Pesquisas na área de biodiversidade são, em geral, transdisciplinares por natureza. Essas pesquisas tentam responder problemas complexos que necessitam de conhecimento transdisciplinar e requerem a cooperação entre pesquisadores de diversas disciplinas. No entanto, é raro que duas ou mais disciplinas distintas tenham observações, dados e métodos em formatos que permitam a colaboração imediata sobre hipóteses complexas e transdisciplinares. Hoje, a velocidade com que qualquer disciplina obtêm avanços científicos depende de quão bem seus pesquisadores colaboram entre si e com tecnologistas das áreas de bancos de dados, gerenciamento de workflow, visualização e tecnologias, como computação em nuvem. Dentro desse cenário, a Web Semântica surge, não só como uma nova geração de ferramentas para a representação de informações, mais também para a automação, integração, interoperabilidade e reutilização de recursos. Neste trabalho, uma infraestrutura semântica é proposta para a integração de dados científicos sobre biodiversidade. Sua arquitetura é baseada na aplicação das tecnologias da Web Semântica para se desenvolver uma infraestrutura eficiente, robusta e escalável aplicada ao domínio da Biodiversidade. O componente central desse ambiente é a linguagem BioDSL, uma Linguagem de Domínio Especifico (DSL) para mapear dados tabulares para o modelo RDF, seguindo os princípios de Linked Open Data. Esse ambiente integrado também conta com uma interface Web, editores e outras facilidades para conversão/integração de conjuntos de dados sobre biodiversidade. Para o desenvolvimento desse ambiente, houve a participação de instituições de pesquisa parceiras que atuam na área de biodiversidade da Amazônia. A ajuda do Laboratório de Interoperabilidade Semântica do Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia (INPA) foi fundamental para a especificação e testes do ambiente. Foram pesquisados vários casos de uso com pesquisadores do INPA e realizados testes com o protótipo do sistema. Nesses testes, ele foi capaz de converter arquivos de dados reais sobre biodiversidade para RDF e interligar automaticamente entidades presentes nesses dados a entidades presentes na web (nuvem LOD). Num experimento envolvendo 1173 registros de espécies ameaçadas, o ambiente conseguiu recuperar automaticamente 967 (82,4%) entidades (URIs) da LOD referentes a essas espécies, com matching completo para o nome das espécies, 149 (12,7%) com matching parcial (apenas um dos nomes da espécie), 36 (3,1%) não tiveram correspondências (sem resultados nas buscas) e 21 (1,7%) sem registro das especies na LOD. / Research in the area of biodiversity is, in general, transdisciplinary in nature. This type of research attempts to answer complex problems that require transdisciplinary knowledge and require the cooperation between researchers of diverse disciplines. However, it is rare for two or more distinct disciplines to have observations, data, and methods in formats that allow immediate collaboration on complex and transdisciplinary hypotheses. Today, the speed which any discipline gets scientific advances depends on how well its researchers collaborate with each other and with technologists from the areas of databases, workflow management, visualization, and internet technologies. Within this scenario, the Semantic Web arises not only as a new generation of tools for information representation, but also for automation, integration, interoperability and resource reuse. In this work, a semantic infrastructure is proposed for the integration of scientific data on biodiversity. This architecture is based on the application of Semantic Web technologies to develop an efficient, robust and scalable infrastructure for use in the field of Biodiversity. The core component of this infrastructure is the BioDSL language, a Specific Domain Language (DSL) to map tabular data to the RDF model, following the principles of Linked Open Data. This integrated environment also has a Web interface, editors and other facilities for converting/integrating biodiversity datasets. For the development of this environment, we had the participation of partner research institutions that work with Amazon biodiversity. The help of the Laboratory of Semantic Interoperability of the National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA) was fundamental for the specification and tests of this infrastructure. Several use cases were investigated with INPA researchers and tests were carried out with the system prototype. In these tests, the prototype was able to convert actual biodiversity data files to RDF and automatically interconnect entities present in these data to entities present on the web (LOD cloud). In an experiment involving 1173 records of endangered species, the environment was able to automatically retrieve 967 (82.4%) LOD entities (URIs) for these species, with complete matching for the species name, 149 (12.7%) with partial matching (only one of the species names), 36 (3,1%) with no matching and 21 (1,7%) no have records at LOD.

<p>Predmet istraživanja disertacije obuhvata&nbsp; realizaciju&nbsp; op&scaron;teg&nbsp; modela tutorskog<br />sistema za elektronsko učenje iz različitih domena&nbsp; primenom&nbsp; tehnologija semantičkog<br />veba i primena tog modela za&nbsp; izgradnju tutorskog sistema za učenje programskog jezika&nbsp;Java sa elementima personalizacije.<br />Cilj disertacije je implementacija&nbsp; i predstavljanje&nbsp; svih&nbsp; elemenata&nbsp; tutorskog sistema za<br />učenje programskog jezika Java&nbsp; pomodu tehnologija semantičkog veba. Ovaj proces<br />obuhvata kreiranje&nbsp; osnovnih&nbsp; gradivnih&nbsp; ontologija&nbsp; kao i&nbsp; pravila za izvođenje konkretnih<br />akcija kojim se postiže personalizacija nastavnog materijala.</p> / <p>The subject of the dissertation includes the implementation of a conceptual&nbsp;model of tutoring system for e-learning in different domains using semantic web&nbsp;technologies and application of that model in a design of a tutoring system for&nbsp;personalised learning of Java programming language.</p><p>The goal of the dissertation is the implementation and presentation of all elements of the tutoring system for learning the Java programming language using semantic web&nbsp;technologies. This process includes the creation of the fundamental building blocks of&nbsp;ontologies and rules for carrying out the actions for adaptation of teaching materials.</p>

A navegação e recuperação entre recursos de catálogos diferentes através de tecnologias Linked Data e da web semântica pode diminuir a sobrecarga para gestão, interoperabilidade e compartilhamento de dados como forma de cooperação institucional, além disso ser modo diferente de navegação entre acervos de instituições e ambientes informacionais externos, possibilitando novas formas de consulta de dados. O objetivo desta pesquisa é identificar os instrumentos e metodologias de representação descritiva, temática e recuperação de documentos audiovisuais no contexto de bibliotecas, arquivos fímicos e da web semântica. Dessa forma, a metodologia inclui a revisão de literatura da área para estudo do estado da arte e o levantamento de tecnologias da web semântica que visam a criação de padrões de metadados, vocabulários, ontologias e modelos conceituais voltados a anotação e descrição audiovisual, assim como uma parte empírica com estudo de caso do catálogo e do manual de filmes da Biblioteca da ECA. / The navigation and retrieval between different catalog resources through Linked Data and semantic web technologies can reduce the overhead for management, interoperability and data sharing as a form of institutional cooperation, besides being a different way of navigating between collections of institutions and informational environments new ways of querying data. The objective of this research is to identify the instruments and methodologies of descriptive, thematic representation and retrieval of audiovisual documents in the context of libraries, phylogenies and the semantic web. Thus, the methodology includes the review of the literature of the area for the study of the state of the art and the survey of semantic web technologies that aim at the creation of standards of metadata, vocabularies, ontologies and conceptual models aimed at annotation and audiovisual description, as well as an empirical part with a case study of the catalog and the film manual of the ECA Library.

L’Internet des Objets (IoT) vise à créer un eco-système global et ubiquitaire composé d’un grand nombre d’objets hétérogènes. Afin d’atteindre cette vision, le World Wide Web apparaît comme un candidat adapté pour interconnecter objets et services à la couche applicative en un Web des Objets (WoT).Cependant l’évolution actuelle du WoT produit des silos d’objets et empêche ainsi la mise en place de cette vision. De plus, même si le Web facilite la composition d’objets et services hétérogènes, les approches existantes produisent des compositions statiques incapables de s’adapter à des environnements dynamiques et des exigences évolutives. Un autre défi est à relever: permettre aux personnes d’interagir avec le vaste, évolutif et hétérogène IoT.Afin de répondre à ces limitations, nous proposons une architecture pour IoT ouvert et autogouverné, constitué de personnes et d’objets situés, en interaction avec un environnement global via des plateformes hétérogènes. Notre approche consiste de rendre les objets autonomes et d’appliquer la métaphore des réseaux sociaux afin de créer des réseaux flexibles de personnes et d’objets. Nous fondons notre approche sur les résultats issus des domaines des multi-agents et du WoT afin de produit un WoT Social.Notre proposition prend en compte les besoins d’hétérogénéité, de découverte et d’interaction flexible dans l’IoT. Elle offre également un coût minimal pour les développeurs et les utilisateurs via différentes couches d’abstraction permettant de limité la complexité de cet éco-système. Nous démontrons ces caractéristiques par la mise en oeuvre de plus scénarios applicatifs. / The Internet of Things (IoT) aims to create a global ubiquitous ecosystem composed of large numbers of heterogeneous devices. To achieve this vision, the World Wide Web is emerging as a suitable candidate to interconnect IoT devices and services at the application layer into a Web of Things (WoT).However, the WoT is evolving towards large silos of things, and thus the vision of a global ubiquitous ecosystem is not fully achieved. Furthermore, even if the WoT facilitates mashing up heterogeneous IoT devices and services, existing approaches result in static IoT mashups that cannot adapt to dynamic environments and evolving user requirements. The latter emphasizes another well-recognized challenge in the IoT, that is enabling people to interact with a vast, evolving, and heterogeneous IoT.To address the above limitations, we propose an architecture for an open and self-governed IoT ecosystem composed of people and things situated and interacting in a global environment sustained by heterogeneous platforms. Our approach is to endow things with autonomy and apply the social network metaphor to createflexible networks of people and autonomous things. We base our approach on results from multi-agent and WoT research, and we call the envisioned IoT ecosystem the Social Web of Things.Our proposal emphasizes heterogeneity, discoverability and flexible interaction in the IoT. In the same time, it provides a low entry-barrier for developers and users via multiple layers of abstraction that enable them to effectively cope with the complexity of the overall ecosystem. We implement several application scenarios to demonstrate these features.

L’Internet des Objets (IoT) vise à créer un eco-système global et ubiquitaire composé d’un grand nombre d’objets hétérogènes. Afin d’atteindre cette vision, le World Wide Web apparaît comme un candidat adapté pour interconnecter objets et services à la couche applicative en un Web des Objets (WoT).Cependant l’évolution actuelle du WoT produit des silos d’objets et empêche ainsi la mise en place de cette vision. De plus, même si le Web facilite la composition d’objets et services hétérogènes, les approches existantes produisent des compositions statiques incapables de s’adapter à des environnements dynamiques et des exigences évolutives. Un autre défi est à relever: permettre aux personnes d’interagir avec le vaste, évolutif et hétérogène IoT.Afin de répondre à ces limitations, nous proposons une architecture pour IoT ouvert et autogouverné, constitué de personnes et d’objets situés, en interaction avec un environnement global via des plateformes hétérogènes. Notre approche consiste de rendre les objets autonomes et d’appliquer la métaphore des réseaux sociaux afin de créer des réseaux flexibles de personnes et d’objets. Nous fondons notre approche sur les résultats issus des domaines des multi-agents et du WoT afin de produit un WoT Social.Notre proposition prend en compte les besoins d’hétérogénéité, de découverte et d’interaction flexible dans l’IoT. Elle offre également un coût minimal pour les développeurs et les utilisateurs via différentes couches d’abstraction permettant de limité la complexité de cet éco-système. Nous démontrons ces caractéristiques par la mise en oeuvre de plus scénarios applicatifs. / The Internet of Things (IoT) aims to create a global ubiquitous ecosystem composed of large numbers of heterogeneous devices. To achieve this vision, the World Wide Web is emerging as a suitable candidate to interconnect IoT devices and services at the application layer into a Web of Things (WoT).However, the WoT is evolving towards large silos of things, and thus the vision of a global ubiquitous ecosystem is not fully achieved. Furthermore, even if the WoT facilitates mashing up heterogeneous IoT devices and services, existing approaches result in static IoT mashups that cannot adapt to dynamic environments and evolving user requirements. The latter emphasizes another well-recognized challenge in the IoT, that is enabling people to interact with a vast, evolving, and heterogeneous IoT.To address the above limitations, we propose an architecture for an open and self-governed IoT ecosystem composed of people and things situated and interacting in a global environment sustained by heterogeneous platforms. Our approach is to endow things with autonomy and apply the social network metaphor to createflexible networks of people and autonomous things. We base our approach on results from multi-agent and WoT research, and we call the envisioned IoT ecosystem the Social Web of Things.Our proposal emphasizes heterogeneity, discoverability and flexible interaction in the IoT. In the same time, it provides a low entry-barrier for developers and users via multiple layers of abstraction that enable them to effectively cope with the complexity of the overall ecosystem. We implement several application scenarios to demonstrate these features.

Whenever autonomous entities work together to meet each other's needs, there arises the problem of how an entity with a need can find and use entities with the capability to meet that need. This problem is seen in Web service architectures, agent systems, and data integration systems, among others. Solutions have been proposed in each of these fields, but they are all dependent on implementation and interface. Hence all are restricted to their particular field, and all require their participants to conform to certain assumptions about implementation and interface. This failure of support for service autonomy is conceptually unattractive and impractical. In this thesis we show how to describe and matchmake service capabilities and client needs in a way that is implementation and interface independent. The result is a service discovery solution that fully supports the rights of services to choose their own implementation and interface. Our representation is capable of capturing capabilities across a range of service types, from Web services to agents to data sources, while ignoring the implementation and interface details that distinguish them. Thus, our solution unifies these fields for description and discovery purposes, allowing data sources with complex language interfaces to compete against form-based Web services and frame-and-slot agents, for example. Moreover, our solution captures all of the most important aspects of capability, such as: the conceptual meaning and limitations on what a service can achieve; what requests can be expressed through a service's interface, and limitations on what attributes of information a service can return. The provision of an interface independent capability description raises the additional question of how to enable a client to invoke the service to which it has been matched, and correctly interpret the results returned; we solve this by providing an interface description that maps from client objectives onto invocations, and from returned results onto a canonical result format.

This thesis explores the role of modularity for achieving a better adaptation of learning technology to pedagogical requirements. In order to examine the interrelations that occur between pedagogy and computer science, a theoretical framework rooted in both fields is applied. During the twentieth century, the focus of pedagogical research and practice has gone from behaviourism, via cognitivism, to learning theory based on constructivism. Changes in learning objectives and an increasing cognitive complexity of learning tasks are likely to have contributed to this evolvement. This puts new requirements on the design and implementation of pedagogical instruction (instructional design) and its application to learning technology. Using instructional design together with technology requires the pedagogical process to be predetermined, which is partly contradicted by the nature of constructivism. Many constructivist approaches require social interaction and dynamic learning environments that can adapt to changes that are required by different pedagogical approaches. Those requirements have been met using modular approaches for content, i.e., learning objects, implemented in non-modular web-based virtual learning environments (VLE), like learning management systems (LMS). This thesis argues that modularity promotes adaptability and adaptivity, but that the current practice of using learning objects and LMSes is too restricted to fulfill the increasing needs for flexibility. The reasons are that the learning object concept is still too ill-defined to function as a component framework, and there are complex and unsolved issues regarding the representation of pedagogical instructions. This is especially complicated from a constructivist perspective where pedagogical instructions cannot always be assumed to be predetermined, which needs to be encountered for by technology. This thesis contributes to the research field by suggesting a modular approach that includes both digital learning content and VLEs. This was accomplished by suggesting a taxonomy and an abstract model for learning objects, which address both functional and technical properties. Furthermore, six action areas are suggested in order to enhance the technical quality of learning objects. Using the abstract model as a basis, the software architecture of learning objects was addressed in order to separate data, logics and presentation – including the separation of the representation of pedagogical process from the components that implement it. This facilitates the combination of modularity and representation of pedagogical instruction that utilizes machine-processable semantics, enabling the utilization of modularity at composition time as well as at run-time. This approach has resulted in a SOA-based architecture framework that has been used as blueprint for implementing two prototypes of modular VLEs, using different technology platforms. The objective was to verify the taxonomy, the abstract model, and the architecture framework. The experiments have shown that it is possible to incorporate learning content and the VLE into the same modular framework in order to provide the flexibility needed for learning technology to better adapt to changing pedagogical requirements. The experiments have also shown how pedagogical processes benefit from being represented using machine-processable semantics in being able to better utilize the flexibility offered by modularity in keeping the components of the VLE together by representing context and structure. This has been illustrated by adding semantic annotations that were used to dynamically connect pedagogical instruction to annotated learning objects, using machine-processable semantics. / QC 20100903

This thesis addresses the issues of coherent distributed knowledge production and sharing in the Life-science area. In spite of the continuously increasing computing and storage capabilities of computing infrastructures, the management of massive scientific data through centralized approaches became inappropriate, for several reasons: (i) they do not guarantee the autonomy property of data providers, constrained, for either ethical or legal concerns, to keep the control over the data they host, (ii) they do not scale and adapt to the massive scientific data produced through e-Science platforms. In the context of the NeuroLOG and VIP Life-science collaborative platforms, we address on one hand, distribution and heterogeneity issues underlying, possibly sensitive, resource sharing ; and on the other hand, automated knowledge production through the usage of these e-Science platforms, to ease the exploitation of the massively produced scientific data. We rely on an ontological approach for knowledge modeling and propose, based on Semantic Web technologies, to (i) extend these platforms with efficient, static and dynamic, transparent federated semantic querying strategies, and (ii) to extend their data processing environment, from both provenance information captured at run-time and domain-specific inference rules, to automate the semantic annotation of ''in silico'' experiment results. The results of this thesis have been evaluated on the Grid'5000 distributed and controlled infrastructure. They contribute to addressing three of the main challenging issues faced in the area of computational science platforms through (i) a model for secured collaborations and a distributed access control strategy allowing for the setup of multi-centric studies while still considering competitive activities, (ii) semantic experiment summaries, meaningful from the end-user perspective, aimed at easing the navigation into massive scientific data resulting from large-scale experimental campaigns, and (iii) efficient distributed querying and reasoning strategies, relying on Semantic Web standards, aimed at sharing capitalized knowledge and providing connectivity towards the Web of Linked Data.

The Web turns out to be a collection of services that interoperate through the Internet. As the number of services increase, it is getting more and more diffucult for users to find, filter and integrate these services depending on their requirements. Automatic techniques are being developed to fulfill these tasks. The first step toward automatic composition is the discovery of services needed. UDDI which is one of the accepted web standards, provides a registry of web services. However representation capabilities of UDDI are insufficient to search for services on the basis of what they provide. Semantic web initiatives like OWL and OWL-S are promising for locating exact services based on their capabilities. In this thesis, a new semantic service discovery mechanism is implemented based on OWL-S service profiles. The service profiles of an advertisement and a request are matched based on OWL ontologies describing them. In contrast to previous work on the subject, the ontologies of the advertisement and the request are not assumed to be same. In case they are different, schema matching algorithms are applied. Schema matching algorithms find the mappings between the given schema models. A hybrid combination of semantic, syntactic and structural schema matching algorithms are applied to match ontologies

Web service composition is an inevitable aspect of web services technology, which solves complex problems by combining available basic services and ordering them to best suit the problem requirements. Automatic composition gives us flexibility of selecting best candidate services at composition time, this would require the user to define the resource allocation constraints for selecting and composing candidate web services. Resource allocation constraints define restrictions on how to allocate resources, and scheduling under resource allocation constraints to provide proper resource allocation to tasks. In this work, web service composition system named as CWSF (Composite Web Service Framework) constructed for users to define a workflow system in which a rich set of constraints can be defined on web services. On the contrary many technologies and studies, CWSF provides a user-friendly environment for modeling web service composition system. The output of the framework is the scheduling of web service composition in which how and when web services are executed are defined. With this work, a language, CWSL is defined to describe workflow, resource allocation constraints, selection and discovery rules of web services and associated semantic information. An important property of CWSF system is converting web service composition problem into a constraint satisfaction problem to find the best solution that meet the all criteria defined by user. Furthermore, CWSF has ability to display other possible solutions to provides users flexibility. This study also includes semantic matching and mapping facilities for service discovery.