Dieter Fensel – författare

This textbook introduces the theoretical foundations of technologies essential for knowledge graphs. It also covers practical examples, applications and tools. Knowledge graphs are the most recent answer to the challenge of providing explicit knowledge about entities and their relationships by potentially integrating billions of facts from heterogeneous sources.

The book is structured in four parts. For a start, Part I lays down the overall context of knowledge graph technology. Part II “Knowledge Representation” then provides a deep understanding of semantics as the technical core of knowledge graph technology. Semantics is covered from different perspectives, such as conceptual, epistemological and logical. Next, Part III “Knowledge Modelling” focuses on the building process of knowledge graphs. The book focuses on the phases of knowledge generation, knowledge hosting, knowledge assessment, knowledge cleaning, knowledge enrichment, and knowledge deployment to cover a complete life cycle for this process. Finally, Part IV (simply called “Applications”) presents various application areas in detail with concrete application examples as well as an outlook on additional trends that will emphasize the need for knowledge graphs even stronger.

This textbook is intended for graduate courses covering knowledge graphs. Besides students in knowledge graph, Semantic Web, database, or information retrieval classes, also advanced software developers for Web applications or tools for Web data management will learn about the foundations and appropriate methods.

Service-oriented computing has become one of the predominant factors in current IT research and development. Web services seem to be the middleware solution of the future for highly interoperable distributed software solutions. In parallel, research on the Semantic Web provides the results required to exploit distributed machine-processable data. To combine these two research lines into industrial-strength applications, a number of research projects have been set up by organizations like W3C and the EU.

Dieter Fensel and his coauthors deliver a profound introduction into one of the most promising approaches – the Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO). After a brief presentation of the underlying basic technologies and standards of the World Wide Web, the Semantic Web, and Web Services, they detail all the elements of WSMO from basic concepts to possible applications in e-commerce, e-government and e-banking, and they also describe its relation to other approaches like OWL-S or WSDL-S.

While many of the related technologies and standards are still under development, this book already offers both a broad conceptual introduction and lots of pointers to future application scenarios for researchers in academia and industry as well as for developers of distributed Web applications.

Service-oriented computing has become one of the predominant factors in IT research and development efforts over the last few years. In spite of several standardization efforts that advanced from research labs into industrial-strength technologies and tools, there is still much human effort required in the process of finding and executing Web services.

Here, Dieter Fensel and his team lay the foundation for understanding the Semantic Web Services infrastructure, aimed at eliminating human intervention and thus allowing for seamless integration of information systems. They focus on the currently most advanced SWS infrastructure, namely SESA and related work such as the Web Services Execution Environment (WSMX) activities and the Semantic Execution Environment (OASIS SEE TC) standardization effort. Their book is divided into four parts: Part I provides an introduction to the field and its history, covering basic Web technologies and the state of research and standardization in the Semantic Web field. Part II presents the SESA architecture. The authors detail its building blocks and show how they are consolidated into a coherent software architecture that can be used as a blueprint for implementation. Part III gives more insight into middleware services, describing the necessary conceptual functionality that is imposed on the architecture through the basic principles. Each such functionality is realized using a number of so-called middleware services. Finally, Part IV shows how the SESA architecture can be applied to real-world scenarios, and provides an overview of compatible and related systems.

The book targets professionals as well as academic and industrial researchers working on various aspects of semantic integration of distributed information systems. They will learn how to apply the Semantic Web Services infrastructure to automate and semi-automate tasks, by using existing integration technologies. In addition, the book is also suitable for advanced graduate students enrolled in courses covering knowledge management, the Semantic Web, or integration of information systems, as it will educate them about basic technologies for Semantic Web Services and general issues related to integration of information systems.

After years of mostly theoretical research, Semantic Web Technologies are now reaching out into application areas like bioinformatics, eCommerce, eGovernment, or Social Webs. Applications like genomic ontologies, semantic web services, automated catalogue alignment, ontology matching, or blogs and social networks are constantly increasing, often driven or at least backed up by companies like Google, Amazon, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and others. The need to leverage the potential of combining information in a meaningful way in order to be able to benefit from the Web will create further demand for and interest in Semantic Web research.

This movement, based on the growing maturity of related research results, necessitates a reliable reference source from which beginners to the field can draw a first basic knowledge of the main underlying technologies as well as state-of-the-art application areas. This handbook, put together by three leading authorities in the field, and supported by an advisory board of highly reputed researchers, fulfils exactly this need. It is the first dedicated reference work in this field, collecting contributions about both the technical foundations of the Semantic Web as well as their main usage in other scientific fields like life sciences, engineering, business, or education.

A paradigm shift is taking place in computer science: one generation ago, we learned to abstract from hardware to software, now we are abstracting from software to serviceware implemented through service-oriented computing. Yet ensuring interoperability in open, heterogeneous, and dynamically changing environments, such as the Internet, remains a major challenge for actual machine-to-machine integration. Usually significant problems in aligning data, processes, and protocols appear as soon as a specific piece of functionality is used within a different application context.

The Semantic Web Services (SWS) approach is about describing services with metadata on the basis of domain ontologies as a means to enable their automatic location, execution, combination, and use. Fensel and his coauthors provide a comprehensive overview of SWS in line with actual industrial practice. They introduce the main sociotechnological components that ground the SWS vision (like Web Science, Service Science, and service-oriented architectures) and several approaches that realize it, e.g. the Web Service Modeling Framework, OWL-S, and RESTful services. The real-world relevance is emphasized through a series of case studies from large-scale R&D projects and a business-oriented proposition from the SWS technology provider Seekda.

Each chapter of the book is structured according to a predefined template, covering both theoretical and practical aspects, and including walk-through examples and hands-on exercises.  Additional learning material is available on the book website www.swsbook.org. With its additional features, the book is ideally suited as the basis for courses or self-study in this field, and it may also serve as a reference for researchers looking for a state-of-the-art overview of formalisms, methods, tools, and applications related to SWS.

In the mid 1990s, Tim Berners-Lee had the idea of developing the World Wide Web into a „Semantic Web“, a web of information that could be interpreted by machines in order to allow the automatic exploitation of data, which until then had to be done by humans manually.

One of the first people to research topics related to the Semantic Web was Professor Rudi Studer. From the beginning, Rudi drove projects like ONTOBROKER and On-to-Knowledge, which later resulted in W3C standards such as RDF and OWL. By the late 1990s, Rudi had established a research group at the University of Karlsruhe, which later became the nucleus and breeding ground for Semantic Web research, and many of today’s well-known research groups were either founded by his disciples or benefited from close cooperation with this think tank.

In this book, published in celebration of Rudi’s 60th birthday, many of his colleagues look back on the main research results achieved during the last 20 years. Under the editorship of Dieter Fensel, once one of Rudi’s early PhD students, an impressive list of contributors and contributions has been collected, covering areas like Knowledge Management, Ontology Engineering, Service Management, and Semantic Search.Overall, this book provides an excellent overview of the state of the art in Semantic Web research, by combining historical roots with the latest results, which may finally make the dream of a “Web of knowledge, software and services” come true.