Section I: Introduction

Chapter I: Semantic Web take-off in a European Industry Perspective

Alain Leger. France Telecom R&D - Rennes, France Johannes Heinecke. France Telecom R&D - Rennes, France Lyndon JB Nixon. Freie Universität Berlin, Germany Pavel Shvaiko. University of Trento, Italy Jean Charlet-Hopitaux de Paris. Université Paris 6, France Paola Hobson. Motorola Labs, UK François Goasdoué. LRI CNRS & Université Paris Sud XI, France

The first chapter presents an overview of the penetration of Semantic Web technology in industry, which is progressing slowly but accelerating as new success stories are reported. The authors report on the ongoing work in the cross-fertilization between industry and academia. In particular, they present a collection of application fields and use cases from European enterprises which are interested in the promises of Semantic Web technology. The spectrum of applications is extremely large, e.g. corporate portals and knowledge management, e-commerce, e-work, e-business, healthcare, e-government, natural language processing, search, data and services integration, social networks, business intelligence, etc. The chapter ends with the presentation of the current state of the technology and future trends as seen by prominent actors in the field.

Section II: Semantic Web E-Business Cases

Chapter II: Applying Semantic Web Technologies to Car Repairs

Martin Bryan. CSW informatics, UK Jay Cousins. CSW informatics, UK

Chapter 2 presents the European Commission MYCAREVENT research project, which brought together European vehicle manufacturers, vehicle repair organisations, diagnostic tool manufacturers and IT specialists, including semantic web technologists, to study how to link together the wide range of information sets they use to identify faults and repair vehicles. These information are integrated and accessed through a service portal by using a ‘shared language’ for the project, a reference terminology to which the disparate terminologies of organisations participating in the project can be mapped. This shared vocabulary is materialised as a Semantic Web ontology.

Chapter III: Semantic Integration for B2B Service Assurance

Alistair Duke. BT Group Chief Technology Office, UK Marc Richardson. BT Group Chief Technology Office, UK

This chapter describes an approach to support Operational Support System (OSS) integration across organisation boundaries. The requirement for such Business-to-Business (B2B) interfaces is expected to increase as is the need to carry out integration in much more flexible way. Existing approaches for integration tend to be implementation specific, operate at the syntactic level and are realised by programme code. Consequently they are inflexible due to their highly coupled nature and are costly to setup and maintain. An approach to decouple B2B interfaces is introduced, which allows them to be flexibly coupled as required with the use of scalable, semantic mediation. An initial prototype is described based on an Assurance Integration scenario for BT Wholesale’s B2B gateway.

Chapter IV: Semantic-Web-enabled Protocol Mediation for the Logistics Domain

Oscar Corcho. Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain Silvestre Losada. Intelligent Software Components, S.A., Spain V. Richard Benjamins. Intelligent Software Components, S.A., Spain

Chapter 4 deals with one of the most difficult problems dealing with applications interoperation, protocol mediation. This kind of mediation is concerned with non-matching message interchange patterns in applications interaction. The proposed solution focuses on solving the interoperation issues between two heterogeneous logistic provider systems, which use two different standard protocols: RosettaNet and EDIFACT. It includes an ontology for interaction choreography description and the software that implements the bridging mechanisms between this two protocols based on the knowledge captured by the ontology.

Chapter V: A Case Study in Building Semantic eRecruitment Applications

Elena Simperl. Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Austria Malgorzata Mochol. Free University of Berlin, Germany

In this chapter, authors report their practical experiences in building an ontology-based e-Recruitment system. This case study confirms previous findings in ontology engineering literature. First, to build ontology-based systems is still a tedious process due to the lack of proved and tested methods and tools supporting the entire life cycle of an ontology. And second, to reuse existing ontologies within new application contexts is currently related to efforts potentially comparable to the costs of a new implementation. These findings are used to further elaborate existing best practices towards a list of recommendations for the e-Recruitment domain.

Chapter VI: The SEEMP Approach to Semantic Interoperability for e-Employment

E. Della Valle. CEFRIEL – Politecnico of Milano, Italy D. Cerizza. CEFRIEL – Politecnico of Milano, Italy I. Celino. CEFRIEL – Politecnico of Milano, Italy M.G. Fugini. CEFRIEL – Politecnico of Milano, Italy J. Estublier. Université Joseph Fourier, France G. Vega. Université Joseph Fourier, France M. Kerrigan. University of Innsbruck, Austria A. Gómez-Pérez. Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain J. Ramírez. Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain B. Villazón. Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain G. Zhao. Le Forem, Belgium M. Cesarini. Università di Milano-Bicocca, Italy F. De Paoli. Università di Milano-Bicocca, Italy

Chapter 6 also presents a European Research project, SEEMP. This project promotes increased partnership between labour market actors and the development of closer relations between private and public employment services. The need for a flexible collaboration gives rise to the issue of interoperability in both data exchange and share of services. SEEMP proposes a solution that relies on semantic services based collaboration among public and private employment services. Each actor in the marketplace has to care only about integrating with the marketplace and the reference ontology. The marketplace will offer services to support the interaction with other actors.

Chapter VII: Towards Effectiveness and Transparency in e-Business Transactions. An Ontology for Customer Complaint Management

Mustafa Jarrar. University of Cyprus, Cyprus & Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium

This chapter presents an ontology for customer complaint management, which has been developed in the EU funded project CCFORM, with the aim of establishing an European customer complaint portal. The objective is that any consumer can register a complaint against any party about any problem, at this portal. The portal should be multilanguage and sensitive to cross-border business regulations. A customer complaint ontology, which underpins the CC portal, makes all these features possible. The CContology comprises classifications of complaint problems, complaint resolutions, complaining parties, complaint-recipients, ''best-practices'', rules of complaint, etc.

Chapter VIII: A Semantic Web-Based Information Integration Approach For An Agent-Based Electronic Market

Maria João Viamonte. Polytechnic of Porto, Portugal Nuno Silva. Polytechnic of Porto, Portugal

In this chapter, authors face the problem of the growth of e-commerce using software agents to support both customers and suppliers in buying and selling goods and services. The diversity of the actors involved leads to different conceptualizations of the needs and capabilities, giving rise to semantic incompatibilities between them. Authors propose an ontology-based information integration approach, exploiting the ontology mapping paradigm, by aligning consumer needs and the market capacities, in a semi-automatic mode and based on semantic web technology. The approach is improved by the application and exploitation of the information and trust relationships captured by the social networks.

Chapter IX: Semantic Web for Media Convergence: a Newspaper Case

Ferran Perdrix. Diari Segre Media Group, Spain Juan Manuel Gimeno. Universitat de Lleida, Spain Rosa Gil. Universitat de Lleida, Spain Marta Oliva. Universitat de Lleida, Spain Roberto García. Universitat de Lleida, Spain

Chapter 9 studies the case of media convergence in newspaper media houses, which are evolving to highly dynamic and multi-channel communication mediums, where the different channels converge into a unified news editorial office. In order to cope with the new requirements arising from this change, machines must be aware of a greater part of the underlying semantics. Ontologies are a clear candidate to put this semantics into play, and Semantic Web technologies a good choice for web-wide information integration. However, newspapers have made great investments in their current systems so a smooth transition is preferred. The chapter proposal is to build an ontological framework based on existing journalism and multimedia standards and to translate existing metadata to the Semantic Web.

Chapter X: Ontologically enhanced RosettaNet B2B Integration

Paavo Kotinurmi. Helsinki University of Technology, Finland Armin Haller. Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Galway Eyal Oren. Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Galway

This chapter describes the OERN ontological extension to RosettaNet and shows how this extension can be used in business integrations to resolve data heterogeneities. RosettaNet is an industry-driven e-business process standard that defines common inter-company public processes and their associated business documents. The usage of Web ontology languages in RosettaNet collaborations can help accommodate partner heterogeneity in their set-up phase and can ease back-end integrations, enabling for example more competition in the purchasing processes.

Chapter XI: Towards an Operational REA business ontology

Frederik Gailly. Ghent University, Belgium Geert Poels. Ghent University, Belgium

The authors of this chapter present the development of a formal representation, based on an OWL Semantic Web ontology for the Resource Event Agent (REA), which is a business ontology for ontology-driven enterprise system development. The objective is to overcome the limitation of the current specification, which is neither sufficiently explicit nor formal, and thus difficult to use in ontology-driven business information systems. The chapter discusses the choices made in redesigning REA and illustrates how this new formal representation can be used to support ontology-driven supply chain collaboration.

Chapter XII: Towards Semantic Business Processes: Concepts, Methodology and Implementation

Muhammad Ahtisham Aslam. University of Leipzig, Germany Sören Auer. University of Leipzig, Germany Klaus-Peter Fähnrich. University of Leipzig, Germany

In this chapter, semantic extensions for Web services are presented as a mean to overcome business processes interoperability limitations due to purely syntactic approaches. Another drawback is that services cannot be discovered and composed dynamically by other semantic enabled systems slowing down the process of interaction between business partners. OWL-S is a suite of OWL ontologies and can be used to describe the compositions of Web services on the basis of matching semantics as well as to expose semantically enriched interfaces. The aim of this chapter is to describe an approach and its implementation that can be used to enable business processes for semantic based dynamic discovery, invocation and composition by translating BPEL process descriptions to the OWL-S suite of ontologies.

Chapter XIII: Experiences in building mobile e-business services: service provisioning and mobility

Ivano De Furio. AtosOrigin Italia S.p.A., Italy Giovanni Frattini. AtosOrigin Italia S.p.A., Italy Massimo Magaldi. AtosOrigin Italia S.p.A., Italy Luigi Romano. AtosOrigin Italia S.p.A., Italy

Chapter 13 analyses how telecommunications operators can improve their partnership networks and provide new services by solving the interoperability limitations of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). The idea is to use web services technology to create service providers federations and ontologies to support advanced matchmaking mechanisms based on a semantic metadata store. In particular, the proposal includes a Service Registration Authority that controls and enforces annotation policies in order to avoid the lack of uniformity in service descriptions. Furthermore, this solution enables enhanced service/component discovery and validation, helping software engineers to build services by composing building blocks.

Chapter XIV: Towards the use of networked ontologies for dealing with knowledge-intensive domains: a pharmaceutical case study

Germán Herrero Cárcel. ATOS Origin SAE, Spain Tomás Pariente Lobo. ATOS Origin SAE, Spain

The case study presented in this chapter is about how networked ontologies satisfy the needs of such a knowledge intensive sector as the pharmaceutical one. The use of semantics helps bridging the gap between the different representations that different stakeholders have. The problem arises when the ontologies used to model the domain become too large and unmanageable. Networked ontologies can solve these problems. The particular case scenario considered by this chapter is the nomenclature of products in the pharmaceutical sector, which is currently under development in the EC funded FP6 project NeOn in order to develop a common reference ontology about drugs.

Chapter XV: Semantic Competence Pull: A Semantics-based Architecture for Filling Competence Gaps in Organizations

Ricardo Colomo Palacios. Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain Marcos Ruano Mayoral. Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain Juan Miguel Gomez-Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain Angel García Crespo-Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain

The authors of this chapter highlight one of the key problems that the software industry has been facing due to the lack of alignment between the curricula offered by Universities and other kinds of education and training centres and the professional profiles demanded by companies and organizations. The chapter proposal is to provide a set of mechanisms and an intermediary system that allows companies to define and express their competency gaps and, at the same time, allow education centres to analyse those gaps and define the training plans to meet those needs.

Chapter XVI: Using Semantic Web Services in eBanking Solutions

Laurent Cicurel. Intelligent Software Components S.A., Spain José Luís Bas. Bankinter, Spain Sergio Bellido Gonzalez. Bankinter, Spain Jesus Contreras. Intelligent Software Components S.A., Spain Richard Benjamins. Intelligent Software Components S.A., Spain Jose Manuel Lopez-Cobo. Intelligent Software Components S.A., Spain Silvestre Losada. Intelligent Software Components S.A., Spain

In this chapter an e-Banking case is presented, concentrating on how to offer a public access to efficient transactional stock market functionalities. Traditional Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) succeed at providing reasonable good web-based brokerage solutions but may lack on extensibility possibilities. By introducing Semantic Web Services (SWS) as a way to integrate third party services from distributed service providers, authors propose an innovative way that combines ontologies and SWS in order to allow different users to define their own stock change strategies regardless of the provider of information.

Chapter XVII: Formal Ontology for Media Rights Transactions

Adam Pease. Articulate Software, USA Godfrey Rust. Rightscom,UK

The last chapter presents a large-scale data integration and transaction management system for media rights, called Ontologyx. Previous versions of this system have utilized lightweight schema and conventional semantic web technologies such as OWL. The current version employs formal ontology development in the SUO-KIF logical language and involves reuse an extension of a large formal ontology, the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO). In particular, authors argue that extending from a large ontology will give the model greater coverage of more domains and expand business opportunities to expand into supporting more kinds of transaction management applications.