ANALYSIS OF VISION BASED SYSTEMS TO DETECT REAL TIME GOAL EVENTS IN SOCCER VIDEOS

The purpose of this article is to analyze current vision-based systems from a soccer video semantic point of view such as video summarization, features analysis, and provision of augmented information. Currently, computer vision techniques are applicable in a challenging soccer context. Scene interpretation is performed based on the complexity of the semantic. For each area of vision-based systems, computer vision methodologies are analyzed along with their strengths and weaknesses. We have also investigated whether the existing approaches are equally applicable for real-time soccer video semantic analysis.     

DisCComp – A Formal Model for Distributed Concurrent Components

Most large-scaled software systems are structured in distributed components to manage complexity and have to cope with concurrent executed threads. System decomposition and concurrent flow of execution are orthogonal. A sound semantic model that is powerful enough to handle distributed concurrent components but also realistic enough to provide a foundation for component technologies actually in use is still missing. Therefore, the paper introduces such an operational semantics for distributed concurrent component-based systems. Based on this formal model, UML-based modeling techniques are introduced. Tool support for modeling, code generation, and system execution is provided.     

Modelling mobile app requirements for semantic traceability

The paper presents a modelling method aimed to support the definition and elicitation of requirements for mobile apps through an approach that enables semantic traceability for the requirements representation. Business process-centricity is employed in order to capture requirements in a knowledge structure that retains procedural knowledge from stakeholders and can be traversed by semantic queries in order to trace domain-specific contextual information for the modelled requirements. Consequently, instead of having requirements represented as natural language items that are documented by diagrammatic models, the communication channels are switched: semantically interlinked conceptual models become the requirements representation, while free text can be used for requirements annotations/metadata. Thus, the method establishes a knowledge externalization channel between business stakeholders and app developers, also tackling the Twin Peaks bridging challenge (between requirements and early designs). The method is presented using its modelling procedure as a guiding thread, with each step illustrated by case-based samples of the modelling language and auxiliary functionality. The design work is encompassed by an existing metamodelling framework and introduces a taxonomy for modelling relations, since the metamodel is the key enabler for the goal of semantic traceability. The research was driven by the ComVantage EU research project, concerned with mobile app support for collaborative business process execution. Therefore, the project provides context for the illustrating examples; however, generalization possibilities beyond the project scope will also be discussed, with respect to both motivation and outcome.     

Making knowledge machine-processable: some implications of general semantic search

The central argument of this paper is that the design, implementation and use of technologies that underpin general semantic search have implications for what we know and the way in which knowledge is understood. Semantic search is an assemblage of technologies that most Internet users would use regularly without necessarily realising. Users of search engines implementing semantic search can obtain answers to questions rather than just retrieve pages that include their search query. This paper critically examines the design of the Semantic Web, upon which semantic search is based. It demonstrates that implicit in the design of the Semantic Web are particular assumptions about the nature of classification and the nature of knowledge. The Semantic Web was intended for interoperability within specific domains. It is here argued that the extension to general semantic search, for use by the general public, has implications for what type of knowledge is visible and what counts as legitimate knowledge. The provision of a definitive answer to a query, via the reduction of discursive knowledge into machine-processable data, provides the illusion of objectivity and authority in a way that is increasingly impenetrable to critical scrutiny.     

Representations for semantic learning webs: Semantic Web technology in learning support

Abstract Recent work on applying semantic technologies to learning has concentrated on providing novel means of accessing and making use of learning objects. However, this is unnecessarily limiting: semantic technologies will make it possible to develop a range of educational Semantic Web services, such as interpretation, structure-visualization, support for argumentation, novel forms of content customization, novel mechanisms for aggregating learning material, citation services and so on. In this paper, we outline an initial framework that extends the use of semantic technologies as a means of providing learning services that are owned and created by learning communities.     

利用语义模型的需求可跟踪性的实现

需求的可跟踪性——一种可以把需求规格说明和其他在软件系统生命周期产生的产品联系起来的性能，很早就已经广泛地被认为是高效软件工程管理和软件系统质量的关键因素。该文提出了一种基于语义模型的方法，把从需求获取到编辑SRS的这样一个过程划分成若干阶段，并找出每一阶段的语义元素和联系。     

Transaction management issues in a failure-prone multidatabase system environment

This paper is concerned with the problem of integrating a number of existing off-the-shelf local database systems into a multidatabase system that maintains consistency in the face of concurrency and failures.The major difficulties in designing such systems stem from the requirements that local transactions be allowed to execute outside the multidatabase system control, and that the various local database systems cannot participate in the execution of a global commit protocol. A scheme based on the assumption that the component local database systems use the strict two-phase locking protocol is developed. Two major problems are addressed: How to ensure global transaction atomicity without the provision of a commit protocol, and how to ensure freedom from global deadlocks.     

A semantic repository approach to improve the government to business relationship

A major objective in business interactions consists in enhancing the business perspective over service provision by developing strategies and tools to provide support in the selection of services according to the value they have for businesses. This means providing a way to determine the value of services according to specific business criteria, and conceive technologies that support the sharing of knowledge involved in service provision. In this paper we present an approach based on semantic repositories. The repository enables a business perspective over service provision, based on the association between services and business processes, and is related to the problem of supporting businesses in the value-driven service selection. This perspective is addressed in the paper by exploiting expressive semantic representations and reasoning. An ontology for representing relevant semantic properties of services and processes is provided, and an algorithm for value-based service selection is presented. Two real life case studies show the effectiveness of the approach.     

A logical approach to systems engineering artifacts: semantic relationships and dependencies beyond traceability—from requirements to functional and architectural views

Not only system assurance drives a need for semantically richer relationships across various artifacts, work products, and items of information than are implied in the terms “trace and traceability” as used in current standards and textbooks. This paper deals with the task of working out artifacts in software and system development, their representation, and the analysis and documentation of the relationships between their logical contents—herein referred to as tracing and traceability; this is a richer meaning of traceability than in standards like IEEE STD 830. Among others, key tasks in system development are as follows: capturing, analyzing, and documenting system-level requirements, the step to functional system specifications, the step to architectures given by the decomposition of systems into subsystems with their connections and behavioral interactions. Each of these steps produces artifacts for documenting the development, as a basis for a specification and a design rationale, for documentation, for verification, and impact analysis of change requests. Crucial questions are how to represent and formalize the content of these artifacts and how to relate their content to support, in particular, system assurance. When designing multi-functional systems, key artifacts are system-level requirements, functional specifications, and architectures in terms of their subsystem specifications. Links and traces between these artifacts are introduced to relate their contents. Traceability has the goal to relate artifacts. It is required for instance in standards for functional system safety such as the ISO 26262. An approach to specifying semantic relationships is shown, such that the activity of creating and using (navigating through) these relationships can be supported with automation.     

An atomicity-generating protocol for anonymous currencies

Atomicity is necessary for reliable electronic commerce transactions. Anonymity is also an issue of great importance not only to designers of commerce systems, but also to those concerned with the societal effects of information technologies, providing atomicity and anonymity is not trivial. Reliable systems, which provide highly atomic transactions, offer limited anonymity. Many anonymous systems (Rivest and Shamir, 1996) do not offer anonymous reliable transactions (Yee, 1994). Three basic approaches have been used: secure hardware for trusted record-keeping (Brands, 1993), storage of identity information with trustees for conditional anonymity (Low et al., 1993) or by providing dispute resolution only with the removal of anonymity (Chaum, 1988). In this work, the problem of anonymous atomic transactions for a generic token currency is solved using distributed trust and with the assumption that any single party may be corrupt. Defined is a transaction to include the provision of information goods or a contract to deliver specified goods, allowing for the highest degree of atomicity. The cryptographic strength of the atomicity guarantee can be made to the user's specification on a per transaction basis. The atomicity-generating protocol includes provision for dispute resolution and anonymous refunds. Also illustrated, is that any electronic token currency can be made reliable with the addition of this atomicity-generating protocol     

A context-aware middleware for real-time semantic enrichment of distributed multimedia metadata

This paper investigates the problem of the real-time integration and processing of multimedia metadata collected by a distributed sensor network. The discussed practical problem is the efficiency of the technologies used in creating a Knowledge Base in real-time. Specifically, an approach is proposed for the real-time, rule-based semantic enrichment of lower level context features with higher-level semantics. The distinguishing characteristic is the provision of an intelligent middleware-based architecture on which low level components such as sensors, feature extraction algorithms, data sources, and high level components such as application-specific ontologies can be plugged. Throughout the paper, Priamos, a middleware architecture based on Semantic Web technologies is presented, together with a stress-test of the system’s operation under two test case scenarios: A smart security surveillance application and a smart meeting room application. Performance measurements are conducted and corresponding results are exposed.     

Semantic Web Technologies for supporting learning assessment

The use of Semantic Web Technologies in eLearning has become more significant in recent years. A topic that has received less attention to date is the use of such technologies for supporting assessment processes. In this paper, an approach that makes use of Semantic Web Technologies to support the assessment of open questions in eLearning courses is described. This methodology combines domain ontologies, semantic annotations and semantic similarity measurements. It also incorporates an algorithm for extracting knowledge from students’ answers. It has been applied in different courses and the results are also reported and discussed. In our approach, the behaviour of the algorithm for calculating the referred semantic similarity is defined by the teacher.     

一种基于P2P的视频点播系统的研究与设计

视频点播(VOD)是一种以用户为主导的音视频信息系统。传统的VOD系统多是C/S模式采用服务器机群或者代理缓存的方式来实现,这会带来较大的硬件和管理开销,系统扩展性也难以得到保证。文中提出了一种基于P2P结构的视频点播的设计方案,分析了采用P2P技术以后视频点播系统对于节点闲散资源的利用和保证播放质量等方面的优势,并探讨了在系统设计与实现中的相关技术与方法,包括基于本体的语义搜索、媒体资源定位与节点负载均衡三方面。     

Secure and privacy-preserving crowdsensing using smart contracts: Issues and solutions

The advent of Blockchain and smart contracts is empowering many technologies and systems to automate commerce and facilitate the exchange, tracking and the provision of goods, data and services in a reliable and auditable way. Crowdsensing systems is one type of systems that have been receiving a lot of attention in the past few years. In crowdsensing systems consumer devices such as mobile phones and Internet of Things devices are used to deploy wide-scale sensor networks. We identify some of the major security and privacy issues associated with the development of crowdsensing systems based on smart contracts and Blockchain. We also explore possible solutions that can address major security concerns with these systems.     

Tracking urban geo-topics based on dynamic topic model

Modern cities are facing critical environmental and social problems that are difficult to solve using conventional planning approaches due to the cities’ magnitude and complexity. Recent developments in sensing technologies and urban computing, however, integrate new data resources and technologies to tackle these challenges. Popular social networking platforms such as Twitter provide new data sources on important events (e.g., cultural activities, political campaigns, accidents, crises) providing rich knowledge about urban systems and human dynamics. This research is intended to develop a method for effectively monitoring important information during such events and helping with planning and policymaking. We use semantically similar and geographically close geo-topics to represent important local events. This research proposes a data-driven system for detecting and tracking the semantic, spatial, and temporal dynamics of these geo-topics, specifically designed for geo-tagged tweets. The system consists of data preprocessing, geo-topic generation, and geo-topic tracking modules. The preprocessing module can remove robotic and semantically trivial texts. In the geo-topic generation module, we use spatial factors to measure the spatial impacts of geo-tagged tweets by applying an exponential decay function to the pairwise distances between tweets. We then improve the dynamic topic model (DTM) by embedding the spatial factors to enable the generation of geo-topics in semantic, spatial, and temporal dimensions simultaneously. The geo-topic tracking module monitors semantic change by detecting changes in certain keywords’ probabilities and the volumes of tweets belonging to different geo-topics. This module also uses radius of gyration and trajectory-pattern mining to track and analyze the movement patterns of geo-topics. We employed the tracking system in three disaster cases in different U.S. cities to track small-scale emergencies and crises. These implementations demonstrated the effectiveness of the system for identifying and tracking geo-topics at fine temporal and geographic scales. The system also has strong potential in creating planning-related analyses for policy makers, improving the situational awareness of the general public, and serving as a basis for urban information systems that contribute to smart, agile, and resilient city developments.     

Applying semantic Web technologies to drug safety determination

Ensuring drug safety is of paramount importance to the life sciences industry. It's critical that drugs are able not only to achieve the desired result but also to do so without harmful side effects. By identifying problems as early as possible in the drug discovery and development process, life sciences companies can avoid drug safety sagas, such as a recent example that concerned COX-2 inhibitors. Unfortunately, drug safety problems are often revealed only during clinical trials or occasionally after marketing. These challenges are becoming more acute as medicines are targeted to defined patient populations. The life sciences industry can use semantic Web technologies to integrate data more effectively across all drug discovery and development business units, thereby providing a more supportive environment for the early detection of safety-related issues. Effective integration would enable genomic data and patient profiles to be more easily related to safety, thus providing: 1) a simpler framework for determining risk-benefit for individual patients in particular treatment regimens, 2) a better mechanism to distribute new data relating to safety throughout the organization, and 3) a better decision-making environment to determine which drugs to pursue. Furthermore, semantic Web inferencing capabilities enable an intelligent decision support system or autonomous agent to reason about combined domain-specific and industry-specific knowledge and act on the conclusions drawn from this inferencing process.     

Ontology-based multiperspective requirements traceability framework

Large-scaled software development inevitably involves a group of stakeholders, each of whom may express their requirements differently in their own terminology and representation depending on their perspectives or perceptions of their shared problems. In view of that, the heterogeneity must be well handled and resolved in tracing and managing changes of such requirements. This paper presents our multiperspective requirements traceability (MUPRET) framework which deploys ontology as a knowledge management mechanism to intervene mutual “understanding” without restricting the freedom in expressing requirements differently. Ontology matching is applied as a reasoning mechanism in automatically generating traceability relationships. The relationships are identified by deriving semantic analogy of ontology concepts representing requirements elements. The precision and recall of traceability relationships generated by the framework are verified by comparing with a set of traceability relationships manually identified by users as a proof-of-concept of this framework.     

A keyword-driven approach for generating OWL DL conformance test data

The conformance of semantic technologies has to be systematically evaluated to measure and verify the real adherence of these technologies to the Semantic Web standards. Current evaluations of semantic technology conformance are not exhaustive enough and do not directly cover user requirements and use scenarios, which raises the need for a simple, extensible and parameterizable method to generate test data for such evaluations. To address this need, this paper presents a keyword-driven approach for generating ontology language conformance test data that can be used to evaluate semantic technologies, details the definition of a test suite for evaluating OWL DL conformance using this approach, and describes the use and extension of this test suite during the evaluation of some tools.     

Exploiting smart spaces for interactive TV applications development

The integration of semantic technologies and TV services is a substantial innovation to improve the services to users in an environment that is extended beyond the fixed home environment. But currently, this integration is mainly limited to provide personalized recommendation services and systems by matching user static preferences. Designing and development of interactive TV (iTV) applications using semantic technologies are not realized yet. In this work, we explore the potential of introduction semantic technologies and smart spaces in design and development of iTV applications. We use an example scenario to show how future iTV applications include the mesh-up of information from different sources. We proposed a methodology and show how ontology-driven approach can help to design and develop these iTV applications. We demonstrate the suitability of our ontology-driven application development tools and rule-based approach for the development of highly dynamic context-aware iTV applications.