This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Semantics in Data and Knolwedge Bases, SDKB 2008, held in Nantes, France, on March 29, 2008. The 6 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited papers and a survey on the state of the art in the field, were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The SDKB workshop presented original contributions demonstrating the use of logic, discrete mathematics, combinatorics, domain theory and other mathematical theories of semantics for database and knowledge bases, computational linguistics and semiotics, and information and knowledge-based systems.

Proceedings of the meeting held in Jerusalem, Israel, June, 1988. Thirty papers represent a cross ssection of the many facets of contemporary database research and provide an up-to-date account of activities of some of the leading companies in the database field. Covers: knowledge-based application

In this book, the authors first address the research issues by providing a motivating scenario, followed by the exploration of the principles and techniques of the challenging topics. Then they solve the raised research issues by developing a series of methodologies. More specifically, the authors study the query optimization and tackle the query performance prediction for knowledge retrieval. They also handle unstructured data processing, data clustering for knowledge extraction. To optimize the queries issued through interfaces against knowledge bases, the authors propose a cache-based optimization layer between consumers and the querying interface to facilitate the querying and solve the latency issue. The cache depends on a novel learning method that considers the querying patterns from individual’s historical queries without having knowledge of the backing systems of the knowledge base. To predict the query performance for appropriate query scheduling, the authors examine the queries’ structural and syntactical features and apply multiple widely adopted prediction models. Their feature modelling approach eschews the knowledge requirement on both the querying languages and system. To extract knowledge from unstructured Web sources, the authors examine two kinds of Web sources containing unstructured data: the source code from Web repositories and the posts in programming question-answering communities. They use natural language processing techniques to pre-process the source codes and obtain the natural language elements. Then they apply traditional knowledge extraction techniques to extract knowledge. For the data from programming question-answering communities, the authors make the attempt towards building programming knowledge base by starting with paraphrase identification problems and develop novel features to accurately identify duplicate posts. For domain specific knowledge extraction, the authors propose to use a clustering technique to separate knowledge into different groups. They focus on developing a new clustering algorithm that uses manifold constraints in the optimization task and achieves fast and accurate performance. For each model and approach presented in this dissertation, the authors have conducted extensive experiments to evaluate it using either public dataset or synthetic data they generated.

In the last decades, information modelling and knowledge bases have become hot topics not only in academic communities related to information systems and computer science, but also in business areas where information technology is applied. This book aims to exchange scientific results and experiences achieved in computer science and other related disciplines using innovative methods and progressive approaches. A platform has been established drawing together researchers as well as practitioners dealing with information modelling and knowledge bases. The main topics of this publication target the variety of themes in the domain of information modelling, conceptual analysis, design and specification of information systems, ontologies, software engineering, knowledge and process management, data and knowledge bases. The editors also aim at applying new progressive theories.

This volume showcases contributions from internationally-known researchers in the field of information management. Most of the approaches presented here make use of fuzzy logic, introduced by L.A. Zadeh almost 50 years ago, which constitute a powerful tool to model and handle gradual concepts. What all of these contributions have in common is placing the user at the center of the information system, be it for helping him/her to query a data set, to handle imperfect information, or to discover useful knowledge from a massive collection of data. Researchers working in data and knowledge management will greatly benefit from this collection of up-to-date studies. This may be also an invaluable source of information for postgraduate students interested in advanced information management techniques.

The Semantic Web aims at enriching the existing Web with meta-data and processing methods so as to provide web-based systems with advanced capabilities, in particular with context awareness and decision support. The objective of this book is to provide a coherent introduction to semantic web methods and research issues with a particular emphasis on reasoning. The 7th reasoning web Summer School, held in August 2011, focused on the central topic of applications of reasoning for the emerging “Web of Data”. The 12 chapters in the present book provide excellent educational material as well as a number of references for further reading. The book not only addresses students working in the area, but also those seeking an entry point to various topics related to reasoning over Web data.

This is the 12th volume in a series on information modelling and knowledge bases. The topics of the articles cover a wide variety of themes in the domain of information modelling, design and specification of information systems and knowledge bases, ranging from foundations and theories to systems construction and application studies. The contributions in this volume represent the following major themes: models in intelligent activity; concept modelling and conceptual modelling; conceptual modelling and information requirements specification; collections of concepts, knowledge base design, and database design; human-computer interaction and modelling; software engineering and modelling; and applications.

This series is directed to diverse managerial professionals who are leading the transformation of individual domains by using expert information and domain knowledge to drive decision support systems (DSSs). The series offers a broad range of subjects addressed in specific areas such as health care, business management, banking, agriculture, environmental improvement, natural resource and spatial management, aviation administration, and hybrid applications of information technology aimed to interdisciplinary issues. This book series is composed of three volumes: Volume 1 consists of general concepts and methodology of DSSs; Volume 2 consists of applications of DSSs in the biomedical domain; Volume 3 consists of hybrid applications of DSSs in multidisciplinary domains. The book is shaped upon decision support strategies in the new infrastructure that assists the readers in full use of the creative technology to manipulate input data and to transform information into useful decisions for decision makers.

Within the nuclear field, a vast body of knowledge, involving scientific, technical and managerial fields, is distributed among many organizations of different types. Managing and provisioning distributed knowledge is therefore becoming one of the major challenges in federated organizational environments. This publication provides information to organizations dealing with nuclear knowledge and its management. It covers an introduction to semantic information technologies, the Worldwide Web standards developed for interoperability, the construction of knowledge bases on the basis of distributed knowledge, and the development of knowledge driven applications. In addition to providing insight into the development of distributed knowledge bases, the intent of this publication is to provide examples of applications of semantic technologies specifically in the nuclear field.

This volume contains the lecture notes of the 8th Reasoning Web Summer School 2012, held in Vienna, Austria, in September 2012, in the form of worked out tutorial papers on the various topics that have been covered in that school. The 2012 summer school program had been put together under the general leitmotif of advanced query answering topics for the Web. The idea was to address on the one hand foundations and computational aspects of query answering, in formalisms, methods and technology, and on the other hand to also spotlight some rising or emerging application fields relating to the Semantic Web in which query answering plays a role, and which by their nature also pose new challenges and problems for this task; linked stream processing, geospatial data, semantic wikis, and argumentation on the web fall in this category.