Reasoning Web Semantic Technologies For Information Systems

This book is aimed to introduce the general concepts and methodology of developing Decision Support Systems (DSS) and to illustrate their use in a variety of professional fields. This book series is dedicated to support professionals and series readers in the emerging field of DSS.

This highly topical text considers the construction of the next generation of the Web, called the Semantic Web. This will enable computers to automatically consume Web-based information, overcoming the human-centric focus of the Web as it stands at present, and expediting the construction of a whole new class of knowledge-based applications that will intelligently utilise Web content. The text is structured into three main sections on knowledge representation techniques, reasoning with multi-agent systems, and knowledge services. For each of these topics, the text provides an overview of the state-of-the-art techniques and the popular standards that have been defined. Numerous small programming examples are given, which demonstrate how the benefits of the Semantic Web technologies can be realised at the present time. The main theoretical results underlying each of the technologies are presented, and the main problems and research issues which remain are summarised. Based on a course on 'Multi-Agent Systems and the Semantic Web' taught at the University of Edinburgh, this text is ideal for final-year undergraduate and graduate students in Mathematics, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Logic and researchers interested in Multi-Agent Systems and the Semantic Web.

The 191 papers are organized in topical sections on computational statistics, social networking and computing, evolutionary computing and applications, information education and application, internet and web computing, scientific and engineering computing, system simulation computing, bio-inspired and DNA computing, internet and Web computing, multimedia networking and computing, parallel and distributed computing.

The 170 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 557 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on learning and information processing, data mining, retrieval and management, bioinformatics and bio-inspired models, agents and hybrid systems, financial engineering, as well as a special session on nature-inspired date technologies.