Saturday, February 22, 2014

JWS preprint: ArguBlogging: an Application for the Argument Web


New preprint on the JWS preprint server:

Floris Bex, Mark Snaith, John Lawrence and Chris Reed, ArguBlogging: an Application for the Argument Web, Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, to appear, 2014.

In this paper, we present a software tool for 'ArguBlogging', which allows users to construct debate and discussions across blogs, linking existing and new online resources to form distributed, structured conversations. Arguments and counterarguments can be posed by giving opinions on one's own blog and replying to other bloggers' posts. The resulting argument structure is connected to the Argument Web, in which argumentative structures are made semantically explicit and machine-processable. We discuss the ArguBlogging tool and the underlying infrastructure and ontology of the Argument Web.

Friday, February 21, 2014

JWS Preprint: Streaming the Web: Reasoning over Dynamic Data


A new preprint is available on the JWS preprint server:

Alessandro Margara, Jacopo Urbani, Frank van Harmelen and Henri Bal, Streaming the Web: Reasoning over Dynamic Data, Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, to appear, 2014.

In the last few years a new research area, called stream reasoning, emerged to bridge the gap between reasoning and stream processing. While current reasoning approaches are designed to work on mainly static data, theWeb is, on the other hand, extremely dynamic: information is frequently changed and updated, and new data is continuously generated from a huge number of sources, often at high rate. In other words, fresh information is constantly made available in the form of streams of new data and updates. Despite some promising investigations in the area, stream reasoning is still in its infancy, both from the perspective of models and theories development, and from the perspective of systems and tools design and implementation. The aim of this paper is threefold: (i) we identify the requirements coming from dierent application scenarios, and we isolate the problems they pose; (ii) we survey existing approaches and proposals in the area of stream reasoning, highlighting their strengths and limitations; (iii) we draw a research agenda to guide the future research and development of stream reasoning. In doing so, we also analyze related research fields to extract algorithms, models, techniques, and solutions that could be useful in the area of stream reasoning.