Semantic Web

The World-wide web, a system of interlinked, hypertext documents accessed via the Internet, has transformed many areas of human endeavor. For example, scientific discovery is increasingly driven by our ability to share, integrate, and analyze data over the web. However, the current web falls significantly short of realizing its full potential as envisioned by its inventor Tim Berners- Lee. This is due to the fact that most of the information that is currently available on the web is designed for human consumption. The semantic web is aimed at transforming the web into an information space designed to support not only human-human communication, but also for human-machine and machine-machine communication. Semantic web is a key enabler of large scale distributed, integrative, collaborative e-science. Semantic web research focuses on the development of tools for:

(a) Description and annotation of information sources (databases, knowledge bases) and services

(b) Collaborative construction of ontologies (controlled vocabularies, shared conceptualizations in specific application domains) and mappings between ontologies

(c) Flexible integration and querying of multiple autonomous sources

(d) Scalable and robust inference with distributed data and ontologies

(e) Composition of autonomous, distributed services

(f) Selective sharing of information (e.g., due to privacy considerations)

(g) Creation, sharing, and use of distributed workflows

(h) Managing data provenance

(i) Construction of predictive models (using machine learning) from distributed semantically disparate data sources

Semantic Web Research at Iowa State University

Over the past several years, several Computer Science faculty and graduate students at Iowa State University have been working on aspects of semantic web, e.g., semantics-enabled information integration, semantics-driven construction of predictive models from data, theoretical foundations of modular ontologies, and semantic web applications in bioinformatics and engineering informatics. Computer Science research on semantic web is currently supported by several grants from the National Science Foundation:

1. Collaborative Research: Learning Classifiers from Autonomous, Semantically Heterogeneous Distributed Data Sources, National Science Foundation, Vasant Honavar (PI) and Doina Caragea (Co-PI) $449,000. 2007-2010.

2. IIS: Exploratory Investigation of Modular Ontologies. National Science Foundation, Vasant Honavar (PI), Giora Slutzki and Doina Caragea (Co-PIs), (2006-2008). $100,000.

3. Interactive and Verifiable Composition of Web Services to Satisfy End User Goals. National Science Foundation, Samik Basu (PI), Vasant Honavar and Robyn Lutz (Co-PIs). (2007-2010), $335,002.

In addition, semantic web is a key component of applied research by our group in bioinformatics, engineering informatics, and related areas that is supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the United States Department of Agriculture, and the National Institutes of Health.