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Journal on data semantics XIV (LNCS 5880)
Spaccapietra S., Delcambre L. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Germany,2009.Type:Divisible Book
Date Reviewed: Nov 23 2011

Engineering software for the semantic Web has many formidable challenges, many of which involve data semantics as either a central or major issue. This volume consists of five papers.

The first of the five papers is on the semantics of modeling 3D objects in virtual reality projects. Objects in virtual reality interact with each other following the laws of physics that are applicable to real objects. Modeling them can be a daunting task because of the level of detail work necessary in implementing their behavior at the lowest level of software development. The paper describes research on creating an abstraction layer that hides the time- and effort-consuming details of low-level implementation in virtual reality and on using a new logic engine to define the semantics and check for consistency.

The second paper is on the long-standing problem of data mapping between different data sources. The context used is mapping data between relational databases. For this problem, one would like to apply as much automation as possible to discover mappings. The authors report on Tupelo, a software system for automated mapping identification. Computational experiments using Tupelo, on both synthetic and real-world datasets, show that it is effective.

The third paper is on using semantic networks and context for searching and discovering software engineering artifacts. The motivation is practical. Developing new implementations of software solutions that have already been done is expensive. Change requests in particular run up costs to the point where the project is no longer viable. If it were possible to find out that a module had already been created in another project that solves a problem, then there would be opportunities to save on costs and salvage projects. The problem is finding these solutions elsewhere. Two principal problems are examined in this paper: the semantic network structures of software engineering projects, and the contexts in which the projects are developed. Similar projects may not be easily recognized as being comparable because of their internal structures and the descriptions and terminologies used to describe them. Yet they may have components that, if found, could be straightforwardly employed in other projects.

The fourth paper is on applying fuzzy description languages to extract image semantics. Many of the items archived in digital libraries and similar repositories are nontextual, and pictures represent the principal nontextual items. The approach in this paper is to accept the lack of crispness in the semantics of an image--the semantics are uncertain and need to be treated as fuzzy. As a part of the project, the authors develop and employ a fuzzy description language logic reasoning engine.

The last paper describes model-independent schema management (MISM), “a platform for model-independent solutions to model management problems.” The platform works by manipulating the schemas and metadata to relate comparable, but not necessarily identical, representations of data items in two different databases. The system is model independent yet model aware. It is based on a few operations--merge, diff, and modelgen--that are applied to the schemas. In addition to relating present data models, it can also be used to handle schema evolution. The computational experiment tackles the round-trip engineering problem in which a schema can give rise to a second schema that undergoes changes, and then the changes can be related back to the original schema.

There is no index at the end of the book. Instead, each paper has its own extensive set of references. The diversity of the topics and problems analyzed in this volume shows the pervasiveness of the problem of data semantics in the artifacts and systems in the semantic Web.

Reviewer:  Anthony J. Duben Review #: CR139607 (1205-0437)
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