is a process where some entities (documents, web content, services) are browsed or searched with specific consideration of their meaning in a certain domain of human knowledge. For instance, one may semantically search for “annual management report file” (in contrast to searching for “.doc file” which is a pure syntax-based search).
Published in Chapter:
Semantic Integration for Research Environments
Tomasz Gubala (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands and ACC CYFRONET AGH, Poland), Marian Bubak (Institute of Computer Science AGH, Poland), and Peter Sloot (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 17
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-374-6.ch026
Abstract
Research environments for modern, cross-disciplinary scientific endeavors have to unite multiple users, with varying levels of expertise and roles, along with multitudes of data sources and processing units. The high level of required integration contrasts with the loosely-coupled nature of environments which are appropriate for research. The problem is to support integration of dynamic service-based infrastructures with data sources, tools and users in a way that conserves ubiquity, extensibility and usability. This chapter presents a close examination of related achievements in the field and the description of proposed approach. It shows that integration of loosely-coupled system components with formallydefined vocabularies may fulfill the listed requirements. The authors demonstrate that combining formal representations of domain knowledge with techniques like data integration, semantic annotations and shared vocabularies, enables the development of systems for modern e-Science. For demonstration they present how several semantically-augmented experiments are modeled in the ViroLab virtual laboratory for virology.