Books in the Synthesis Lectures on Data, Semantics, and Knowledge series

This book introduces core natural language processing (NLP) technologies to non-experts in an easily accessible way, as a series of building blocks that lead the user to understand key technologies, why they are required, and how to integrate them into Semantic Web applications. Natural language processing and Semantic Web technologies have different, but complementary roles in data management. Combining these two technologies enables structured and unstructured data to merge seamlessly. Semantic Web technologies aim to convert unstructured data to meaningful representations, which benefit enormously from the use of NLP technologies, thereby enabling applications such as connecting text to Linked Open Data, connecting texts to each other, semantic searching, information visualization, and modeling of user behavior in online networks. The first half of this book describes the basic NLP processing tools: tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, and morphological analysis, in addition to the main tools required for an information extraction system (named entity recognition and relation extraction) which build on these components. The second half of the book explains how Semantic Web and NLP technologies can enhance each other, for example via semantic annotation, ontology linking, and population. These chapters also discuss sentiment analysis, a key component in making sense of textual data, and the difficulties of performing NLP on social media, as well as some proposed solutions. The book finishes by investigating some applications of these tools, focusing on semantic search and visualization, modeling user behavior, and an outlook on the future.

The dramatic progress of smartphone technologies has ushered in a new era of mobile sensing, where traditional wearable on-body sensors are being rapidly superseded by various embedded sensors in our smartphones. For example, a typical smartphone today, has at the very least a GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, triaxial accelerometer, and gyroscope. Alongside, new accessories are emerging such as proximity, magnetometer, barometer, temperature, and pressure sensors. Even the default microphone can act as an acoustic sensor to track noise exposure for example. These sensors act as a "e;"e;lens"e;"e; to understand the user's context along different dimensions. Data can be passively collected from these sensors without interrupting the user. As a result, this new era of mobile sensing has fueled significant interest in understanding what can be extracted from such sensor data both instantaneously as well as considering volumes of time series from these sensors. For example, GPS logs can be used to determine automatically the significant places associated to a user's life (e.g., home, office, shopping areas). The logs may also reveal travel patterns, and how a user moves from one place to another (e.g., driving or using public transport). These may be used to proactively inform the user about delays, relevant promotions from shops, in his "e;"e;regular"e;"e; route. Similarly, accelerometer logs can be used to measure a user's average walking speed, compute step counts, gait identification, and estimate calories burnt per day. The key objective is to provide better services to end users. The objective of this book is to inform the reader of the methodologies and techniques for extracting meaningful information (called "e;"e;semantics"e;"e;) from sensors on our smartphones. These techniques form the cornerstone of several application areas utilizing smartphone sensor data. We discuss technical challenges and algorithmic solutions for modeling and mining knowledge from smartphone-resident sensor data streams. This book devotes two chapters to dive deep into a set of highly available, commoditized sensors---the positioning sensor (GPS) and motion sensor (accelerometer). Furthermore, this book has a chapter devoted to energy-efficient computation of semantics, as battery life is a major concern on user experience.

While many Web 2.0-inspired approaches to semantic content authoring do acknowledge motivation and incentives as the main drivers of user involvement, the amount of useful human contributions actually available will always remain a scarce resource. Complementarily, there are aspects of semantic content authoring in which automatic techniques have proven to perform reliably, and the added value of human (and collective) intelligence is often a question of cost and timing. The challenge that this book attempts to tackle is how these two approaches (machine- and human-driven computation) could be combined in order to improve the cost-performance ratio of creating, managing, and meaningfully using semantic content. To do so, we need to first understand how theories and practices from social sciences and economics about user behavior and incentives could be applied to semantic content authoring. We will introduce a methodology to help software designers to embed incentives-minded functionalities into semantic applications, as well as best practices and guidelines. We will present several examples of such applications, addressing tasks such as ontology management, media annotation, and information extraction, which have been built with these considerations in mind. These examples illustrate key design issues of incentivized Semantic Web applications that might have a significant effect on the success and sustainable development of the applications: the suitability of the task and knowledge domain to the intended audience, and the mechanisms set up to ensure high-quality contributions, and extensive user involvement. Table of Contents: Semantic Data Management: A Human-driven Process / Fundamentals of Motivation and Incentives / Case Study: Motivating Employees to Annotate Content / Case Study: Building a Community of Practice Around Web Service Management and Annotation / Case Study: Games with a Purpose for Semantic Content Creation / Conclusions

The world of scholarship is changing rapidly. Increasing demands on scholars, the growing size and complexity of questions and problems to be addressed, and advances in sophistication of data collection, analysis, and presentation require new approaches to scholarship. A ubiquitous, open information infrastructure for scholarship, consisting of linked open data, open-source software tools, and a community committed to sustainability are emerging to meet the needs of scholars today. This book provides an introduction to VIVO, http://vivoweb.org/, a tool for representing information about research and researchers -- their scholarly works, research interests, and organizational relationships. VIVO provides an expressive ontology, tools for managing the ontology, and a platform for using the ontology to create and manage linked open data for scholarship and discovery. Begun as a project at Cornell and further developed by an NIH funded consortium, VIVO is now being established as an open-source project with community participation from around the world. By the end of 2012, over 20 countries and 50 organizations will provide information in VIVO format on more than one million researchers and research staff, including publications, research resources, events, funding, courses taught, and other scholarly activity. The rapid growth of VIVO and of VIVO-compatible data sources speaks to the fundamental need to transform scholarship for the 21st century. Table of Contents: Scholarly Networking Needs and Desires / The VIVO Ontology / Implementing VIVO and Filling It with Life / Case Study: University of Colorado at Boulder / Case Study: Weill Cornell Medical College / Extending VIVO / Analyzing and Visualizing VIVO Data / The Future of VIVO: Growing the Community

The World Wide Web has enabled the creation of a global information space comprising linked documents. As the Web becomes ever more enmeshed with our daily lives, there is a growing desire for direct access to raw data not currently available on the Web or bound up in hypertext documents. Linked Data provides a publishing paradigm in which not only documents, but also data, can be a first class citizen of the Web, thereby enabling the extension of the Web with a global data space based on open standards - the Web of Data. In this Synthesis lecture we provide readers with a detailed technical introduction to Linked Data. We begin by outlining the basic principles of Linked Data, including coverage of relevant aspects of Web architecture. The remainder of the text is based around two main themes - the publication and consumption of Linked Data. Drawing on a practical Linked Data scenario, we provide guidance and best practices on: architectural approaches to publishing Linked Data; choosing URIs and vocabularies to identify and describe resources; deciding what data to return in a description of a resource on the Web; methods and frameworks for automated linking of data sets; and testing and debugging approaches for Linked Data deployments. We give an overview of existing Linked Data applications and then examine the architectures that are used to consume Linked Data from the Web, alongside existing tools and frameworks that enable these. Readers can expect to gain a rich technical understanding of Linked Data fundamentals, as the basis for application development, research or further study. Table of Contents: List of Figures / Introduction / Principles of Linked Data / The Web of Data / Linked Data Design Considerations / Recipes for Publishing Linked Data / Consuming Linked Data / Summary and Outlook