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Business process management is fast becoming one of the most important approaches for designing contemporary organizations and information systems. A critical component of business process management is business process modelling. It is widely accepted that modelling of business processes from scratch is a complex, time-consuming and error-prone task. However the efforts made to model these processes are seldom reused beyond their original purpose. Reuse of business process models has the potential to overcome the challenges of modelling business processes from scratch. Process model repositories, properly populated, are certainly a step toward supporting reuse of process models. This thesis starts with the observation that the existing process model repositories for supporting process model reuse suffer from several shortcomings that affect their usability in practice. Firstly, most of the existing repositories are proprietary, therefore they can only be enhanced or extended with new models by the owners of the repositories. Secondly, it is difficult to locate and retrieve relevant process models from a large collection. Thirdly, process models are not goal related, thereby making it difficult to gain an understanding of the business goals that are realized by a certain model. Finally, process model repositories lack a clear mechanism to identify and define the relationship between business processes and as a result it is difficult to identify related processes. Following a design science research paradigm, this thesis proposes an open and language-independent process model repository with an efficient retrieval system to support process model reuse. The proposed repository is grounded on four original and interrelated contributions: (1) a set of requirements that a process model repository should possess to increase the probability of process model reuse; (2) a context-based process semantic annotation model for semantically annotating process models to facilitate effective retrieval of process models; (3) a business process relationship meta-model for identifying and defining the relationship of process models in the repository; and (4) architecture of a process model repository for process model reuse. The models and architecture produced in this thesis were evaluated to test their utility, quality and efficacy. The semantic annotation model was evaluated through two empirical studies using controlled experiments. The conclusion drawn from the two studies is that the annotation model improves searching, navigation and understanding of process models. The process relationship meta-model was evaluated using an informed argument to determine the extent to which it meets the established requirements. The results of the analysis revealed that the meta-model meets the established requirements. Also the analysis of the architecture against the requirements indicates that the architecture meets the established requirements. / Processhantering, också kallat ärendehantering, har blivit en av de viktigaste ansatserna för att utforma dagens organisationer och informationssystem. En central komponent i processhantering är processmodellering. Det är allmänt känt att modellering av processer kan vara en komplex, tidskrävande och felbenägen uppgift. Och de insatser som görs för att modellera processer kan sällan användas bortom processernas ursprungliga syfte. Återanvändning av processmodeller skulle kunna övervinna många av de utmaningar som finns med att modellera processer. En katalog över processmodeller är ett steg mot att stödja återanvändning av processmodeller. Denna avhandling börjar med observationen att befintliga processmodellkataloger för att stödja återanvändning av processmodeller lider av flera brister som påverkar deras användbarhet i praktiken. För det första är de flesta processmodellkatalogerna proprietära, och därför kan endast katalogägarna förbättra eller utöka dem med nya modeller. För det andra är det svårt att finna och hämta relevanta processmodeller från en stor katalog. För det tredje är processmodeller inte målrelaterade, vilket gör det svårt att få en förståelse för de affärsmål som realiseras av en viss modell. Slutligen så saknar processmodellkataloger ofta en tydlig mekanism för att identifiera och definiera förhållandet mellan processer, och därför är det svårt att identifiera relaterade processer. Utifrån ett designvetenskapligt forskningsparadigm så föreslår denna avhandling en öppen och språkoberoende processmodellkatalog med ett effektivt söksystem för att stödja återanvändning av processmodeller. Den föreslagna katalogen bygger på fyra originella och inbördes relaterade bidrag: (1) en uppsättning krav som en processmodellkatalog bejöver uppfylla för att öka möjligheterna till återanvändning av processmodeller; (2) en kontextbaserad semantisk processannoteringsmodell för semantisk annotering av processmodeller för att underlätta effektivt återvinnande av processmodeller; (3) en metamodell för processrelationer för att identifiera och definiera förhållandet mellan processmodeller i katalogen; och (4) en arkitektur av en processmodellkatalog för återanvändning av processmodeller. De modeller och den arkitektur som tagits fram i denna avhandling har utvärderats för att testa deras användbarhet, kvalitet och effektivitet. Den semantiska annotationsmodellen utvärderades genom två empiriska studier med kontrollerade experiment. Slutsatsen av de två studierna är att modellen förbättrar sökning, navigering och förståelse för processmodeller. Metamodellen för processrelationer utvärderades med hjälp av ett informerat argument för att avgöra i vilken utsträckning den uppfyllde de ställda kraven. Resultaten av analysen visade att metamodellen uppfyllde dessa krav. Även analysen av arkitekturen indikerade att denna uppfyllde de fastställda kraven.

There has been an increasing interest in Semantic Web services (SWS) as a proposed solution to facilitate automatic discovery, composition and deployment of existing syntactic Web services. Successful implementation and wider adoption of SWS by research and industry are, however, profoundly based on the existence of effective and easy to use methods for service semantic description. Unfortunately, Web service semantic annotation is currently performed by manual means. Manual annotation is a difficult, error-prone and time-consuming task and few approaches exist aiming to semi-automate that task. Existing approaches are difficult to use since they require ontology building. Moreover, these approaches employ ineffective matching methods and suffer from the Low Percentage Problem. The latter problem happens when a small number of service elements - in comparison to the total number of elements – are annotated in a given service. This research addresses the Web services annotation problem by developing a semi-automatic annotation approach that allows SWS developers to effectively and easily annotate their syntactic services. The proposed approach does not require application ontologies to model service semantics. Instead, a standard query template is used: This template is filled with data and semantics extracted from WSDL files in order to produce query instances. The input of the annotation approach is the WSDL file of a candidate service and a set of ontologies. The output is an annotated WSDL file. The proposed approach is composed of five phases: (1) Concept extraction; (2) concept filtering and query filling; (3) query execution; (4) results assessment; and (5) SAWSDL annotation. The query execution engine makes use of name-based and structural matching techniques. The name-based matching is carried out by CN-Match which is a novel matching method and tool that is developed and evaluated in this research. The proposed annotation approach is evaluated using a set of existing Web services and ontologies. Precision (P), Recall (R), F-Measure (F) and Percentage of annotated elements are used as evaluation metrics. The evaluation reveals that the proposed approach is effective since - in relation to manual results - accurate and almost complete annotation results are obtained. In addition, high percentage of annotated elements is achieved using the proposed approach because it makes use of effective ontology extension mechanisms.

In order to compete with the global giants, enterprises are concentrating on their core competencies and collaborating with organizations that compliment their skills and core activities. The current trend is to develop temporary alliances of independent enterprises, in which companies can come together to share skills, core competencies and resources. However, knowledge sharing and communication among multidiscipline companies is a complex and challenging problem. In a collaborative environment, the meaning of knowledge is drastically affected by the context in which it is viewed and interpreted; thus necessitating the treatment of structure as well as semantics of the data stored in enterprise repositories. Keeping the present market and technological scenario in mind, this research aims to propose tools and techniques that can enable companies to assimilate distributed information resources and achieve their business goals.

The Internet and Web have brought in a new era of information sharing and opened up countless opportunities for people to rethink and redefine communication. With the development of network-related technologies, a Client/Server architecture has become dominant in the application layer of the Internet. Nowadays network nodes are behind firewalls and Network Address Translations, and the centralised design of the Client/Server architecture limits communication between users on the client side. Achieving the conflicting goals of data privacy and data openness is difficult and in many cases the difficulty is compounded by the differing solutions adopted by different organisations and companies. Building a more decentralised or distributed environment for people to freely share their knowledge has become a pressing challenge and we need to understand how to adapt the pervasive Client/Server architecture to this more fluid environment. This thesis describes a novel framework by which network nodes or humans can interact and share knowledge with each other through formal service-choreography specifications in a decentralised manner. The platform allows peers to publish, discover and (un)subscribe to those specifications in the form of Interaction Models (IMs). Peer groups can be dynamically formed and disbanded based on the interaction logs of peers. IMs are published in HTML documents as normal Web pages indexable by search engines and associated with lightweight annotations which semantically enhance the embedded IM elements and at the same time make IM publications comply with the Linked Data principles. The execution of IMs is decentralised on each peer via conventional Web browsers, potentially giving the system access to a very large user community. In this thesis, after developing a proof-of-concept implementation, we carry out case studies of the resulting functionality and evaluate the implementation across several metrics. An increasing number of service providers have began to look for customers proactively, and we believe that in the near future we will not search for services but rather services will find us through our peer communities. Our approaches show how a peer-to-peer architecture for this purpose can be obtained on top of a conventional Client/Server Web infrastructure.

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Submitted by Filipe dos Santos (fsantos@pucsp.br) on 2016-09-02T14:31:38Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Newton Juniano Calegari.pdf: 2853517 bytes, checksum: e1eda2a1325986c6284a5054d724a19f (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-09-02T14:31:38Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Newton Juniano Calegari.pdf: 2853517 bytes, checksum: e1eda2a1325986c6284a5054d724a19f (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-04-02 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo / The tool proposed in this research aims at bringing together the Semantic Web technologies and content publishers, this way enabling the latter to contribute to creating structured data and metadata about texts and information they may make available on the Web. The general goal is to investigate the technical feasibility of developing a semantic annotation tool that enables content publishers to contribute to the Semantic Web ecosystem. Based on (BERNERS-LEE et al., 2001; ALESSO; SMITH, 2006; RODRÍGUEZ-ROCHA et al., 2015; GUIZZARDI, 2005; ISOTANI; BITTENCOURT, 2015), the Semantic Web is presented according to its technological stack. Considering the importance of the ontologies and vocabularies used to create Semantic Web applications, the essential subjects of the conceptual modelling and the ontology language used on the Web are presented. In order to provide the necessary concepts to use semantic annotations, this dissertation presents both the way annotations are used (manual, semi-automatic, and automatic) as well as the way these annotations are integrated with resources available on the Web. The state-of-the-art chapter describes recent projects and related work on the use of Semantic Web within Web-content publishing context. The methodology adopted by this research is based on (SANTAELLA; VIEIRA, 2008; GIL, 2002), in compliance with the exploratory approach for research. This research presents the proposal and the architecture of the semantic annotation tool, which uses shared vocabulary in order to create structured data based on textual content. In conclusion, this dissertation addresses the possibilities of future work, both in terms of the implementation of the tool in a real use case as well as in new scientific research / A proposta apresentada nesta pesquisa busca aproximar as tecnologias de Web Semântica dos usuários publicadores de conteúdo na Web, permitindo que estes contribuam com a geração de dados estruturados e metadados sobre textos e informações que venham disponibilizar na Web. O objetivo geral deste trabalho é investigar a viabilidade técnica de desenvolvimento de uma ferramenta de anotação semântica que permita aos usuários publicadores de conteúdo contribuírem para o ecossistema de Web Semântica. Com suporte de (BERNERS-LEE et al., 2001; ALESSO; SMITH, 2006; RODRÍGUEZ-ROCHA et al., 2015; GUIZZARDI, 2005; ISOTANI; BITTENCOURT, 2015) apresenta-se o tópico de Web Semântica de acordo com a pilha tecnológica que mostra o conjunto de tecnologias proposto para a sua realização. Considerando a importância de ontologias e vocabulários para a construção de aplicações de Web Semântica, são apresentados então os tópicos fundamentais de modelagem conceitual e a linguagem de ontologias para Web. Para fornecer a base necessária para a utilização de anotações semânticas são apresentados, além da definição, os modos de uso de anotações (manual, semi-automático e automático) e as formas de integrar essas anotações com recursos disponíveis nas tecnologias da Web Semântica. O estado da arte contempla trabalhos e projetos recentes sobre o uso de Web Semântica no contexto de publicação de conteúdo na Web. A metodologia é baseada na proposta apresentada por SANTAELLA; VIEIRA (2008), seguindo uma abordagem exploratória para a condução da pesquisa. É apresentada a proposta e os componentes de uma ferramenta de anotação semântica que utiliza vocabulários compartilhados para geração de dados estruturados a partir de conteúdo textual. Concluindo o trabalho, são apresentadas as possibilidades futuras, tanto da implementação da ferramenta em um cenário real, atestando sua viabilidade técnica, quanto novos trabalhos encaminhados a partir desta pesquisa

Cette thèse traite d'une approche, guidée par une ontologie, conçue pour annoter les documents d'un corpus où chaque document décrit une entité de même type. Dans notre contexte, l'ensemble des documents doit être annoté avec des concepts qui sont en général trop spécifiques pour être explicitement mentionnés dans les textes. De plus, les concepts d'annotation ne sont représentés au départ que par leur nom, sans qu'aucune information sémantique ne leur soit reliée. Enfin, les caractéristiques des entités décrites dans les documents sont incomplètes. Pour accomplir ce processus particulier d'annotation de documents, nous proposons une approche nommée SAUPODOC (Semantic Annotation Using Population of Ontology and Definitions of Concepts) qui combine plusieurs tâches pour (1) peupler et (2) enrichir une ontologie de domaine. La phase de peuplement (1) ajoute dans l'ontologie des informations provenant des documents du corpus mais aussi du Web des données (Linked Open Data ou LOD). Le LOD représente aujourd'hui une source prometteuse pour de très nombreuses applications du Web sémantique à condition toutefois de développer des techniques adaptées d'acquisition de données. Dans le cadre de SAUPODOC, le peuplement de l'ontologie doit tenir compte de la diversité des données présentes dans le LOD : propriétés multiples, équivalentes, multi-valuées ou absentes. Les correspondances à établir, entre le vocabulaire de l'ontologie à peupler et celui du LOD, étant complexes, nous proposons un modèle pour faciliter leur spécification. Puis, nous montrons comment ce modèle est utilisé pour générer automatiquement des requêtes SPARQL et ainsi faciliter l'interrogation du LOD et le peuplement de l'ontologie. Celle-ci, une fois peuplée, est ensuite enrichie(2) avec les concepts d'annotation et leurs définitions qui sont apprises grâce à des exemples de documents annotés. Un raisonnement sur ces définitions permet enfin d'obtenir les annotations souhaitées. Des expérimentations ont été menées dans deux domaines d'application, et les résultats, comparés aux annotations obtenues avec des classifieurs, montrent l'intérêt de l'approche. / This thesis deals with an approach, guided by an ontology, designed to annotate documents from a corpus where each document describes an entity of the same type. In our context, all documents have to be annotated with concepts that are usually too specific to be explicitly mentioned in the texts. In addition, the annotation concepts are represented initially only by their name, without any semantic information connected to them. Finally, the characteristics of the entities described in the documents are incomplete. To accomplish this particular process of annotation of documents, we propose an approach called SAUPODOC (Semantic Annotation of Population Using Ontology and Definitions of Concepts) which combines several tasks to (1) populate and (2) enrich a domain ontology. The population step (1) adds to the ontology information from the documents in the corpus but also from the Web of Data (Linked Open Data or LOD). The LOD represents today a promising source for many applications of the Semantic Web, provided that appropriate techniques of data acquisition are developed. In the settings of SAUPODOC, the ontology population has to take into account the diversity of the data in the LOD: multiple, equivalent, multi-valued or absent properties. The correspondences to be established, between the vocabulary of the ontology to be populated and that of the LOD, are complex, thus we propose a model to facilitate their specification. Then, we show how this model is used to automatically generate SPARQL queries and facilitate the interrogation of the LOD and the population of the ontology. The latter, once populated, is then enriched (2) with the annotation concepts and definitions that are learned through examples of annotated documents. Reasoning on these definitions finally provides the desired annotations. Experiments have been conducted in two areas of application, and the results, compared with the annotations obtained with classifiers, show the interest of the approach.

The current World Wide Web is a web of pages. Users have to guess possible keywords that might lead through search engines to the pages that contain information of interest and browse hundreds or even thousands of the returned pages in order to obtain what they want. This frustrating problem motivates an approach to turn the web of pages into a web of knowledge, so that web users can query the information of interest directly. This dissertation provides a step in this direction and a way to partially overcome the challenges. Specifically, this dissertation shows how to turn machine-generated web pages like those on the hidden web into semantic web pages for the web of knowledge. We design and develop three systems to address the challenge of turning the web pages into web-of-knowledge pages: TISP (Table Interpretation for Sibling Pages), TISP++, and FOCIH (Form-based Ontology Creation and Information Harvesting). TISP can automatically interpret hidden-web tables. Given interpreted tables, TISP++ can generate ontologies and semantically annotate the information present in the interpreted tables automatically. This way, we can offer a way to make the hidden information publicly accessible. We also provide users with a way where they can generate personalized ontologies. FOCIH provides users with an interface with which they can provide their own view by creating a form that specifies the information they want. Based on the form, FOCIH can generate user-specific ontologies, and based on patterns in machine-generated pages, FOCIH can harvest information and annotate these pages with respect to the generated ontology. Users can directly query on the annotated information. With these contributions, this dissertation serves as a foundational pillar for turning the current web of pages into a web of knowledge.

One of the problems of semantic web is automated getting annotated data - web pages. Therefore this work is engaged in manual annotation of web pages and try to simplify this process for users using proposed methods. First part contains analysis of annotated data, users and vocabularies used for annotation. Afterwards are proposed methods which simplify annotation creation for users, the possibility of usage similar annotations or possibility highlight interesting parts of web page suitable for annotation. The work includes proposal of annotation tool user interface also that verifies proposed methods in practice. On the basis of this proposal was created a prototype implementation of the annotation tool Semantic Annotator as an extension for Google Chrome browser, which was also used for experiment verifying user-friendliness especially.