International Journal of Semantic Computing

The Semantic Application Design Language (SADL) combines advances in standardized declarative modeling languages based on formal logic with advances in domain-specific language (DSL) development environments to create a controlled-English language that translates directly into the Web Ontology Language (OWL), the SPARQL graph query language, and a compatible if/then rule language. Models in the SADL language can be authored, tested, and maintained in an Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE). This environment offers semantic highlighting, statement completion, expression templates, hyperlinking of concepts to their definition, model validation, automatic error correction, and other advanced authoring features to enhance the ease and productivity of the modeling environment. In addition, the SADL language offers the ability to build in validation tests and test suites that can be used for regression testing. Through common Eclipse functionality, the models can be easily placed under source code control, versioned, and managed throughout the life of the model. Differences between versions can be compared side-by-side. Finally, the SADL-IDE offers an explanation capability that is useful in understanding what was inferred by the reasoner/rule engine and why those conclusions were reached. Perhaps more importantly, explanation is available of why an expected inference failed to occur. The objective of the language and the IDE is to enable domain experts to play a more active and productive role in capturing their knowledge and making it available as computable artifacts useful for automation where appropriate and for decision support systems in applications that benefit from a collaborative human-computer approach. SADL is built entirely on open source code and most of SADL is itself released to open source. This paper explores the concepts behind the language and provides details and examples of the authoring and model lifecycle support facilities.

XML is ubiquitously used as an information exchange platform for web-based applications in healthcare, life sciences, and many other domains. Proliferating XML data are now managed through latest native XML database technologies. XML data sources conforming to common XML schemas could be shared and integrated with syntactic interoperability. Semantic interoperability can be achieved through semantic annotations of data models using common data elements linked to concepts from ontologies. In this paper, we present a framework and software system to support the development of semantic interoperable XML based data sources that can be shared through a Grid infrastructure. We also present our work on supporting semantic validated XML data through semantic annotations for XML Schema, semantic validation and semantic authoring of XML data. We demonstrate the use of the system for a biomedical database of medical image annotations and markups.

This paper addresses semantic search of Web services using natural language processing. First we survey various existing approaches, focusing on the fact that the expensive costs of current semantic annotation frameworks result in limited use of semantic search for large scale applications. We then propose a service search framework based on the vector space model to combine the traditional frequency weighted term-document matrix, the syntactical information extracted from a lexical database and a dependency grammar parser. In particular, instead of using terms as the rows in a term-document matrix, we propose using synsets from WordNet to distinguish different meanings of a word under different contexts as well as clustering different words with similar meanings. Also based on the characteristics of Web services descriptions, we propose an approach to identifying semantically important terms to adjust weightings. Our experiments show that our approach achieves its goal well.

Socioeconomic needs combined with technological advances are creating a demand for an increasing number of systems for which high-assurance is an essential attribute. These system designs, which increasingly include semantic computing components, span a broad spectrum of applications. They are incredibly diverse and their complexity is growing. The conditions under which these systems operate are such that system faults will occur and must be comprehensively accounted for in the systems' designs.

This article investigates the landscape of high-assurance systems, the challenges these systems face, and what must be done to address those challenges. Challenges include societal needs, scientific frontiers, dynamics of technological evolution, and drivers of current research models.

The ever-increasing amount of information flowing through Social Media presents numerous opportunities for the generation of Business Intelligence. Challenges exist in the leveraging of these data sources due to their heterogeneity and unstructured content. This paper presents the application of Semantic Computing to Social Media for industrial application, focusing on topic identification and behavior prediction. The methodologies described can benefit many areas of an organization including support of marketing, customer service, engineering and public relations. Results demonstrate that business operations can be substantially enhanced through application of Semantic Computing to Social Media.