Afzal M.T. (ed.) Semantics in Action - Applications and Scenarios

InTech, 2012. - 278 p.Semantics is the research area touching the diversified domains such as: Philosophy, Information Science, Linguistics, Formal Semantics, Philosophy of Language and its constructs, Query Processing, Semantic Web, Pragmatics, Computational Semantics, Programming Languages, and Semantic Memory etc. The current book is a pleasant combination of number of great ideas, applications, case studies, and practical systems in diversified domains. The book has been divided into two volumes. The current one is the second volume which highlights the state-of-the-art areas in the domain of Semantics. This volume has been divided into four sections and ten chapters. The sections include: 1) Software Engineering, 2) Applications: Semantic Cache, E-Health, Sport Video Browsing, and Power Grids, 3) Visualization, and 4) Natural Language Disambiguation.
Section 1 presents work in the domain of Software Engineering. This section includes three chapters. First chapter employs model transformation language semantics for aspect composition. The presented work highlights state-of-the-art in the domain, proposes model composition semantics, and provides formal notions and algorithms. The implementation details using ATL semantics and evaluations have been provided. Second chapter presents a static slice monad transformer for program slicing based on monadic semantics. The work is an extended version of the previously published papers by the authors in the same area. Third Chapter presents a framework for modeling and generation of web service oriented context aware system to improve human-machine interaction.
Section 2 highlights applications of semantics in four areas such as: semantic cache, ehealth, video browsing, and power grid. The section has been divided into four chapters. First chapter presents a semantic cache system. The state-of-the-art provides insights into contemporary systems. Subsequently, a new semantic cache system such as: sCacheQP, has been proposed. The algorithms have been discussed in details with a case study highlighting the major contributions and challenges in the area. Second chapter highlights the use of Semantics in the area of eHealth for providing semantic interoperability. The prototype has been successfully implemented and tested for a local laboratory in Pakistan. Third chapter presents a semantic approach for sport video browsing. Soccer video high-level semantics detection approaches have been described and evaluated. Subsequently, from the detected highlights, a semantic based soccer video browsing approach is proposed which carries out video content browsing using a book-like structure. Fourth chapter describes a futuristic intelligent selfdescribing power grid based on ontologies. The prototype applications demonstrate that the rule based techniques when applied on domain ontologies, are capable to facilitate the coding of industrial applications and their customization for user needs.
Section 3 presents innovative visualization techniques to infer semantics. This section comprises of two chapters. First chapter is a study to propose a methodology to visualize conflict structures of public debate by analyzing debate minutes based on corpus-based discourse analysis. An innovative visualization has been proposed and demonstrated for a data which is able to extract insights from public debate domain, for example, do citizens agree with each other?, do experts and administration have interest conflict? etc. Second chapter elaborates an idea of visualizing program semantics. With enough details, examples, theories, and visualization, the chapter argues that the Petri nets can be extended to formally visualize the semantics of a program.
Section 4, the last section of this book, discusses about natural language disambiguation for resolving topic-focus ambiguities using natural language semantics. The procedural semantics of TIL were shown to provide rigorous analyses such that sentences differing only in their topic-focus articulation were assigned different constructions producing different propositions (truth-conditions) and having different consequences. However, the proposed approach is not able to dictate which disambiguation is the intended one, thus leaving room for pragmatics.Software Engineering
Using Model Transformation Language Semantics for Aspects Composition
Program Slicing Based on Monadic Semantics
CCMF, Computational Context Modeling Framework – An Ontological Approach to Develop Context-Aware Web Applications
Applications: Semantic Cache, E-Health, Sport Video Browsing, and Power Grids
Semantic Cache System
Semantic Interoperability in E-Health for Improved Healthcare
Semantic Based Sport Video Browsing
Intelligent Self-Describing Power Grids
Visualization
Facet Decomposition and Discouse Analysis: Visualization of Conflict Structure
Visualizing Program Semantics
Natural Language Disambiguation
Resolving Topic-Focus Ambiguities in Natural Language