Semantic Web Programming

Semantic Web Programming would allow searching the Semantics within programs rather than just outputs. This would be a step on from open source programming, this would allow open semantics programming. The code could then be visualised and interacted with using all the tools available for visualising semantic web languages. The whole tree/graph structure of a program could be visualised and searched easily.

Programming with XML is already enabled, and progress can now be made in using those languages such as RDF and OWL which are higher in the Semantic Web stack.

Programming with XML is possible using XForms, XQuery, Simkin, Metal, and many Rich Internet Application development environments.

Programming is becoming possible using OWL and OWL-S (OWL for Web Services). Visualisation of OWL structures enables editing by using UML Activity Diagrams, and OWL models programming structures such as if-then-else, and while loops.

Useful Links

Berners-Lee, T., Semantic Web - XML2000 - Architecture - http://www.w3.org/2000/Talks/1206-xml2k-tbl/slide10-0.html

Dmitriev, S., Jetbrains - Meta Programming System - http://www.onboard.jetbrains.com/is1/articles/04/10/lop/ - Language Oriented Programming: The Next Programming Paradigm - Sergey Dmitriev.

From BPEL4WS Process Model to Full OWL-S Ontology - http://www.eswc2006.org/poster-papers/FP13-Aslam.pdf - Muhammad Ahtisham Aslam, Sören Auer - University of Leipzig Germany, Jun Shen - University of Wollongong Australia - ABSTRACT - BPEL4WS is one of the most utilized business process development languages. It can be used to develop executable business processes as a combination of Web Services interactions in a specific sequence called process flow. But still BPEL4WS lacks sufficient representation of business process semantics required for business processes automation. On the other hand OWL-S (OWL for Web Services) is designed to present such kind of semantic information. There exists similarity in the conceptual model of OWL-S and BPEL4WS that can be used to overcome this lack of semantics in BEPL4WS by mapping the BPEL4WS process model to the OWL-S ontology. The mapped OWL-S service can be dynamically discovered, composed and invoked on the basis of matching semantics. Such a process of mapping syntax based Web Services composition in the form of BPEL process model to Semantic Web Services composition in the form of OWL-S composite service can also enable automation of BPEL processes as OWL-S services by applying AI planning techniques. In this paper we present a mapping strategy and a mapping tool that can be used to map BPEL processes to the OWL-S suite of ontologies.

Introduction to OWL - http://www.w3schools.com/rdf/rdf_owl.asp - OWL is a language for processing web information. What You Should Already Know Before you study OWL you should have a basic understanding of XML, XML Namespaces and RDF.

MetaL - http://www.meta-language.net/ - MetaL: An XML based Meta-Programming language.

OWL - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/RDF/RDF.htmOWL

OWL-S API - http://www.mindswap.org/2004/owl-s/api/ - Mindswap - Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab Semantic Web Agents Project - OWL-S API provides a Java API for programmatic access to read, execute and write OWL-S (formerly known as DAML-S) service descriptions. The API supports to read different versions of OWL-S (OWL-S 1.0, OWL-S 0.9, DAML-S 0.7) descriptions. The API provides an ExecutionEngine that can invoke AtomicProcesses that has WSDL or UPnP groundings, and CompositeProcecesses that uses control constructs Sequence, Unordered, and Split. Executing processes that relies on conditionals such as If-Then-else and RepeatUntil is not supported in the default implementation. But this implementation can be extended to handle these constructs if the application that uses the OWL-S descriptions has a custom syntax and evaluation procedure for the conditions.

OWL-S Editor - http://owlseditor.semwebcentral.org/download.shtml - Download.

OWL-S Editor - http://iswc2004.semanticweb.org/demos/02/paper.pdf - Grit Denker and Daniel Elenius and David Martin - SRI International, California, USA, Linkoping University, Linkoping, Sweden - INTRODUCTION - An increasing number of organizations are endorsing Web Services (WS) technology to extend corporate resources to customers and partners and to leverage resources of others. AlthoughWeb Services, based on XML technology, allow interoperability, they do not support efficient and flexible search, allocation, composition, runtime monitoring, or invocation of those Web Services. Semantic Web Services (SWSs) use semantically rich annotations to facilitate these tasks. Richer semantics can provide fuller, more flexible automation of service provision, and use and support the construction of more powerful tools and methodologies.

OWL-S Editor to Semantically Annotate Web-Services - http://staff.um.edu.mt/cabe2/supervising/undergraduate/owlseditFYP/OwlSEdit.html - University of Malta - Department of Computer Science and A.I. - James Scicluna - The current version of the Owl-S Editor can be downloaded from here. We welcome any feedback related to how the tool was used and how effective it was to solve your particular needs. Let us know so that we can improve the tool.

OWL-S: Semantic Markup for Web Services - http://www.daml.org/services/owl-s/1.1/overview/ - Abstract - The Semantic Web should enable greater access not only to content but also to services on the Web. Users and software agents should be able to discover, invoke, compose, and monitor Web resources offering particular services and having particular properties, and should be able to do so with a high degree of automation if desired. Powerful tools should be enabled by service descriptions, across the Web service lifecycle. OWL-S (formerly DAML-S) is an ontology of services that makes these functionalities possible. In this document we describe the overall structure of the ontology and its three main parts: the service profile for advertising and discovering services; the process model, which gives a detailed description of a service's operation; and the grounding, which provides details on how to interoperate with a service, via messages.

OWL Web Ontology Language Guide - http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-guide/ - W3C Recommendation 10 February 2004 - The World Wide Web as it is currently constituted resembles a poorly mapped geography. Our insight into the documents and capabilities available are based ..word searches, abetted by clever use of document connectivity and usage patterns. The sheer mass of this data is unmanageable without powerful tool support. In order to map this terrain more precisely, computational agents require machine-readable descriptions of the content and capabilities of Web accessible resources. These descriptions must be in addition to the human-readable versions of that information.

The OWL-S Editor - A Development Tool for Semantic Web Services - http://owlseditor.semwebcentral.org/documents/paper.pdf - Daniel Elenius, Grit Denker, David Martin, Fred Gilham, John Khouri, Shahin Sadaati, and Rukman Senanayake - SRI International, Menlo Park, California, USA - Abstract. The power of Web Service (WS) technology lies in the fact that it establishes a common, vendor-neutral platform for integrating distributed computing applications, in intranets as well as the Internet at large. Semantic Web Services (SWSs) promise to provide solutions to the challenges associated with automated discovery, dynamic composition, enactment, and other tasks associated with managing and using service-based systems. One of the barriers to a wider adoption of SWS technology is the lack of tools for creating SWS specifications. OWL-S is one of the major SWS description languages. This paper presents an OWL-S Editor, whose objective is to allow easy, intuitive OWL-S service development and to provide a variety of special-purpose capabilities to facilitate SWS design. The editor is implemented as a plugin to the Protege OWL ontology editor, and is being developed as open-source software.

The OWL-S Editor - A Domain-Specific Extension to Protégé - Elenius, D., 2005. - 8th Intl. Protégé Conference - July 18-21, 2005 - Madrid, Spain.

Programming with XML - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/XML/XML.htmProgrammingwithXML

Rich Internet Applications - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/Ajax/ajax.htmRichInternetApplications

Simkin - http://www.simkin.co.uk/- A high-level lightweight embeddable scripting language which works with Java or C++ and XML.

VISUAL MODELING OF OWL-S SERVICES - http://members.deri.at/~jamess/pdfs/scicluna-iadis2004.pdf - Msida MSD 06, Malta (Europe) - Mr. James Scicluna, Mr. Charlie Abela, Dr. Matthew Montebello, Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, University of Malta - ABSTRACT - The Semantic Web is slowly gathering interest and becoming a reality. More people are becoming aware of this and are trying to embed Semantic Web technologies into their applications. This involves the use of tools that can handle rapid ontology building and validation in an easy and transparent manner. In the area of Semantic Web Web Services (SWWS) an OWL-S specification defines a set of ontologies through which a semantic description of the service can be created. At times this is not an easy task and could result in an incorrect specification of the description or even lead the fainthearted user to resort to some other type of description language. This paper describes the OWL-S editor tool that provides two methodologies in which such a web services description can be developed without exposing the developer to the underlying OWL-S syntax. These methodologies are based on a mapping from WSDL to OWL-S and on modeling a composite service using standard UML Activity Diagrams.

XForms - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/Ajax/ajax.htmXForms

XQuery - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/XML/XML.htmXQuery

Semantic Web Interest Group - SWIG-UK event, Bristol UK

==== SWIG-UK - A Semantic Web Community Event

Hewlett-Packard Bristol

We would like to invite users and developers interested in the
semantic web to attend a community event to be held at HP Labs
Bristol, UK on Tuesday 11 November 2008. This will be an opportunity
for you to meet other users and developers and to share experiences
with semantic web applications.

The day will a mixture of discussion, demos, short presentations,
with a few longer presentations if offered. The objective is to
allow people to share experiences of using the semantic web. The
agenda will be driven by the attendees; it is not limited to Jena
applications nor limited to the UK.

Please register early so we know there is critical mass for the event.

Registration: swig-uk-2008@sparql.net

Further Information - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/semanticweb-southwest/ - Directions: http://www.hpl.hp.com/bristol/directions.html.

Meta-Programming as a Model Creation Technique

Model-Driven Programming and Meta-Programming together with Semantic Web and End-User Programming techniques are vital ingredients of the User Driven Programming/Modelling approach used in this thesis. Dmitriev (2006) explains the problem to be solved in order to improve model production as “limitations of programming which force the programmer to think like the computer rather than having the computer think more like the programmer.” Meta-programming (Dmitriev, 2006) is a useful way of allowing for language independent software development, and can aid in providing a high level front-end to programming languages. “Meta-programming is the writing of programs that write or manipulate other programs (or themselves) as their data” (Wikipedia, 2008).

The idea behind use of meta-programming in this thesis is that instead of writing programs to do a task a domain expert needs the program for, the meta program developer creates an environment which all domain experts, in this and similar fields can use to create their own solutions. The developer then only needs to maintain and improve this programming environment, and can concentrate on this task; the domain expert can concentrate on solving the problem at hand without having to ask the developer to create the code on his or her behalf. Dmitriev (2006) advocates reducing dependency on languages and environments by enabling programmers to develop their own specific languages for solving each domain problem:

"If we are going to make creating languages easy, we need to separate the representation and storage of the program from the program itself. We should store programs directly as a structured graph, since this allows us to make any extensions we like to the language. Sometimes, we wouldn't even need to consider text storage at all. A good example of this today is an Excel spreadsheet. Ninety-nine percent of people don't need to deal with the stored format at all, and there are always import and export features when the issue comes up. The only real reason we use text today is because we don't have any better editors than text editors. But we can change this... Text editors... don't know how to work with the underlying graph structure of programs. But with the right tools, the editor could work directly with the graph structure, and give us freedom to use any visual representation we like in the editor. We could render the program as text, tables, diagrams, trees, or anything else. We could even use different representations for different purposes, e.g. a graphical representation for viewing, and a textual representation for editing. We could use domain specific representations for different parts of the code, e.g. graphical math symbols for math formulas, graphic charts for charts, rows and columns for spreadsheets, etc. We could use the most appropriate representation for the problem domain, which might be text, but is not limited to text. The best representation depends on how we think about the problem domain. This flexibility of representation would also enable us to make our editors more powerful than ever, since different representations could have specialized ways to edit them."

This provides a way to create programs that create programs so enabling the 3 step translation process used in this thesis, and this enables translations between people, between systems, and between languages. This could enable those who are not currently programmers to create models at their domain level using domain specific systems created for them by programmers. The mechanisms for this are recursive translation of the tree/graph code representation to multiple models and languages, where necessary aided by user/modeller choices.

References

Dmitriev, S., 2007. Language Oriented Programming: The Next Programming Paradigm - http://www.onboard.jetbrains.com/is1/articles/04/10/lop/.

Fischer, G., 2007. 'Meta-Design: A Conceptual Framework for End-User Software Engineering' http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/frontdoor.php?source_opus=1087 - Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings.

Wikipedia (2008) Metaprogramming - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaprogramming.

More information is available at - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/softwareengineering.htm#MetaProgramming.

Open Standard Representation of Rules and Equations

SWRL

Miller and Baramidze (2005) explain and SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language). Zhao and Liu (2008) examine the need for sharing product information between partners as a product model, and how agreement through ontologies, Semantic Web, and standards can assist this. Zhao and Liu examine mapping of STEP representations to ontology languages OWL - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/RDF/RDF.htm#OWL and SWRL and how this benefits interoperability. Zhao and Liu are encoding STEP rules and executable statements into OWL and SWRL. Zhao and Liu also show a diagram (similar to this one of Berners-Lee) of the position of OWL and SWRL in a stack of standards from XML in the Syntax layer up to OWL/SWRL in the Logic/Rule layer of 'Semantics'.

SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language) combining OWL and RuleML and its use in modelling will also be investigated. This could be used for formally specifying the construction of equations and rules in a model and the relationships and constraints between items represented in an equation. Miller and Baramidze (2005) explain the SWRL language. An editing facility to model these equations and constraints, so that errors could be prevented, would improve the usability of future visual modelling systems created. Support for SWRL in Protégé and other ontology based systems will assist with the construction of a modelling system with sophisticated editing of rules (Miller and Baramidze, 2005). Miller and Baramidze (2005) examine efforts to develop mathematical semantic representations above the syntactical representations of MathML. SWRL also has standardised arithmetic and comparison operators (Zhao and Liu, 2008). These languages should enable standardisation of the representation of mathematical expressions that relate nodes, and their values and expressions; this would seem to be a difficult problem as it needs a user interface that enables complex mathematical structures to be conveyed by language and/or diagrammatic visualisation.

References

Miller, J A., Baramidze, G., Simulation and the Semantic Web - 2005. - Proceedings of the 2005 Winter Simulation Conference.

Zhao, W. and Liu, J.K. 2008. OWL/SWRL representation methodology for EXPRESS-driven product information model Part I. Implementation methodology, Computers in Industry - Article in Press, Corrected Proof - Abstract - This paper presents an ontology-based approach to enable semantic interoperability and reasoning over the product information model. The web ontology language (OWL) and the semantic web rule language (SWRL) in the Semantic Web are employed to construct the product information model. The traditional modeling language called EXPRESS is discussed. The representation methodology for EXPRESS-driven product information model is then proposed. The key of the representation methodology is mapping from EXPRESS to OWL/SWRL. Some illustrated examples are presented. - Keywords - Product information model; OWL; SWRL; EXPRESS; Ontology representation. Zhao and Liu (2008) are encoding STEP rules and executable statements into OWL and SWRL.

RuleML

The research of the Rule Markup Initiative is explained here. Rules for the Web have become a mainstream topic since inference rules became important in E-Commerce and the Semantic Web, and since transformation rules were put into practice for document generation from a central XML repository. Rules have continued to play an important role in artificial intelligence, knowledge-based systems, and for intelligent agents. This is now combined with standardisation in XML/RDF enabling use of declarative rules for web services. The Rule Markup Initiative has taken steps towards defining a shared Rule Markup Language (RuleML), enabling both forward (bottom-up) and backward (top-down) rules.

Reference

RuleML - The Rule Markup Initiative http://www.ruleml.org/.

Representation of Equations

Gruber (1993) examines how equations and quantities can be represented in an ontology. Kamareddine et al. (2004) examine how mathematics can be represented in order to make it easier for people to enter well-formed mathematical expressions.

Shim et al. (2002) examine translation from a users' model to equations and explain "converting a decision-makers' specification of a decision problem into an algebraic form and then into a form understandable by an algorithm is a key step in the use of a model". For a practical example the figure below explains the concept for a simple example of the representation of the equation E=MC². This relationship can be defined by the user. Here this is achieved using an ontology tool (Protégé), and this definition can be read directly by Decision support software (Vanguard Studio) that can visualise the information and colour code it. For a more complex example a higher level user interface would be required to enable a user to define the problem, and a translation step to the computer readable model. Units have been left out as the type of equation used and values in it are not important to the concept. The software can translate the source model into a program and calculate results. The result program is then translated again into a result model defined using open standard languages such as XML, and Java for human friendly visualisations viewable as web pages/diagrams.

Translation Process - Equations

References

Gruber T. R. 1993, Toward Principles for the Design of Ontologies Used for Knowledge Sharing - http://www2.umassd.edu/SWAgents/agentdocs/stanford/onto-design.pdf - In Formal Ontology in Conceptual Analysis and Knowledge Representation, edited by Nicola Guarino and Roberto Poli, Kluwer Academic Publishers, in press. Substantial revision of paper presented at the International Workshop on Formal Ontology, March, 1993, Padova, Italy. Available as Technical Report KSL 93-04, Knowledge Systems Laboratory, Stanford University.

Kamareddine, F., Maarek, M., Wells, J. B, 2005, Toward an Object-Oriented Structure for Mathematical Text - http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~jbw/papers/Kamareddine+Maarek+Wells:Toward-an-Object-Oriented-Structure-for-Mathematical-Text:MKM-2005.pdf - Mathematical Knowledge Management, 4th Int'l Conf., Proceedings, LNCS. Springer-Verlag.

Quint, V., Vatton, I., 2004. Techniques for Authoring Complex XML Documents - http://wam.inrialpes.fr/publications/2004/DocEng2004VQIV.html - DocEng 2004 - ACM Symposium on Document Engineering Milwaukee October 28-30 - This paper reviews the main innovations of XML and considers their impact on the editing techniques for structured documents.

Quint, V., Vatton, I., 2005. Towards Active Web Clients - http://wam.inrialpes.fr/publications/2005/DocEng05-Quint.html - DocEng 2005 - ACM Symposium on Document Engineering - 2-4 November 2005 - Bristol, United Kingdom. - Recent developments of document technologies have strongly impacted the evolution of Web clients over the last fifteen years, but all Web clients have not taken the same advantage of this advance. In particular, mainstream tools have put the emphasis on accessing existing documents to the detriment of a more cooperative usage of the Web. However, in the early days, Web users were able to go beyond browsing and to get more actively involved.

Shim, J.P., Warkentin, M., Courtney, J. F., Power, D J., 2002, Past, present, and future of decision support technology - Decision Support Systems - Volume 33, Issue 2 , June 2002, Pages 111-126.

MathML

MathML is a specification for describing mathematics as a basis for machine to machine communication. It provides a way of including mathematical expressions in Web pages. This is explained at World Wide Web Consortium Math Home (2008). There is support for creation and editing of MathML documents in Amaya (Amaya, 2008), (Quint and Vatton, 2004 and 2005).

MathML and semantics built on this could assist in the process of translating equations/formulae into code by providing an open representation of functions as XML (eXtensible Markup Language). Functions entered by the model developer can then be translated to this open representation and translated to programming languages and/or read by programming languages.

Miller and Baramidze (2005) examine efforts to develop mathematical semantic representations above the syntactical representations of MathML.

References

Amaya - http://www.w3.org/Amaya/ - Welcome to Amaya - W3C's Editor/Browser - Amaya is a Web editor, i.e. a tool used to create and update documents directly on the Web. Browsing features are seamlessly integrated with the editing and remote access features in a uniform environment. This follows the original vision of the Web as a space for collaboration and not just a one-way publishing medium.

Miller, J A., Baramidze, G., Simulation and the Semantic Web - 2005. - Proceedings of the 2005 Winter Simulation Conference.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Math Home, 2008. What is MathML? http://www.w3.org/Math/Overview.html.

Links

Coq proof assistant - http://coq.inria.fr/ - Coq is a formal proof management system: a proof done with Coq is mechanically checked by the machine.

End User Programming for Scientists: Modeling Complex Systems - http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2007/1077/ - Andrew Begel - Microsoft Research - In: End-User Software Engineering - Dagstuhl Seminar - Summary - http://www.dagstuhl.de/en/program/calendar/semhp/?semnr=2007081 - Margaret M. Burnett, Gregor Engels, Brad A. Myers and Gregg Rothermel - From 18.01.07 to 23.02.07, the Dagstuhl Seminar 07081 End-User Software Engineering was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl.

EquMath.Net - http://equmath.net/ - EquMath is resource for math lessons from Algebra to Differential Equations!.

Equplus - http://equplus.net/ - Science and Math Equations.

Mathematica - http://www.wolfram.com/ - Wolfram Research.

Mathematical Functions - Interactive Graph - http://www.richtann.com/2dExamples/graph.html - Richard Tann UWE - An Example using Actionscript to model functions and dynamically redraw according to user interaction.

MathLang: experience-driven development of a new mathematical language - http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/kamareddine04mathlang.html - F. Kamareddine, et al., 2004 - Abstract: In this paper we report on the design of a new mathematical language and our method of designing it, driven by the encoding of mathematical texts. MathLang is intended to provide support for checking basic well-formedness of mathematical text without requiring the heavy and dicult-to-use machinery of full type theory or other forms of full formalization. At the same time, it is intended to allow the addition of fuller formalization to a document as time and e ort permits.

MathWeb - http://www.mathweb.org/ - MathWeb.org supplies an infrastructure for web-supported mathematics.

Mizar Project - http://mizar.org/project/ - The Mizar project started around 1973 as an attempt to reconstruct mathematical vernacular in a computer-oriented environment.

OMDoc.org - http://www.omdoc.org/ - OMDoc.org: The OMDoc Portal - OMDoc is a markup format and data model for Open Mathematical Documents. It serves as semantics-oriented representation format and ontology language for mathematical knowledge.

OpenMath - http://www.openmath.org/ - OpenMath is a new, extensible standard for representing the semantics of mathematical objects.

Richard Tann UWE - http://www.richtann.com/2dExamples/graph.html - Mathematical Functions - An Example using Actionscript to model functions and dynamically redraw according to user interaction.

Toward an Object-Oriented Structure for Mathematical Text - http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~jbw/papers/Kamareddine+Maarek+Wells:Toward-an-Object-Oriented-Structure-for-Mathematical-Text:MKM-2005.pdf - Kamareddine, F., Maarek, M., Wells, J. B, 2005, Mathematical Knowledge Management, 4th Int'l Conf., Proceedings, LNCS. Springer-Verlag.

SRML

SRML - Simulation Reference Markup Language - http://www.w3.org/TR/SRML/ - W3C Note 18 December 2002.

SRML case study: simple self-describing process modeling and simulation - http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1371486 - Reichenthal, S.W. Boeing, Anaheim, CA, USA; 2004, Simulation Conference, 2004. Proceedings of the 2004 Winter - Volume: 2, pp 1461- 1466 - ISBN: 0-7803-8786-4.