Though a number of such approaches can be found, no systematic analysis of them exists which can be used to understand the inspiring motivation, the applicability context, and the structure of the approaches. In this paper, we provide a framework for analyzing the existing methodologies that compares them to a set of general criteria. In particular, we obtain a classification based upon the direction of ontology construction; bottom-up are those methodologies that start with some descriptions of the domain and obtain a classification, while top-down ones start with an abstract view of the domain itself, which is given a priori. The resulting classification is useful not only for theoretical purposes but also in the practice of deployment of ontologies in Information Systems, since it provides a framework for choosing the right methodology to be applied in the specific context, depending also on the needs of the application itself.

The primary purpose of ontological annotation in Natural Language Processing (NLP) is to make explicit the content of concepts in a domain, using a set of arbitrary tags or labels which must conform to an agreed standard. This method has contributed to the development of many European languages, but it has not been so much employed in African languages. This paper therefore develops a model to prepa component features so as to make it both human and machine readable. The ontology development process proposed by (Schultz, 1997) which is based on the activities identified in the IEEE standard for software development is the method of ontological annotations adopted to design the hybrid model for Yoruba noun. B (1990)‟ “ y (1978)‟ and Awo y (1978)‟ y

The increasing volume of data available on the Web makes information retrieval a tedious and difficult task. The vision of the Semantic Web introduces the next generation of the Web by establishing a layer of machine-understandable data e.g. for software agents, sophisticated search engines and Web services. The success of the Semantic Web crucially depends on the easy creation, integration and use of semantic data. This chapter is a state-of-the-art review of techniques which could make the Web more "semantic". Beyond this state-of-the-art, we describe open research areas and we present major current research programs in this domain.

Based on the long-standing work of the Global University Alliance and its members, ontology is introduced for the business domain. This 'business ontology' incorporates all the constructs that can be found in the most popular business standards and frameworks. The business ontology's research and development journey is detailed; in terms of the how the research and findings came about, including the underlying academic design science that is informed by practitioners' industrial experiences. It explains the value of ontology, from which the need for the business ontology can be justified and gives it presence in business practice. The paper concludes with a discussion on the ontology's present status and future potential.

The development of the Semantic Web, the next-generation Web, greatly relies on the availability of ontologies and powerful annotation tools. However, there is a lack of ontology-based annotation tools for linguistic multimedia data. Existing tools either lack ontology support or provide limited support for multimedia. To fill the gap, we present an ontology-based linguistic multimedia annotation tool, OntoELAN, which features: (1) the support for OWL ontologies; (2) the management of language profiles, which allow the user to choose a subset of ontological terms for annotation; (3) the management of ontological tiers, which can be annotated with language profile terms and, therefore, corresponding ontological terms; and (4) storing OntoELAN annotation documents in XML format based on multimedia and domain ontologies. To our best knowledge, OntoELAN is the first audio/video annotation tool in the linguistic domain that provides support for ontology-based annotation. It is expected that the availability of such a tool will greatly facilitate the creation of linguistic multimedia repositories as islands of the Semantic Web of language engineering.

Software engineers and programmers will probably find themselves needing to manage multiple versions of their software. This entails, among others, managing source codes, inserting metadata tags for annotation, tracing source changes from current to previous versions, checking respective change logs, retrieving different versions of the source code, etc. The issues are more pronounced for software teams and especially those working in distributed development environments. Similar issues are observed in the case of dealing with OWL files and other enterprise systems documentation resources. It is noted that, although currently not being practiced, ontology-based annotation techniques in revision control can be influential in surmounting many of the problems associated with such issues. These issues and related new approaches on revision control are considered in this paper. We introduce a novel revision control approach based on semantic ontology annotation in distributed environments.

The Web has been, in the last decades, the place where information retrieval achieved its maximum importance, given its ubiquity and the sheer volume of information. However, its exponential growth made the retrieval task increasingly hard, relying its effectiveness on idiosyncratic and somewhat biased ranking algorithms. To deal with this problem, a "new" Web, called Semantic Web (SW) was proposed, bringing along concepts like "Web of Data" and "Linked Data", although the definitions and connections among these concepts are often unclear. Based on a qualitative approach built over a literature review, a definition of SW is presented, discussing the related concepts sometimes used as synonyms. It concludes that the SW is a comprehensive and ambitious construct that includes the great purpose of making the Web a global database. It also follows the specifications developed and/or associated with its operationalization and the necessary procedures for the connection of data in an open format on the Web. The goals of this comprehensive SW are the union of two outcomes still tenuously connected: the virtually unlimited possibility of connections between data-the web domain-with the potentiality of the automated inference of "intelligent" systems-the semantic component.

The development of the Semantic Web, the next-generation Web, greatly relies on the availability of ontologies and powerful annotation tools. However, there is a lack of ontology-based annotation tools for linguistic multimedia data. Existing tools either lack ontology support or provide limited support for multimedia. To fill the gap, we present an ontology-based linguistic multimedia annotation tool, OntoELAN, which features: (1) the support for OWL ontologies; (2) the management of language profiles, which allow the user to choose a subset of ontological terms for annotation; (3) the management of ontological tiers, which can be annotated with language profile terms and, therefore, corresponding ontological terms; and (4) storing OntoELAN annotation documents in XML format based on multimedia and domain ontologies. To our best knowledge, OntoELAN is the first audio/video annotation tool in the linguistic domain that provides support for ontology-based annotation. It is expected that the availability of such a tool will greatly facilitate the creation of linguistic multimedia repositories as islands of the Semantic Web of language engineering.

and the transformation of working individually on a project or being part of a specialized team. In academia, this collaborative approach is born from the need for every scholar to define new applications for development within their specialization. Secondly, the interdisciplinary approach fosters a new multitude of problems that incite exploration of multidimensional and often multidisciplinary solutions. US VS. THEM Although collaboration is the goal, often artists and programmers stray from each other's tools, techniques, and processes. Therefore, the debate begins. Here is an example of a typical artist vs. techie debate; What is better to use in web design, HTML hand coding, or WYSIWYG software such as Macromedia Dreamweaver? Is HTML hand coding better than writing the code transparently within an intuitive user interface? Does it truly matter? The result is the same-a web page. Why the debate? Well, we all want to think that our discipline and approach is a better solution. One main cause for tech vs. art is the natural inclination of the masses to view technology as simply a term for computers and peripherals. When in fact, the Greek word technikos means of art. The word technical is also defined as: of or relating to technique. In addition, the word also carries the meaning: having special knowledge of a mechanical or scientific subject. Technology is defined by Merriam Webster as: a manner of accomplishing a task using technical methods or knowledge. If the word technology is so scientific, where did it find its way into art? Billy Kluver, a Swedish-born engineer in the late 1950s became a chief catalyst for the art and technology movement in the 1960s. Kulver was a pioneering proponent in the marriage between art and technology. Inspired by Aristotle's notion of Techne-in which there was no differentiation between the practice of art and science. Kluver was a crucial conduit in interdisciplinary collaboration between artists and scientists. In a 1996 essay titled, "The Great Northwestern Power Failure," Kluver states, "The artists work is like that of a scientist. It is an investigation which may or may not yield meaningful results; in many cases we only know many years later." Kluver was a visionary who understood the value of technology as a gathering force in collaboration, not a obstacle. The work Kluver accomplished with Robert Rauschenberg in their founded group Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) was critical to today's interdisciplinary collaborations. E.A.T. encouraged artists and engineers in interdisciplinary technology-based art projects (Packer, 2001). viii SHARING WORDS Highly shared words throughout many disciplines, computer graphics and multimedia have become foundations for scholars to explore within their own contexts. The terms are found universally throughout many disciplines that bear no resemblance to each other in purpose, process, and output. It is appropriate that the digital scholar is to understand, embrace, and explore the countless tributaries of opportunity that exist within computer graphics and multimedia. Within concentration areas, there exists a mountain of terms that has an immeasurable amount of specialization and hybrids. Each one is important in the unique function of a particular problem. Engagement of unknown areas is critical to developing a true meaning for the word technology. BOOK ORGANIZATION This book has a diverse authorship that spans several disciplines, countries, and levels. Specifically, three main areas are focused on. Section I is Digital Design. Chapters in this section explore topics within digital design education, production, culture, and techniques. Section II is Computer Science. Chapters in this section provide extensive insight into computer science research topics including 4d visualization, virtual environments, graph aesthetics, and video indexing. Section III is Multimedia and New Media. This section contains chapters that cross boundaries between digital design and computer science. However, because the chapters engage multiple media and integrate interactivity in the discussion, they are classified as multimedia or new media chapters within this text. The topic areas include Macromedia Flash programming, digital asset alignment and management, analysis of digital audio, and machine vision in the arts. This diverse array of art, technology, and science all come together to make up a small piece of the vast subject we know as computer graphics and multimedia. One major goal of this text is to enable the reader to open their minds to the extensive journeys that can be taken exploring merely one specialization in computer graphics and multimedia. This book also hopes to encourage artists to understand and embrace collaboration in science and technology. And to encourage scientists, engineers, and techies to open the doors to collaborative interdisciplinary projects allowing scientists and artists to come together as hybrid technologists who share the same vision and principles towards problem solving, but do not share the same educational, experiential, and technical backgrounds. There are 12 chapters in this book. They are fairly divided between digital design, computer science, and multimedia/new media. Here is a brief description of each chapter's significance. x To the editorial staff: Initially I must thank the superb staff at Idea Group Inc. for their invaluable support throughout this process.

This article proposes an architecture to support information and knowledge exchange between collaborating business partners. The focus is on knowledge representation and exchange by intelligent agents to support collaborative business functions through agents that exchange problem-specific information in standardized formats. The article then shows the application of the proposed architecture in the context of an infomediarybased B2B E-marketplace. Article: Emergent internet technologies already have had significant impacts on the business processes of today's organizations. New ways of conducting business with other businesses (B2B), directly with end consumers (B2C), and via new E-marketplaces have been implemented to facilitate transaction processing and coordinate processes among business partners. Increasingly, the Internet is seen by business organizations as a vehicle to create value. With an increasing number of parties involved in managing such a complex supply chain, the timely sharing of accurate information among collaborating partners becomes crucial to the efficiency of workflows and business operations (Rabin. 2003). However, a lack of systems and process integration, and the resultant lack of end-to-end value chain visibility, continue to hinder collaborative and mutually beneficial partnerships (Rabin, 2003). Information exchange, facilitated through technologies such as the Internet with its global connectivity, enables the creation of information partnerships among participants engaged in collaborative work across the entire supply chain. Information partnerships require system models that enable and support information integration, knowledge exchange, and thus improved collaboration among business partners. Such systems must provide trusted collaborating partners with "intelligent" capabilities for the seamless and transparent exchange of dynamic market information, including supply and demand conditions both synchronously and asynchronously, to attain their full business potential. Weber and Aha (2003) identified requirements for organizational knowledge management systems (KMS) where the central unit is a repository of knowledge artifacts (Holsapple and Joshi, 2001) collected from internal or external organizational sources. Here, knowledge repositories play a central role in the storage, distribution, and management of knowledge in an organization (Bolloju et al., 2002). Implementing and managing such knowledge integration capabilities over distributed and heterogeneous information platforms, such as the Internet, is a challenging task; yet, realizing this task can have huge benefits for organizations that embrace collaborative business paradigms. Recently, intelligent agents have gained significant interest as powerful modeling abstractions for B2B applications (Papazoglou, 2001). The assumption here is that the usage of software agents for processing information and knowledge flows can help increase the efficacy of an E-marketplace for its participants. Software agents work together by sharing process knowledge to achieve operational synergies for the goaloriented activities of individual entities in the system. Together-with emerging technologies like extensible Markup Language (XML) and Web Services, they provide opportunities to develop integrative E-marketplaces with suppliers or customers. INTELLIGENT AGENTS AND THEIR APPLICATION An intelligent agent is "a computer system situated in some environment and that is capable of flexible autonomous action in this environment in order to meet its design objectives" (Jennings and Wooldridge, 1998). The terms agents, software agents and intelligent agents are often used interchangeably in the literature.

Researchers share large amounts of digital resources, which offer new chances for cooperation. Collaborative annotation systems are meant to support this. Often these systems are targeted at a specific task or domain, e.g., annotation of a corpus. The DWAN framework for web annotation is generic and can support a wide range of tasks and domains. A key feature of the framework is its support for caching representations of the annotated resource. This allows showing the context of the annotation even if the resource has changed or has been removed. The paper describes the design and implementation of the framework. Use cases provided by researchers are well in line with the key characteristics of the DWAN annotation framework.

This article proposes an architecture to support information and knowledge exchange between collaborating business partners. The focus is on knowledge representation and exchange by intelligent agents to support collaborative business functions through agents that exchange problem-specific information in standardized formats. The article then shows the application of the proposed architecture in the context of an infomediarybased B2B E-marketplace. Article: Emergent internet technologies already have had significant impacts on the business processes of today's organizations. New ways of conducting business with other businesses (B2B), directly with end consumers (B2C), and via new E-marketplaces have been implemented to facilitate transaction processing and coordinate processes among business partners. Increasingly, the Internet is seen by business organizations as a vehicle to create value. With an increasing number of parties involved in managing such a complex supply chain, the timely sharing of accurate information among collaborating partners becomes crucial to the efficiency of workflows and business operations (Rabin. 2003). However, a lack of systems and process integration, and the resultant lack of end-to-end value chain visibility, continue to hinder collaborative and mutually beneficial partnerships (Rabin, 2003). Information exchange, facilitated through technologies such as the Internet with its global connectivity, enables the creation of information partnerships among participants engaged in collaborative work across the entire supply chain. Information partnerships require system models that enable and support information integration, knowledge exchange, and thus improved collaboration among business partners. Such systems must provide trusted collaborating partners with "intelligent" capabilities for the seamless and transparent exchange of dynamic market information, including supply and demand conditions both synchronously and asynchronously, to attain their full business potential. Weber and Aha (2003) identified requirements for organizational knowledge management systems (KMS) where the central unit is a repository of knowledge artifacts (Holsapple and Joshi, 2001) collected from internal or external organizational sources. Here, knowledge repositories play a central role in the storage, distribution, and management of knowledge in an organization (Bolloju et al., 2002). Implementing and managing such knowledge integration capabilities over distributed and heterogeneous information platforms, such as the Internet, is a challenging task; yet, realizing this task can have huge benefits for organizations that embrace collaborative business paradigms. Recently, intelligent agents have gained significant interest as powerful modeling abstractions for B2B applications (Papazoglou, 2001). The assumption here is that the usage of software agents for processing information and knowledge flows can help increase the efficacy of an E-marketplace for its participants. Software agents work together by sharing process knowledge to achieve operational synergies for the goaloriented activities of individual entities in the system. Together-with emerging technologies like extensible Markup Language (XML) and Web Services, they provide opportunities to develop integrative E-marketplaces with suppliers or customers. INTELLIGENT AGENTS AND THEIR APPLICATION An intelligent agent is "a computer system situated in some environment and that is capable of flexible autonomous action in this environment in order to meet its design objectives" (Jennings and Wooldridge, 1998). The terms agents, software agents and intelligent agents are often used interchangeably in the literature.

We define Semantic eBusiness as “an approach to managing knowledge for coordination of eBusiness processes through the systematic application of Semantic Web technologies.” Advances in Semantic Web-based technologies offer the means to integrate heterogeneous systems across organizations in a meaningful way by incorporating ontology—a common, standard, and shareable vocabulary used to represent the meaning of system entities; knowledge representation, with structured collections of information and sets of inference rules that can be used to conduct automated reasoning; and intelligent agents that collect content from diverse sources and exchange semantically enriched information. These primary components of the Semantic Web vision form the foundation technology for semantic eBusiness. The challenge for research in information systems and eBusiness is to provide insight into the design of business models and technical architecture that demonstrate the potential of technical advanceme...

This article proposes an architecture to support information and knowledge exchange between collaborating business partners. The focus is on knowledge representation and exchange by intelligent agents to support collaborative business functions through agents that exchange problem-specific information in standardized formats. The article then shows the application of the proposed architecture in the context of an infomediarybased B2B E-marketplace. Article: Emergent internet technologies already have had significant impacts on the business processes of today's organizations. New ways of conducting business with other businesses (B2B), directly with end consumers (B2C), and via new E-marketplaces have been implemented to facilitate transaction processing and coordinate processes among business partners. Increasingly, the Internet is seen by business organizations as a vehicle to create value. With an increasing number of parties involved in managing such a complex supply chain, the timely sharing of accurate information among collaborating partners becomes crucial to the efficiency of workflows and business operations (Rabin. 2003). However, a lack of systems and process integration, and the resultant lack of end-to-end value chain visibility, continue to hinder collaborative and mutually beneficial partnerships (Rabin, 2003). Information exchange, facilitated through technologies such as the Internet with its global connectivity, enables the creation of information partnerships among participants engaged in collaborative work across the entire supply chain. Information partnerships require system models that enable and support information integration, knowledge exchange, and thus improved collaboration among business partners. Such systems must provide trusted collaborating partners with "intelligent" capabilities for the seamless and transparent exchange of dynamic market information, including supply and demand conditions both synchronously and asynchronously, to attain their full business potential. Weber and Aha (2003) identified requirements for organizational knowledge management systems (KMS) where the central unit is a repository of knowledge artifacts (Holsapple and Joshi, 2001) collected from internal or external organizational sources. Here, knowledge repositories play a central role in the storage, distribution, and management of knowledge in an organization (Bolloju et al., 2002). Implementing and managing such knowledge integration capabilities over distributed and heterogeneous information platforms, such as the Internet, is a challenging task; yet, realizing this task can have huge benefits for organizations that embrace collaborative business paradigms. Recently, intelligent agents have gained significant interest as powerful modeling abstractions for B2B applications (Papazoglou, 2001). The assumption here is that the usage of software agents for processing information and knowledge flows can help increase the efficacy of an E-marketplace for its participants. Software agents work together by sharing process knowledge to achieve operational synergies for the goaloriented activities of individual entities in the system. Together-with emerging technologies like extensible Markup Language (XML) and Web Services, they provide opportunities to develop integrative E-marketplaces with suppliers or customers. INTELLIGENT AGENTS AND THEIR APPLICATION An intelligent agent is "a computer system situated in some environment and that is capable of flexible autonomous action in this environment in order to meet its design objectives" (Jennings and Wooldridge, 1998). The terms agents, software agents and intelligent agents are often used interchangeably in the literature.

We define Semantic eBusiness as “an approach to managing knowledge for coordination of eBusiness processes through the systematic application of Semantic Web technologies.” Advances in Semantic Web-based technologies offer the means to integrate heterogeneous systems across organizations in a meaningful way by incorporating ontology—a common, standard, and shareable vocabulary used to represent the meaning of system entities; knowledge representation, with structured collections of information and sets of inference rules that can be used to conduct automated reasoning; and intelligent agents that collect content from diverse sources and exchange semantically enriched information. These primary components of the Semantic Web vision form the foundation technology for semantic eBusiness. The challenge for research in information systems and eBusiness is to provide insight into the design of business models and technical architecture that demonstrate the potential of technical advanceme...

This article proposes an architecture to support information and knowledge exchange between collaborating business partners. The focus is on knowledge representation and exchange by intelligent agents to support collaborative business functions through agents that exchange problem-specific information in standardized formats. The article then shows the application of the proposed architecture in the context of an infomediarybased B2B E-marketplace. Article: Emergent internet technologies already have had significant impacts on the business processes of today's organizations. New ways of conducting business with other businesses (B2B), directly with end consumers (B2C), and via new E-marketplaces have been implemented to facilitate transaction processing and coordinate processes among business partners. Increasingly, the Internet is seen by business organizations as a vehicle to create value. With an increasing number of parties involved in managing such a complex supply chain, the timely sharing of accurate information among collaborating partners becomes crucial to the efficiency of workflows and business operations (Rabin. 2003). However, a lack of systems and process integration, and the resultant lack of end-to-end value chain visibility, continue to hinder collaborative and mutually beneficial partnerships (Rabin, 2003). Information exchange, facilitated through technologies such as the Internet with its global connectivity, enables the creation of information partnerships among participants engaged in collaborative work across the entire supply chain. Information partnerships require system models that enable and support information integration, knowledge exchange, and thus improved collaboration among business partners. Such systems must provide trusted collaborating partners with "intelligent" capabilities for the seamless and transparent exchange of dynamic market information, including supply and demand conditions both synchronously and asynchronously, to attain their full business potential. Weber and Aha (2003) identified requirements for organizational knowledge management systems (KMS) where the central unit is a repository of knowledge artifacts (Holsapple and Joshi, 2001) collected from internal or external organizational sources. Here, knowledge repositories play a central role in the storage, distribution, and management of knowledge in an organization (Bolloju et al., 2002). Implementing and managing such knowledge integration capabilities over distributed and heterogeneous information platforms, such as the Internet, is a challenging task; yet, realizing this task can have huge benefits for organizations that embrace collaborative business paradigms. Recently, intelligent agents have gained significant interest as powerful modeling abstractions for B2B applications (Papazoglou, 2001). The assumption here is that the usage of software agents for processing information and knowledge flows can help increase the efficacy of an E-marketplace for its participants. Software agents work together by sharing process knowledge to achieve operational synergies for the goaloriented activities of individual entities in the system. Together-with emerging technologies like extensible Markup Language (XML) and Web Services, they provide opportunities to develop integrative E-marketplaces with suppliers or customers. INTELLIGENT AGENTS AND THEIR APPLICATION An intelligent agent is "a computer system situated in some environment and that is capable of flexible autonomous action in this environment in order to meet its design objectives" (Jennings and Wooldridge, 1998). The terms agents, software agents and intelligent agents are often used interchangeably in the literature.

This article proposes an architecture to support information and knowledge exchange between collaborating business partners. The focus is on knowledge representation and exchange by intelligent agents to support collaborative business functions through agents that exchange problem-specific information in standardized formats. The article then shows the application of the proposed architecture in the context of an infomediarybased B2B E-marketplace. Article: Emergent internet technologies already have had significant impacts on the business processes of today's organizations. New ways of conducting business with other businesses (B2B), directly with end consumers (B2C), and via new E-marketplaces have been implemented to facilitate transaction processing and coordinate processes among business partners. Increasingly, the Internet is seen by business organizations as a vehicle to create value. With an increasing number of parties involved in managing such a complex supply chain, the timely sharing of accurate information among collaborating partners becomes crucial to the efficiency of workflows and business operations (Rabin. 2003). However, a lack of systems and process integration, and the resultant lack of end-to-end value chain visibility, continue to hinder collaborative and mutually beneficial partnerships (Rabin, 2003). Information exchange, facilitated through technologies such as the Internet with its global connectivity, enables the creation of information partnerships among participants engaged in collaborative work across the entire supply chain. Information partnerships require system models that enable and support information integration, knowledge exchange, and thus improved collaboration among business partners. Such systems must provide trusted collaborating partners with "intelligent" capabilities for the seamless and transparent exchange of dynamic market information, including supply and demand conditions both synchronously and asynchronously, to attain their full business potential. Weber and Aha (2003) identified requirements for organizational knowledge management systems (KMS) where the central unit is a repository of knowledge artifacts (Holsapple and Joshi, 2001) collected from internal or external organizational sources. Here, knowledge repositories play a central role in the storage, distribution, and management of knowledge in an organization (Bolloju et al., 2002). Implementing and managing such knowledge integration capabilities over distributed and heterogeneous information platforms, such as the Internet, is a challenging task; yet, realizing this task can have huge benefits for organizations that embrace collaborative business paradigms. Recently, intelligent agents have gained significant interest as powerful modeling abstractions for B2B applications (Papazoglou, 2001). The assumption here is that the usage of software agents for processing information and knowledge flows can help increase the efficacy of an E-marketplace for its participants. Software agents work together by sharing process knowledge to achieve operational synergies for the goaloriented activities of individual entities in the system. Together-with emerging technologies like extensible Markup Language (XML) and Web Services, they provide opportunities to develop integrative E-marketplaces with suppliers or customers. INTELLIGENT AGENTS AND THEIR APPLICATION An intelligent agent is "a computer system situated in some environment and that is capable of flexible autonomous action in this environment in order to meet its design objectives" (Jennings and Wooldridge, 1998). The terms agents, software agents and intelligent agents are often used interchangeably in the literature.

Meta-reasoning is essential for multi-agent communication. In this paper we propose a framework of multi-agent communication in which agents employ meta-reasoning to reason with agent and ontology locations in order to communicate semantic information with other agents on the semantic web and also reason with multiple distributed ontologies. We shall argue that multi-agent communication of Semantic Web information cannot be realized without the need to reason with agent and ontology locations. This is because for an agent to be able to communicate with another agent, it must know where and how to send a message to that agent. Similarly, for an agent to be able to reason with an external semantic web ontology, it must know where and how to access to that ontology. The agent framework and its communication mechanism are formulated entirely in meta-logic.

This article proposes an architecture to support information and knowledge exchange between collaborating business partners. The focus is on knowledge representation and exchange by intelligent agents to support collaborative business functions through agents that exchange problem-specific information in standardized formats. The article then shows the application of the proposed architecture in the context of an infomediarybased B2B E-marketplace. Article: Emergent internet technologies already have had significant impacts on the business processes of today's organizations. New ways of conducting business with other businesses (B2B), directly with end consumers (B2C), and via new E-marketplaces have been implemented to facilitate transaction processing and coordinate processes among business partners. Increasingly, the Internet is seen by business organizations as a vehicle to create value. With an increasing number of parties involved in managing such a complex supply chain, the timely sharing of accurate information among collaborating partners becomes crucial to the efficiency of workflows and business operations (Rabin. 2003). However, a lack of systems and process integration, and the resultant lack of end-to-end value chain visibility, continue to hinder collaborative and mutually beneficial partnerships (Rabin, 2003). Information exchange, facilitated through technologies such as the Internet with its global connectivity, enables the creation of information partnerships among participants engaged in collaborative work across the entire supply chain. Information partnerships require system models that enable and support information integration, knowledge exchange, and thus improved collaboration among business partners. Such systems must provide trusted collaborating partners with "intelligent" capabilities for the seamless and transparent exchange of dynamic market information, including supply and demand conditions both synchronously and asynchronously, to attain their full business potential. Weber and Aha (2003) identified requirements for organizational knowledge management systems (KMS) where the central unit is a repository of knowledge artifacts (Holsapple and Joshi, 2001) collected from internal or external organizational sources. Here, knowledge repositories play a central role in the storage, distribution, and management of knowledge in an organization (Bolloju et al., 2002). Implementing and managing such knowledge integration capabilities over distributed and heterogeneous information platforms, such as the Internet, is a challenging task; yet, realizing this task can have huge benefits for organizations that embrace collaborative business paradigms. Recently, intelligent agents have gained significant interest as powerful modeling abstractions for B2B applications (Papazoglou, 2001). The assumption here is that the usage of software agents for processing information and knowledge flows can help increase the efficacy of an E-marketplace for its participants. Software agents work together by sharing process knowledge to achieve operational synergies for the goaloriented activities of individual entities in the system. Together-with emerging technologies like extensible Markup Language (XML) and Web Services, they provide opportunities to develop integrative E-marketplaces with suppliers or customers. INTELLIGENT AGENTS AND THEIR APPLICATION An intelligent agent is "a computer system situated in some environment and that is capable of flexible autonomous action in this environment in order to meet its design objectives" (Jennings and Wooldridge, 1998). The terms agents, software agents and intelligent agents are often used interchangeably in the literature.

This article proposes an architecture to support information and knowledge exchange between collaborating business partners. The focus is on knowledge representation and exchange by intelligent agents to support collaborative business functions through agents that exchange problem-specific information in standardized formats. The article then shows the application of the proposed architecture in the context of an infomediarybased B2B E-marketplace. Article: Emergent internet technologies already have had significant impacts on the business processes of today's organizations. New ways of conducting business with other businesses (B2B), directly with end consumers (B2C), and via new E-marketplaces have been implemented to facilitate transaction processing and coordinate processes among business partners. Increasingly, the Internet is seen by business organizations as a vehicle to create value. With an increasing number of parties involved in managing such a complex supply chain, the timely sharing of accurate information among collaborating partners becomes crucial to the efficiency of workflows and business operations (Rabin. 2003). However, a lack of systems and process integration, and the resultant lack of end-to-end value chain visibility, continue to hinder collaborative and mutually beneficial partnerships (Rabin, 2003). Information exchange, facilitated through technologies such as the Internet with its global connectivity, enables the creation of information partnerships among participants engaged in collaborative work across the entire supply chain. Information partnerships require system models that enable and support information integration, knowledge exchange, and thus improved collaboration among business partners. Such systems must provide trusted collaborating partners with "intelligent" capabilities for the seamless and transparent exchange of dynamic market information, including supply and demand conditions both synchronously and asynchronously, to attain their full business potential. Weber and Aha (2003) identified requirements for organizational knowledge management systems (KMS) where the central unit is a repository of knowledge artifacts (Holsapple and Joshi, 2001) collected from internal or external organizational sources. Here, knowledge repositories play a central role in the storage, distribution, and management of knowledge in an organization (Bolloju et al., 2002). Implementing and managing such knowledge integration capabilities over distributed and heterogeneous information platforms, such as the Internet, is a challenging task; yet, realizing this task can have huge benefits for organizations that embrace collaborative business paradigms. Recently, intelligent agents have gained significant interest as powerful modeling abstractions for B2B applications (Papazoglou, 2001). The assumption here is that the usage of software agents for processing information and knowledge flows can help increase the efficacy of an E-marketplace for its participants. Software agents work together by sharing process knowledge to achieve operational synergies for the goaloriented activities of individual entities in the system. Together-with emerging technologies like extensible Markup Language (XML) and Web Services, they provide opportunities to develop integrative E-marketplaces with suppliers or customers. INTELLIGENT AGENTS AND THEIR APPLICATION An intelligent agent is "a computer system situated in some environment and that is capable of flexible autonomous action in this environment in order to meet its design objectives" (Jennings and Wooldridge, 1998). The terms agents, software agents and intelligent agents are often used interchangeably in the literature.

Developing new software based on requirements specifications created by business analysts often leads to misunderstanding and lack of comprehension, because of the different backgrounds of the people involved. If requirements specifications instead have a clearly defined structure and comprehensive semantics, this obstacle can be resolved. Therefore, we propose to structure the requirements specifications using existing linguistics-based modeling methods and annotate the used terms with ontologies to enhance the understanding and reuse of these documents during the software engineering process.

This article proposes an architecture to support information and knowledge exchange between collaborating business partners. The focus is on knowledge representation and exchange by intelligent agents to support collaborative business functions through agents that exchange problem-specific information in standardized formats. The article then shows the application of the proposed architecture in the context of an infomediarybased B2B E-marketplace. Article: Emergent internet technologies already have had significant impacts on the business processes of today's organizations. New ways of conducting business with other businesses (B2B), directly with end consumers (B2C), and via new E-marketplaces have been implemented to facilitate transaction processing and coordinate processes among business partners. Increasingly, the Internet is seen by business organizations as a vehicle to create value. With an increasing number of parties involved in managing such a complex supply chain, the timely sharing of accurate information among collaborating partners becomes crucial to the efficiency of workflows and business operations (Rabin. 2003). However, a lack of systems and process integration, and the resultant lack of end-to-end value chain visibility, continue to hinder collaborative and mutually beneficial partnerships (Rabin, 2003). Information exchange, facilitated through technologies such as the Internet with its global connectivity, enables the creation of information partnerships among participants engaged in collaborative work across the entire supply chain. Information partnerships require system models that enable and support information integration, knowledge exchange, and thus improved collaboration among business partners. Such systems must provide trusted collaborating partners with "intelligent" capabilities for the seamless and transparent exchange of dynamic market information, including supply and demand conditions both synchronously and asynchronously, to attain their full business potential. Weber and Aha (2003) identified requirements for organizational knowledge management systems (KMS) where the central unit is a repository of knowledge artifacts (Holsapple and Joshi, 2001) collected from internal or external organizational sources. Here, knowledge repositories play a central role in the storage, distribution, and management of knowledge in an organization (Bolloju et al., 2002). Implementing and managing such knowledge integration capabilities over distributed and heterogeneous information platforms, such as the Internet, is a challenging task; yet, realizing this task can have huge benefits for organizations that embrace collaborative business paradigms. Recently, intelligent agents have gained significant interest as powerful modeling abstractions for B2B applications (Papazoglou, 2001). The assumption here is that the usage of software agents for processing information and knowledge flows can help increase the efficacy of an E-marketplace for its participants. Software agents work together by sharing process knowledge to achieve operational synergies for the goaloriented activities of individual entities in the system. Together-with emerging technologies like extensible Markup Language (XML) and Web Services, they provide opportunities to develop integrative E-marketplaces with suppliers or customers. INTELLIGENT AGENTS AND THEIR APPLICATION An intelligent agent is "a computer system situated in some environment and that is capable of flexible autonomous action in this environment in order to meet its design objectives" (Jennings and Wooldridge, 1998). The terms agents, software agents and intelligent agents are often used interchangeably in the literature.

This article proposes an architecture to support information and knowledge exchange between collaborating business partners. The focus is on knowledge representation and exchange by intelligent agents to support collaborative business functions through agents that exchange problem-specific information in standardized formats. The article then shows the application of the proposed architecture in the context of an infomediarybased B2B E-marketplace. Article: Emergent internet technologies already have had significant impacts on the business processes of today's organizations. New ways of conducting business with other businesses (B2B), directly with end consumers (B2C), and via new E-marketplaces have been implemented to facilitate transaction processing and coordinate processes among business partners. Increasingly, the Internet is seen by business organizations as a vehicle to create value. With an increasing number of parties involved in managing such a complex supply chain, the timely sharing of accurate information among collaborating partners becomes crucial to the efficiency of workflows and business operations (Rabin. 2003). However, a lack of systems and process integration, and the resultant lack of end-to-end value chain visibility, continue to hinder collaborative and mutually beneficial partnerships (Rabin, 2003). Information exchange, facilitated through technologies such as the Internet with its global connectivity, enables the creation of information partnerships among participants engaged in collaborative work across the entire supply chain. Information partnerships require system models that enable and support information integration, knowledge exchange, and thus improved collaboration among business partners. Such systems must provide trusted collaborating partners with "intelligent" capabilities for the seamless and transparent exchange of dynamic market information, including supply and demand conditions both synchronously and asynchronously, to attain their full business potential. Weber and Aha (2003) identified requirements for organizational knowledge management systems (KMS) where the central unit is a repository of knowledge artifacts (Holsapple and Joshi, 2001) collected from internal or external organizational sources. Here, knowledge repositories play a central role in the storage, distribution, and management of knowledge in an organization (Bolloju et al., 2002). Implementing and managing such knowledge integration capabilities over distributed and heterogeneous information platforms, such as the Internet, is a challenging task; yet, realizing this task can have huge benefits for organizations that embrace collaborative business paradigms. Recently, intelligent agents have gained significant interest as powerful modeling abstractions for B2B applications (Papazoglou, 2001). The assumption here is that the usage of software agents for processing information and knowledge flows can help increase the efficacy of an E-marketplace for its participants. Software agents work together by sharing process knowledge to achieve operational synergies for the goaloriented activities of individual entities in the system. Together-with emerging technologies like extensible Markup Language (XML) and Web Services, they provide opportunities to develop integrative E-marketplaces with suppliers or customers. INTELLIGENT AGENTS AND THEIR APPLICATION An intelligent agent is "a computer system situated in some environment and that is capable of flexible autonomous action in this environment in order to meet its design objectives" (Jennings and Wooldridge, 1998). The terms agents, software agents and intelligent agents are often used interchangeably in the literature.

This paper introduces two important elements of our VNewsQA/ICT system: its semantic models of simple Vietnamese sentences and its semantic processing mechanism. The VNewsQA/ICT is a Vietnamese based Question Answering system which has the ability to gather information from some Vietnamese news title forms on the ICTnews websites (http://www.ictnews.vn), instead of using a database or a knowledge base, to answer the related Vietnamese questions in the domain of information and communications technology.

Enterprise interoperability is a challenging goal that has many facets, one of which being the need for cooperating enterprises to have a precise understanding of the information that they exchange with each other. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) collaborating in a virtual cluster to market, customize and provision services to customers require the same understanding of these services and their features. This paper describes the work being undertaken in the European IST project VISP (IST-FP6-027178) to meet this requirement. ISP services are being classified and formally specified and an ontology is being developed for the ISP service domain.

Software engineers and programmers will probably find themselves needing to manage multiple versions of their software. This entails, among others, managing source codes, inserting metadata tags for annotation, tracing source changes from current to previous versions, checking respective change logs, retrieving different versions of the source code, etc. The issues are more pronounced for software teams and especially those working in distributed development environments. Similar issues are observed in the case of dealing with OWL files and other enterprise systems documentation resources. It is noted that, although currently not being practiced, ontology-based annotation techniques in revision control can be influential in surmounting many of the problems associated with such issues. These issues and related new approaches on revision control are considered in this paper. We introduce a novel revision control approach based on semantic ontology annotation in distributed environments.

The threat of imminent extinction of perhaps half of the world's languages has led to increased efforts aimed at the their documentation. Such documentation necessarily makes use of a suite of tools to handle a diverse array of tasks from time segmentation of recordings, to transcription, to annotation, to publication. No one tool can support all aspects of the workflow for language documentation, but there is, at present, no general solution for interoperation among the tools required. We outline a solution to this problem based on Semantic Web technologies and further suggest that OpenOffice's capabilities for working with RDF make it an ideal choice for tool development for those aspects of workflow related to the production of publications.

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This paper introduces two important elements of our VNewsQA/ICT system: its semantic models of simple Vietnamese sentences and its semantic processing mechanism. The VNewsQA/ICT is a Vietnamese based Question Answering system which has the ability to gather information from some Vietnamese news title forms on the ICTnews websites (http://www.ictnews.vn), instead of using a database or a knowledge base, to answer the related Vietnamese questions in the domain of information and communications technology.

In recent years, the term "semantics" has been widely used in various fields of research and particularly in areas related to information technology. One of the motivators of such an appropriation is the vision of the Semantic Web, a set of developments underway, which might allow one to obtain better results when querying on the web. However, it is worth asking what kind of semantics we can find in the Semantic Web, considering that studying the subject is a complex and controversial endeavour. Working within this context, we present an account of semantics relying on the main linguist approaches, in order to then analyze what semantics is within the scope of information technology. We critically evaluate a spectrum, which proposes the ordination of instruments (models, languages, taxonomic structures, to mention but a few) according to a semantic scale. In addition to proposing a new extended spectrum, the article suggests alternative interpretations with the aim of clarifying the use of the term "semantics" in different contexts. Finally, we offer our conclusions regarding the semantic in the Semantic Web and mention future directions and complementary works.

We define Semantic eBusiness as “an approach to managing knowledge for coordination of eBusiness processes through the systematic application of Semantic Web technologies.” Advances in Semantic Web-based technologies offer the means to integrate heterogeneous systems across organizations in a meaningful way by incorporating ontology—a common, standard, and shareable vocabulary used to represent the meaning of system entities; knowledge representation, with structured collections of information and sets of inference rules that can be used to conduct automated reasoning; and intelligent agents that collect content from diverse sources and exchange semantically enriched information. These primary components of the Semantic Web vision form the foundation technology for semantic eBusiness. The challenge for research in information systems and eBusiness is to provide insight into the design of business models and technical architecture that demonstrate the potential of technical advanceme...

Abstract: There is an increasing interest and effort in preserving and documenting endangered languages. Language data are valuable only when they are well-cataloged, indexed and searchable. Many language data, particularly those of lesser-spoken languages, are collected as audio and video recordings. While multimedia data provide more channels and dimensions to describe a language's function, and gives a better presentation of the cultural system associated with the language of that community, they ...

This article proposes an architecture to support information and knowledge exchange between collaborating business partners. The focus is on knowledge representation and exchange by intelligent agents to support collaborative business functions through agents that exchange problem-specific information in standardized formats. The article then shows the application of the proposed architecture in the context of an infomediarybased B2B E-marketplace. Article: Emergent internet technologies already have had significant impacts on the business processes of today's organizations. New ways of conducting business with other businesses (B2B), directly with end consumers (B2C), and via new E-marketplaces have been implemented to facilitate transaction processing and coordinate processes among business partners. Increasingly, the Internet is seen by business organizations as a vehicle to create value. With an increasing number of parties involved in managing such a complex supply chain, the timely sharing of accurate information among collaborating partners becomes crucial to the efficiency of workflows and business operations (Rabin. 2003). However, a lack of systems and process integration, and the resultant lack of end-to-end value chain visibility, continue to hinder collaborative and mutually beneficial partnerships (Rabin, 2003). Information exchange, facilitated through technologies such as the Internet with its global connectivity, enables the creation of information partnerships among participants engaged in collaborative work across the entire supply chain. Information partnerships require system models that enable and support information integration, knowledge exchange, and thus improved collaboration among business partners. Such systems must provide trusted collaborating partners with "intelligent" capabilities for the seamless and transparent exchange of dynamic market information, including supply and demand conditions both synchronously and asynchronously, to attain their full business potential. Weber and Aha (2003) identified requirements for organizational knowledge management systems (KMS) where the central unit is a repository of knowledge artifacts (Holsapple and Joshi, 2001) collected from internal or external organizational sources. Here, knowledge repositories play a central role in the storage, distribution, and management of knowledge in an organization (Bolloju et al., 2002). Implementing and managing such knowledge integration capabilities over distributed and heterogeneous information platforms, such as the Internet, is a challenging task; yet, realizing this task can have huge benefits for organizations that embrace collaborative business paradigms. Recently, intelligent agents have gained significant interest as powerful modeling abstractions for B2B applications (Papazoglou, 2001). The assumption here is that the usage of software agents for processing information and knowledge flows can help increase the efficacy of an E-marketplace for its participants. Software agents work together by sharing process knowledge to achieve operational synergies for the goaloriented activities of individual entities in the system. Together-with emerging technologies like extensible Markup Language (XML) and Web Services, they provide opportunities to develop integrative E-marketplaces with suppliers or customers. INTELLIGENT AGENTS AND THEIR APPLICATION An intelligent agent is "a computer system situated in some environment and that is capable of flexible autonomous action in this environment in order to meet its design objectives" (Jennings and Wooldridge, 1998). The terms agents, software agents and intelligent agents are often used interchangeably in the literature.

This article proposes an architecture to support information and knowledge exchange between collaborating business partners. The focus is on knowledge representation and exchange by intelligent agents to support collaborative business functions through agents that exchange problem-specific information in standardized formats. The article then shows the application of the proposed architecture in the context of an infomediarybased B2B E-marketplace. Article: Emergent internet technologies already have had significant impacts on the business processes of today's organizations. New ways of conducting business with other businesses (B2B), directly with end consumers (B2C), and via new E-marketplaces have been implemented to facilitate transaction processing and coordinate processes among business partners. Increasingly, the Internet is seen by business organizations as a vehicle to create value. With an increasing number of parties involved in managing such a complex supply chain, the timely sharing of accurate information among collaborating partners becomes crucial to the efficiency of workflows and business operations (Rabin. 2003). However, a lack of systems and process integration, and the resultant lack of end-to-end value chain visibility, continue to hinder collaborative and mutually beneficial partnerships (Rabin, 2003). Information exchange, facilitated through technologies such as the Internet with its global connectivity, enables the creation of information partnerships among participants engaged in collaborative work across the entire supply chain. Information partnerships require system models that enable and support information integration, knowledge exchange, and thus improved collaboration among business partners. Such systems must provide trusted collaborating partners with "intelligent" capabilities for the seamless and transparent exchange of dynamic market information, including supply and demand conditions both synchronously and asynchronously, to attain their full business potential. Weber and Aha (2003) identified requirements for organizational knowledge management systems (KMS) where the central unit is a repository of knowledge artifacts (Holsapple and Joshi, 2001) collected from internal or external organizational sources. Here, knowledge repositories play a central role in the storage, distribution, and management of knowledge in an organization (Bolloju et al., 2002). Implementing and managing such knowledge integration capabilities over distributed and heterogeneous information platforms, such as the Internet, is a challenging task; yet, realizing this task can have huge benefits for organizations that embrace collaborative business paradigms. Recently, intelligent agents have gained significant interest as powerful modeling abstractions for B2B applications (Papazoglou, 2001). The assumption here is that the usage of software agents for processing information and knowledge flows can help increase the efficacy of an E-marketplace for its participants. Software agents work together by sharing process knowledge to achieve operational synergies for the goaloriented activities of individual entities in the system. Together-with emerging technologies like extensible Markup Language (XML) and Web Services, they provide opportunities to develop integrative E-marketplaces with suppliers or customers. INTELLIGENT AGENTS AND THEIR APPLICATION An intelligent agent is "a computer system situated in some environment and that is capable of flexible autonomous action in this environment in order to meet its design objectives" (Jennings and Wooldridge, 1998). The terms agents, software agents and intelligent agents are often used interchangeably in the literature.

This article proposes an architecture to support information and knowledge exchange between collaborating business partners. The focus is on knowledge representation and exchange by intelligent agents to support collaborative business functions through agents that exchange problem-specific information in standardized formats. The article then shows the application of the proposed architecture in the context of an infomediarybased B2B E-marketplace. Article: Emergent internet technologies already have had significant impacts on the business processes of today's organizations. New ways of conducting business with other businesses (B2B), directly with end consumers (B2C), and via new E-marketplaces have been implemented to facilitate transaction processing and coordinate processes among business partners. Increasingly, the Internet is seen by business organizations as a vehicle to create value. With an increasing number of parties involved in managing such a complex supply chain, the timely sharing of accurate information among collaborating partners becomes crucial to the efficiency of workflows and business operations (Rabin. 2003). However, a lack of systems and process integration, and the resultant lack of end-to-end value chain visibility, continue to hinder collaborative and mutually beneficial partnerships (Rabin, 2003). Information exchange, facilitated through technologies such as the Internet with its global connectivity, enables the creation of information partnerships among participants engaged in collaborative work across the entire supply chain. Information partnerships require system models that enable and support information integration, knowledge exchange, and thus improved collaboration among business partners. Such systems must provide trusted collaborating partners with "intelligent" capabilities for the seamless and transparent exchange of dynamic market information, including supply and demand conditions both synchronously and asynchronously, to attain their full business potential. Weber and Aha (2003) identified requirements for organizational knowledge management systems (KMS) where the central unit is a repository of knowledge artifacts (Holsapple and Joshi, 2001) collected from internal or external organizational sources. Here, knowledge repositories play a central role in the storage, distribution, and management of knowledge in an organization (Bolloju et al., 2002). Implementing and managing such knowledge integration capabilities over distributed and heterogeneous information platforms, such as the Internet, is a challenging task; yet, realizing this task can have huge benefits for organizations that embrace collaborative business paradigms. Recently, intelligent agents have gained significant interest as powerful modeling abstractions for B2B applications (Papazoglou, 2001). The assumption here is that the usage of software agents for processing information and knowledge flows can help increase the efficacy of an E-marketplace for its participants. Software agents work together by sharing process knowledge to achieve operational synergies for the goaloriented activities of individual entities in the system. Together-with emerging technologies like extensible Markup Language (XML) and Web Services, they provide opportunities to develop integrative E-marketplaces with suppliers or customers. INTELLIGENT AGENTS AND THEIR APPLICATION An intelligent agent is "a computer system situated in some environment and that is capable of flexible autonomous action in this environment in order to meet its design objectives" (Jennings and Wooldridge, 1998). The terms agents, software agents and intelligent agents are often used interchangeably in the literature.

Detecting academic plagiarism is a pressing problem, e.g., for educational and research institutions, funding agencies, and academic publishers. Existing plagiarism detection systems reliably identify copied text, or near copies of text, but often fail to detect disguised forms of academic plagiarism, such as paraphrases, translations, and idea plagiarism. We present Semantic Concept Pattern Analysis-an approach that performs an integrated analysis of semantic text relatedness and structural text similarity. Using 25 officially retracted academic plagiarism cases, we demonstrate that our approach can detect plagiarism that established text matching approaches would not identify. We view our approach as a promising addition to improve the detection capabilities for strong paraphrases. We plan to further improve Semantic Concept Pattern Analysis and include the approach as part of an integrated detection process that analyzes heterogeneous similarity features to better identify the many possible forms of plagiarism in academic documents.

This paper introduces two important elements of our VNewsQA/ICT system: its semantic models of simple Vietnamese sentences and its semantic processing mechanism. The VNewsQA/ICT is a Vietnamese based Question Answering system which has the ability to gather information from some Vietnamese news title forms on the ICTnews websites (http://www.ictnews.vn), instead of using a database or a knowledge base, to answer the related Vietnamese questions in the domain of information and communications technology.

Traditionally, data used in OLAP (online analytical processing) have been limited to the contents of the data warehouse of a company. However, the needs for analysis are often more demanding and data are needed from different sources. In this article, we study how the semantics of data sources can be described to allow combining data from several sources into an OLAP cube. We apply Semantic Web technologies for defining an OWL/RDF ontology for OLAP data sources and OLAP cubes. These definitions are then utilised in OLAP cube formation by posing an OWL/RDF ontology-based query against them. We use Grid technologies to enhance the efficiency of processing and ensuring security. Our primary interest is in the cube construction (i.e., ETL process), and we assume that standard OLAP methods can be used for the actual analysis. Our tests show that the proposed approach can speed up the construction of an OLAP cube for ad hoc queries by supporting a high-level query language and reducing th...

In the last decade the evolution on educational technologies forced an extraordinary interest in new methods for delivering learning content to learners. The role of technology has often been overestimated causing a myopic consideration of the critical issues in e-learning. This paper provides an initial discussion of the role of ontologies in the context of e-learning. The overall objective is to emphasize the importance of analysing a phenomenon and reveal the descriptive conceptualizations that affect the employment of technology. Ontology as a term has an intrinsic holistic character and from this point of view is quite interesting to investigate ways of understanding the phenomenon of e-learning from several perspectives. An initial clarification of term ontology is presented and the main issues are used for the description of the developmental process of the e-learning ontology entitled Mutli-Dimensional Dynamic Learning (MDL). The final conclusion balances conceptualizations and technological formulations by drilling down abstract concepts to data declarations and thus machine-readable semantics.

In recent years, the term "semantics" has been widely used in various fields of research and particularly in areas related to information technology. One of the motivators of such an appropriation is the vision of the Semantic Web, a set of developments underway, which might allow one to obtain better results when querying on the web. However, it is worth asking what kind of semantics we can find in the Semantic Web, considering that studying the subject is a complex and controversial endeavour. Working within this context, we present an account of semantics relying on the main linguist approaches, in order to then analyze what semantics is within the scope of information technology. We critically evaluate a spectrum, which proposes the ordination of instruments (models, languages, taxonomic structures, to mention but a few) according to a semantic scale. In addition to proposing a new extended spectrum, the article suggests alternative interpretations with the aim of clarifying the use of the term "semantics" in different contexts. Finally, we offer our conclusions regarding the semantic in the Semantic Web and mention future directions and complementary works.

We propose a bootstrapping approach to knowledge acquisition, which uses multimedia ontologies for fused extraction of semantics from multiple modalities, and feeds back the extracted information, aiming to automate the ontology evolution process. This paper presents the basic components of the proposed approach and discusses the open research issues focusing on the synergy of extraction and evolution that will enable the development of scalable and precise knowledge acquisition technology.