On Business Service Semantics

Below you can find the slides of my talk about this topic at the International Conference on Exploring Service Sciences in Porto, Feb 2013.

De Leenheer, P.; Cardoso, J.; Pedrinaci (2013) Ontological Representation and Governance of Business Semantics in Compliant Service Networks. In Proc. of IESS 2012, Springer, LNBIP 143, pp. 155–169

Business Service Semantics: Ontological Representation & Governance of Business Semantics in Compliant Service Networks from Pieter De Leenheer

Abstract: The Internet would enable new ways for service innovation and trading, as well as for analysing the resulting value networks, with an unprecedented level of scale and dynamics. Yet most related eco- nomic activities remain of a largely brittle and manual nature. Service- oriented business implementations focus on operational aspects at the cost of value creation aspects such as quality and regulatory compliance. Indeed they enforce how to carry out a certain business in a prefixed non-adaptive manner rather than capturing the semantics of a business domain in a way that would enable service systems to adapt their role in changing value propositions. In this paper we set requirements for SDL- compliant business service semantics, and propose a method for their ontological representation and governance. We demonstrate an imple- mentation of our approach in the context of service-oriented Information Governance.

CFP First International IFIP Working Conference on Value-Driven Social Semantics & Collective Intelligence (VaSCo) at ACM Web Science 2013 and co-located with Hypertext 2013, CHI 2013

CFP First International IFIP Working Conference on Value-Driven Social Semantics & Collective Intelligence (VaSCo) at ACM Web Science 2013 and co-located with Hypertext 2013, CHI 2013

Chairs

• Pieter De Leenheer, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands & Collibra NV, Belgium (IFIP WG 12.7 chair)
• John Breslin, DERI, National University of Galway, Ireland (IFIP WG 12.7 co-chair)
• Harith Alani, The Open University, UK
• Ricard Ruiz de Querol, Arquetip Lab, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain
• Karolin Kappler, Department of Sociology II / Diagnosis of the Present, FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany 

Keynote

• Wolfgang Nejdl (tentative)

Goals and Motivation

The IFIP Working Group 12.7 on Social Semantics and Collective Intelligence introduces this workshop to reach out to the broader scientific community.

The key goal of this workshop is to establish a multidisciplinary forum that searches for and studies the theoretical foundations, new paradigms, methodologies, technologies, and practical applications that will bring us to a more explicit and meaningful understanding of collective intelligence and social (networking) semantics on the largely tacit Value Web.

In other words: how do knowledge- and social-connectivity on the Web contribute to (social/business) value co-creation and the other way around; and how can we use this knowledge to discover new ways of value co-creation? Secondly, it aims to investigate and promote the applications of such systems in science, industry, and society at large, including opportunities for standardization.

Why the topic is of particular interest at this time

This workshop narrows the study of Web Science down by focusing on the role of Web relationships as a catalyst for innovation, i.e., a Value Web. This brings us to the central problem statement of this workshop: How can organisations or people (transform so they can) harness the Web to collectively produce value?

The search for the answer starts from a number of commonly accepted phenomena:

1. It was not through careful top-down planning, but rather through the evolution of a set of elementary Internet technologies designed for decentralised use, that the “Socio-Semantic” Web emerged with such a dramatic level of complexity and scale, in less than two decades (see Zittrain’s generativity principle).
2. Services are becoming the dominant unit of value-creation strategy, management, and operation:
   1. From a marketing logic point of view, this brings along a shift from transaction-based to relationship-based customer interaction featuring rich service-in-use sentiment and valuation.
   2. From a business innovation and management strategy perspective, enterprises seek a network-centric strategy that focus on collective innovation of services and platforms.
   3. From an IT perspective, service-orientation is a promising paradigm to functionally decompose inward-oriented organisational processes into outward-oriented business service components.
3. The evolution of Web Relationships exhibit non-linear patterns as proposed.

Understanding the collective intelligence and social semantics of the “Value Web” start from these three premises because they are the product of the Socio-Semantic Web, Service Science, and Web Science so far. The goal and premises of the workshop will be studied from different perspectives, including computer science, marketing, innovation management and strategy, social sciences.

Topics of interest

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• theory, formal models, e.g. ontologies, and emerging new paradigms of organized and informal value-creating communities and their collaborative processes
• semantics of data and knowledge about value objects – inherent to Web relationships – that would lead them to gravitate towards unanticipated value propositions on the Value Web.
• auto-emergence of social semantics; harvesting and mining collective intelligence from community interactions;
• social network effects and collective intelligence
• emergent establishment of relationships to collectively produce value propositions such as products or services, common sense knowledge, or socio-political fora
• to make explicit the engineering and prototyping of supporting knowledge-based systems for collective intelligence;
• collective intelligence in linked data; evolution and quality assurance of such linked data;
• the interaction of formal semantics with informal social semantics; social web interoperability issues; modeling of situational awareness; hybrid socio-technical systems;
• identity and authentication of entities and services on the Value Web; related issues of trust, privacy and security;
• implementation and exploitation of social semantics as web services; self-organizing services tailored to communities; methodologies for adoption of such services;
• scalability issues for web-sized collective intelligence;
• “paid” crowds as a type of community where reciprocity is based on money;
• Decision support to reason about value and relationships in value networks
• Profiling social hackers
• Collective intelligence as viewed from the social sciences perspective
• Social innovation for the development of collective intelligence

Important Dates

• Paper Submission Deadline: March 23, 2013
• Acceptance Notification: April 1, 2013
• Camera Ready Due: April 7, 2013
• Author Registration Due: April 3, 2013
• Workshop: May 1, 2013

Submission Guidelines

Submission URL is: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ifipvasco2013
Contact Email is ifipvasco2013@easychair.org

Papers submitted to VASCO’13 must not have been accepted for publication or be under review for another workshop or conference. All submitted papers will be evaluated based on originality, significance, technical soundness, and clarity of expression. All papers will be refereed by at least 3 members of the PC. All submissions must be in English. We solicit short papers describing (i) new ideas (5-8 pages) and (ii) longer papers presenting more tangible results (max. 18 pages). 
Accepted papers will be published in printed IFIP/Springer AICT series: http://www.springer.com/series/6102, and on the IFIP digital library:http://dl.ifip.org/

Programme Committee

CALL FOR PAPERS for the 12th International Conference on Ontologies, DataBases, and Applications of Semantics (ODBASE 2013)

CALL FOR PAPERS

*The 12th International Conference on Ontologies, DataBases, and Applications of Semantics (ODBASE 2013)*

(10-11 Sept 2013, Graz, Austria)

http://www.onthemove-conferences.org/index.php/odbase13

**CHAIRS**

Pieter De Leenheer — VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands & Collibra NV, Belgium

Dejing Dou — University of Oregon, USA

Haixun Wang — Microsoft Research Asia, China

**KEYNOTE**

Prof. Dr. Manfred Hauswirth – Vice-Director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), Ireland

**ABOUT**

The conference on Ontologies, DataBases, and Applications of Semantics for Large Scale Information Systems (ODBASE’13) provides a forum on the use of ontologies and data semantics in novel applications. Of particular relevance to ODBASE 2013 are papers that bridge traditional boundaries between disciplines such as databases, social networks, mobile systems, artificial intelligence, information retrieval, and computational linguistics. We also encourage the submission of research and practical experience papers concerning scale issues in ontology management, information integration, and information extraction, as well as papers that examine the information needs of various applications. This year, in addition to its traditional focus on the management of semantically rich information, ODBASE will have special themes on Semantic Data Mining and Information Governance.

We encourage submissions in areas that connect semantics with the entire data flow cycle: data acquisition e.g. from social networks and mobile devices, data stream processing, e.g., filtering and event contextualization, data analysis,e.g., pattern and knowledge discovery, to dissemination, e.g., publish/subscribe.

ODBASE’13 intends to draw a highly diverse body of researchers and practitioners by being part of the Federated conferences Event “On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2013 (OnTheMove’13)” that co-locates three conferences: ODBASE’13, DOA-SVI’13 (International Symposium on Secure Virtual Infrastructures), and CoopIS’13(International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems).

*TOPICS OF INTEREST*

Specific areas of interest to ODBASE’13 include but are not limited to:

Management of Semantically Expressive Information

- Semantic data modeling

- Semantic integration, including ontology matching, merging, etc.

- Ontology engineering and metadata management

- Ontology-based data management

- Governance aspects such as workflows, roles and responsibilities in semantic information management

Large Scale and Complex Information Management and Analysis

- Semantic indexing, search and query answering in large volumes of data

- Annotation, extraction, summarization, and integration of heterogeneous data resources

- Semantic data mining

- Semantic social network analysis

- Semantic services for big data

Semantic Management of Complex Event Processing

- Semantics in event-driven architectures

- Event algebras, event schemas and type systems

- Event-driven business process management

- Events in social sensing&Collective Intelligence

Applications, Evaluations, and Experiences in the following domains:

- Web 2.0 and Semantic Web,

- Linked Data Web

- Online Social Networks

- Hypertext, multimedia, and hypermedia

- Enterprise-wide Information Systems

- eCommerce, eScience, and Virtual Organizations

- Ubiquitous and Mobile Information Systems

- Information Governance

*IMPORTANT DATES*

Conference Abstract Submission Deadline: May 11, 2013

Conference Paper Submission Deadline: May 18, 2013

Acceptance Notification:  June 25, 2013

Camera Ready Due:  July 16, 2013

Author Registration Due:  July 16, 2013

*SUBMISSION GUIDELINES*

ODBASE 2013 will consider two categories of papers: research and experience. Research papers must contain novel, unpublished results. Experience papers must describe existing, real-world scale systems; preference will be given to papers that describe software products or systems that are in wide experimental and industry use.

Papers submitted to ODBASE’13 must not have been accepted for publication elsewhere or be under review for another workshop or conference. All submitted papers will be carefully evaluated based on originality, significance, technical soundness, and clarity of expression. All papers will be refereed by at least three members of the program committee, and at least two will be experts from industry in the case of practice reports. All submissions must be in English. Submissions must not exceed 18 pages in the final camera-ready paper style. Submissions must be laid out according to the final camera-ready formatting instructions and must be submitted in PDF format. Paper submission site: http://www.onthemove-conferences.org/index.php/odbase13

The final proceedings will be published by Springer Verlag as LNCS (Lecture Notes in Computer Science). Author instructions can be found at:http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html

*PROGRAMME COMMITTEE*

see website: http://www.onthemove-conferences.org/index.php/odbase13

Handbook of Service Description is a Practical Reference for Service Scientists

Purchase it here

World Wide Value Web: Automated Design of Real-World Multi-party Services on the Web

Our claims for the World Wide Value Web:

1. Our world is a large-scale non-linear network of rich relationships between technologies, people, and organisations, emerging from the Web.
2. Web relationships are a catalyst for innovation, i.e., a Value Web, that organisations should harness to devise new forms of value co-creation. To this end, enterprises must abandon value-chain thinking.
3. One challenge is to articulate the structure and composition of value objects inherent to these relationships that would lead them to gravitate towards unanticipated value propositions.
4. Presuming service-centric thinking, and non-linear patterns of the Web, Service Value Networks (SVNs) lie at the center of this gravitation; forming the hubs of the Value Web.
5. (Service) Value Web technologies should embody generative principles similar to those that lead to the success of the Web itself. In other words, Internet-based SVN technologies should allow for unanticipated contribution of value (through service) to the Web by enabling anyone to share and trade their value objects, just like previous generations of the Web did for knowledge and social sharing.

World Wide Value Web: Automated Design of Real-World Multi-party Services on the Web from Pieter De Leenheer

Agree on business semantics with roles, workflow and validation: “we’d call that buttoned down!”

Information Management is one of the world’s leading web sites for its area. They have listed Collibra with 40 other vendors that will  “shape the groundswell in information management technology in the 21st Century.”

Collibra is described as follows (LINK):

• What: Web-based collaborative governance tools
• Why: “A rock solid theoretical foundation, very community and business oriented,” a trusted advisor tells us, unlike metadata tools that get too wrapped around IT concepts. Made to allow business and technical people define their business concepts, facts and rules, in collaboration with roles, workflow, and validation. We’d call that buttoned down.
• Where: Brussels, Belgium
• Of Note: A spinoff of something called [sic.] STARLab at University of Brussels, one of the first places to do database research that’s now onto advanced semantics and ontology.

After being listed among ten semantic companies to watch by PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ Spring Forecast in 2009; and awarded by Gartner as Cool Vendor for Enterprise Information Management in 2011, Collibra finally got rid of its wrong tag “semantic web company” and is now fully and righteously recognized by professionals and companies globally as a key player in the most vibrant, growing and important ICT software sector, that is data integration and governance (although flavored with semantics of course!).

ESWC 2012 Poster Award

 

During the last Extended Semantic Web Conference 2012, we won the best poster award. I post it here.

Towards an Emerging CS Student Community for Regreening Africa: Random Impressions of our First Workshop

Group photo of the First Web alliance for Regreening in Africa Student mini-symposium

Two years after the kick off (reported here), we are gaining a lot of momentum with the Regreening Africa initiative.

Last Friday, 20 April, we organized a first mini workshop with master students who are conducting their master thesis project in the context of a Web for Regreening Africa. The Web Alliance for Regreening Africa initiative is primarily  funded by two running EC-funded research projects W4RA and m-Voices. However, regarding the societal relevance we are convinced we can deliver a convincing bargain for  a larger community of interest to emerge. We have many communities in mind; this workshop aimed at a community at VU of master/PhD students branching their research out from the central theme, but we also have established social networks such as Diaspora and ITGlobal in mind from which we aim to source content contributions.

Our main goal, hence bargain, is to establish a Web of African content through several microprojects. A selection:

• crowdsourcing app for converting pluvial observation data in the Sahel;
• crowdsourcing app for gathering voice fragments in different languages that can be used for voice-based services
• a sustainability analysis for voice-based event organizer;
• RadioMarché: distributed market information system for non-timber tree forest products;
• linked data mash ups for NGOs.

This workshop was a first step in bringing VU Computer Science students’ projects together from Ghana, Ethiopia, Buthan, Iran, Netherlands, Zimbabwe, Suriname, etc. For an overview of the different lines we are exploring check our CAiSE 2012 position paper and ESWC 2012 poster and paper (to be published soon, see list below). Next, some impression from the projects. From my point of view, the meeting was a succes and we agreed to organize a second installment later this year.

Master students from around the Globe: The Netherlands, Iran, Buthan, Zimbabwe / South Africa, and Ethiopia.

Historical pluvial data from regions in the Sahel captured on paper. Binyam Tesfa develops an app to source a crowd willing to convert this data into digital format.

In order to realise voice-based services for various dialects present in the Sahel, Roksareh Nakhaei builds an app that sources a crowd to produce voice fragments. The tasks here require specific language skills, so we cannot source from any general social network such as Facebook.

A mobile event organiser is one of the case studies identified in the m-Voices project. Through voice-based interfaces (using radio or phone) events can be published and consumed. The goal of this project, done by Albert Chifura is to analyse the cost of setting up such infrastructure, hence involvin a "business" sustainability model analysis.

First design of a sustainability assessment of M-event organiser identifying stakeholders and value exchange between them (courtesy of Albert Chifura).

Related publications:

• Bon, A.; de Boer, V.; De Leenheer, P.; van Aart, C.; Gyan, N.; Akkermans, H. (2012)  The Web of Radios – Introducing African Community Radio as an Interface to the Web of Data. In Proc. of ESWC 2012: 1st Int’l Workshop on Downscaling the Semantic Web, LNCS, Springer, to appear
• de Boer, V.; Gyan, N.; Bon, De Leenheer, P.; van Aart, C.; Gyan, N.; Akkermans, H. (2012) Voice-based Access to Linked Market Data in the Sahel. In Proc. of ESWC 2012: 1st Int’l Workshop on Downscaling the Semantic Web, LNCS, Springer, to appear
• de Boer, V.; De Leenheer, P.; Bon, A.; van Aart, C.; Tuyp, W., Boyera, S.; Allen, M.; Akkermans, H.; Gueret, C. (2012) RadioMarché: Distributed Voice- and Web-interfaced Market Information Systems under Rural Conditions. In Proc. of CAiSE 2012, in press

Putting Collibra in Context: a Journey through the Childhood of a 4-year-old Technology Start-up

First click on “Full Screen” on the menu bar below. Then click on “More>>Autoplay”  or use the right arrow to browse through the presentation.

Or watch it directly on the Prezi website.

RadioMarche ́: Distributed Voice- and Web-interfaced Market Information Systems under Rural Conditions

The World Wide Web connects millions of people and organizations, empowering them to socialize, express opinion, and co-create at a scale and speed never seen before. It was not a carefully top-down planning, but a set of elementary internet technologies designed for de-centralized use that allowed for a Web with such a dramatic level of complexity and scale to emerge in less than two decades. Examples of such technologies are W3C-recommended open standards such as HTTP, HTML or RDF. By carefully excluding features that are not universally useful these technologies became easily adopted on a massive scale and gave the Web a generative character, that is, the capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from a broad and varied audience [Zittrain, 2009].

Implementation of the RadioMarché system in Tominian, Mali. This figure shows part of the hardware setup, including the OfficeRoute GSM gateway.

An upcoming trend is to publish structured data from different sources such as governments (e.g., http://data.gov and http://data.gov.uk) and organizations (such as public transport schemas, scientific results, etc.) using the same internet technologies such as HTTP and URI. The Web of Data emerging from this is an extension of the Web: it serves the data using Linked Data approaches so that machines can process them, rather than merely publishing them for human consumption. By treating data as an asset, by sharing and trading it, an open innovation platform for all kinds of services will flourish, linking and augmenting data across domains.

Despite its success so far, the Web implicitly assumes a wide availability of high- bandwidth Internet infrastructure and reliable power supply. Interfacing the Web requires Personal Computers and various skills of which the most pertinent are reading and writing abilities. According to the Web Foundation, there is an estimated 4.5 billion people, mostly living in developing countries, that cannot benefit from the Web for one or more of these reasons. This limits the Web’s generative character per se. For our case study in Mali, only 1.8% of the population has Internet access, only 10% has access to the electricity network, and only 26.2% is literate (source: Internet World Statistics; Developing Renewables; Index Mundi).

For a truly worldwide diffusion of innovations brought forward by the Web, we must devise new types of technologies immune to these infrastructure and interface problems. Hence, complementary or even alternative technologies to the ones we know are needed. Moreover, to guarantee these technologies will be applied and content will be contributed on a large scale, we have to identify value propositions that are interesting enough for a wider audience.

The proposition we consider in this paper is targeted at reducing poverty and hunger in Sub-Saharian Africa through better agricultural and rural development. According to the International Food Policy Institute, small subsistence farmers account for more than 90% of Africa’s agricultural production and are usually at the very bottom of the pyramid. In Africa, agriculture is the primary source of livelihood for about 65% of the population, it represents 40% of Africa’s GDP and 60% of Africa’s total export. Farmers who can count on different sources of income are less vulnerable in periods of drought. Trading is the best way to increase their income; to this end, better communication and access to customers and market information are key challenges. Our focus now lies on non-timber forest products (NTFPs) because they have a very long tradition and their production involves leadership by men as well as women.

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, market information systems (MISs) play an important role in rural agricultural supply chains and are the key to lower food cost and to raising producer and trader incomes (see FAO). MISs are information systems that gather, analyze and publish information about prices and other augmented information relevant to stakeholders involved in handling agricultural products and services. Indeed, farmers have to know the trends in demand to adapt production, find out where to find customers, and be able to determine a reasonable price by comparing with prices from other markets. Hence, there is an urgent need for effective and fair marketing delivered by transparent information. Moreover, costs related to logistics are usually ignored. However, farmers at remote locations have to focus on products that can weigh up for such high prices implied by production as well as transportation costs. Opportunities for innovation through new cultivation techniques, new types of seeds, or by-products remain under-exploited due to a lack of market information needed to deal with the higher production costs.

RadioMarché is being developed within the context of the VOICES (VOIce-based Comunity cEntric mobile Services) project. The conceptual design of the RadioMarché system is shown below.

The RadioMarché system provides alternative interfaces based on voice or SMS via phone or radio, enabling a wider audience to consume and contribute content. The data design is optimized for (i) effective aggregation with other RM instances and data sources from other domains in the Cloud; and (ii) reuse by other services.

The contributions of this paper are :

• The introduction of RadioMarché (RM), a MIS concept adapted for rural conditions in the African Sahel. Regarding the above-mentioned challenges, RM is not dependent on Internet infrastructure, and has voice-based and sms-based interfaces. By exploiting the upward trend in (first-generation) mobile phone usage and the traditionally central role of radio in these areas, we believe in the generativity; hence a wide adoption of the RM concept in many regions of the Sahel.
• The proposition of a Linked Data model to address data integration issues across different regions. On a large scale, we deal with the issue of aggregation and management of distributed market data by adopting Linked Data approaches. We show how our design choices offers opportunities to link aggregated market information to datasets from other domains. The resulting “Web of Data” provides an open innovation platform to develop services with augmented reasoning capabilities for e.g. NGOs, governments, policy makers, traders and scientists.
• A report on a first deployement of RadioMarché conducted in Mali, along with the explanation of the Living Lab approach applied to drive this activity. 

The full position paper will be published  in the proceedings of CAiSE 2012.

de Boer, V.; De Leenheer, P.; Bon, A.; van Aart, C.; Tuyp, W., Boyera, S.; Allen, M.; Akkermans, H.; Gueret, C. (2012) RadioMarché: Distributed Voice- and Web-interfaced Market Information Systems under Rural Conditions. In Proc. of CAiSE 2012