Domenico Gendarmi - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Domenico Gendarmi

Www, 2009

User-generated content on the Social Web is often locked within information silos. Inadequate API... more User-generated content on the Social Web is often locked within information silos. Inadequate APIs or, worst, the lack of APIs obstruct reuse and prevent the opportunity to integrate similar content from different communities. In this paper we present a Web mashup which combines information from different social libraries. Aggregated information, including both classic book metadata and user-generated content, is represented as linked data in RDF to allow machine computation and foster reuse among different applications.

The organization of the knowledge on the web is increasingly becoming a social task performed by ... more The organization of the knowledge on the web is increasingly becoming a social task performed by online communities whose members share a common interest in classifying different types of information for a later retrieval. Collaborative tagging systems allow people to organize a set of resources of interest through unconstrained annotations based on free keywords commonly named tags. Suggestive tagging techniques support users in this organization process and have shown to be helpful also in fostering a quick convergence to a shared tag vocabulary. In this paper, we propose a tag recommender which relies on the content analysis of the resource to be tagged, as well as on the personal and collective tagging history. The main contribution of this work is a model which combines semantic content analysis methods with existing suggestive tagging techniques. The expected benefit is the improvement of the user experience in social bookmarking systems, and more generally in collaborative tagging systems.

The ontology development process is typically led by single or small groups of experts, with user... more The ontology development process is typically led by single or small groups of experts, with users mostly playing a passive role. Such an elitist approach in building ontologies hinders the primary purpose of large-scale knowledge sharing. Collaborative tagging systems have emerged as a new web annotation method proving appealing features in fostering users to collaboratively organize information through their own metadata. Collaborative tagging shifts the creation of metadata for indexing web resources, from an individual professional activity to a collective endeavor, where every user is a potential contributor. In this paper we introduce an approach to knowledge evolution which aims to exploit the ability of collaborative tagging in fostering community members participation to move forward an initial knowledge structure. We present user scenarios about how subscribers of a scientific digital library might play the role of knowledge organizers through personal organization and sharing of citations of interest.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007

The appearance of powerful tools for lightweight metadata creation, such as collaborative tagging... more The appearance of powerful tools for lightweight metadata creation, such as collaborative tagging systems, is harnessing the power of online communities, although such metadata are limited to human consumption only. In this paper we first propose an abstract model for representing a generic collaborative tagging system which uses RDF as the underlying technology to store metadata created by different online

IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, 2006

Data integration systems have been developed to provide an integrated view of related data source... more Data integration systems have been developed to provide an integrated view of related data sources, so that all the information needed can be accessed uniformly, transparently and independently of the physical storage. In this paper we report our experience in developing the first prototype of an information broker for APAT, the Italian Agency for Environmental Protection and Technical Services. The broker provides integrated access to a huge amount of hydrological information stored into a collection of heterogeneous data sources.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2006

The Semantic Web mission is to enable a better organization of the Web content to improve the sea... more The Semantic Web mission is to enable a better organization of the Web content to improve the searching, navigation and integration of the available information. Although the Semantic Web is intended for machines, the process of creating and maintaining it is a social one: only people, for example, have necessary skills to create and maintain ontologies. While most existing ontologies are designed by single individuals or small groups of experts, actual ontology users are not involved in the development process. Such an individual approach in creating ontologies, lead to a weak community grounding. On the other hand, Social Software is becoming increasingly popular among web users, giving opportunities to exploit the potential of collaboration within a community. Tools like wikis and folksonomies allow users to easily create new content and share contributions over a social network. Social Software tools can go beyond their current limits, by exploiting the power provided by semantic technologies. Conversely, Semantic Web tools can benefit from the ability of Social Software in fostering collaboration among users, by lowering entry barriers. In this paper we propose a new approach for ontology evolution, considering collaborative tagging systems as an opportunity to complement classic approaches used in maintaining ontologies.

ACM SIGWEB Newsletter, 2010

Domenico Gendarmi received his PhD in computer science from the University of Bari, Italy in Apri... more Domenico Gendarmi received his PhD in computer science from the University of Bari, Italy in April 2010. He is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at Collaborative Development Group of the same University. His recent research activities focus around the Social Web and Global Software Engineering: in particular, how these fields can interact with each other in order to extend

Collaborative development tools have become mainstream technologies for distributed teams, but th... more Collaborative development tools have become mainstream technologies for distributed teams, but they fall short when both agility and distance occur at the same time. Recently the use of social software applications, such as wikis and blogs, have emerged as a practical and economical option to consider as global teams may use them to organize, track, and publish their work and then, share knowledge.

A Collaborative Development Environments (CDE) provides a project workspace with a standardized t... more A Collaborative Development Environments (CDE) provides a project workspace with a standardized toolset to help distributed development teams cope with geographical distance. However, there is a lack of support to reduce socio-cultural distance, which poses practical barriers to the development of connections and shared context/culture between team members. The rise of the Social Web has created several opportunities to publish personal information, often further composed through Web mashups, which can be regarded as a valuable data source in order to establish a shared context among remote developers, with little or no chances to meet.

Modern collaborative development environments have recently introduced tagging as a new feature i... more Modern collaborative development environments have recently introduced tagging as a new feature in order to let developers annotate software artifacts with free keywords. Since tagging has the potential to have an impact on task management in software development processes, there is a need to understand how developers use tagging in projects supported by collaborative development environments and how developers' behavior

User-generated content on the Social Web is often locked within information silos. Inadequate API... more User-generated content on the Social Web is often locked within information silos. Inadequate APIs or, worst, the lack of APIs obstruct reuse and prevent the opportunity to integrate similar content from different communities. In this paper we present a Web mashup which combines information from different social libraries. Aggregated information, including both classic book metadata and user-generated content, is represented as linked data in RDF to allow machine computation and foster reuse among different applications.

The organization of the knowledge on the web is increasingly becoming a social task performed by ... more The organization of the knowledge on the web is increasingly becoming a social task performed by online communities whose members share a common interest in classifying different types of information for a later retrieval. Collaborative tagging systems allow people to organize a set of resources of interest through unconstrained annotations based on free keywords commonly named tags. Suggestive tagging techniques support users in this organization process and have shown to be helpful also in fostering a quick convergence to a shared tag vocabulary. In this paper, we propose a tag recommender which relies on the content analysis of the resource to be tagged, as well as on the personal and collective tagging history. The main contribution of this work is a model which combines semantic content analysis methods with existing suggestive tagging techniques. The expected benefit is the improvement of the user experience in social bookmarking systems, and more generally in collaborative tagging systems.

One of the most prominent themes concerning environment is the inner and marine water protection.... more One of the most prominent themes concerning environment is the inner and marine water protection. The information required for developing such a theme is very large, having to cover numerous and various fields of knowledge: geography, chemistry, hydrology, geology, biology, physics, economics and social sciences. The national Institutions devoted to cope with this theme, such as the Italian Agency for Environmental Protection and Technical Services (APAT), have to solve two fundamental problems: how to collect such a large mass of information, and how to access the information and retrieve coherent data to process in order to perform easy, fast and reliable decision making. The first problem has been solved by APAT in successive steps, as the technology progressively changed, producing large collections of data stored in several technologically distinct repositories. However, accessing data sources individually and then combining the results manually every time an information is nee...

ABSTRACT Architectural solutions to information integration have extensively appeared during the ... more ABSTRACT Architectural solutions to information integration have extensively appeared during the last years, mostly from the federated system research field. Some of these solutions were created to deal with geographic information, whose inherent features make the integration process particularly complex. Among others, the use of ontologies has been proposed as a way of supporting an automated integration. However, how to specify and use a geographic ontology is not so clear in this context. In this paper, we introduce an ontology-based architectural solution as an extension of a federated system (Information Broker) built by the Italian Agency for Environmental Protection and Technical Services (APAT). Our extension is aimed at improving integration by adding semantic features through the use of ontologies and the ISO 19100 standards.

New Generation Computing, 2010

The combination of the use of advanced Information and Communication Technology, especially the I... more The combination of the use of advanced Information and Communication Technology, especially the Internet, to enable new ways of working, with the enhanced provision of information and interactive services accessible over different channels, is the foundation of a new family of information systems. Particularly, this information explosion on the Web, which threatens our ability to manage information, has affected the geographic information systems. Interoperability is a key word here,

Computers & Geosciences, 2011

Nowadays, the proliferation of geographic information systems has caused great interest in integr... more Nowadays, the proliferation of geographic information systems has caused great interest in integration. However, an integration process is not as simple as joining several systems, since any effort at information sharing runs into the problem of semantic heterogeneity, which requires the identification and representation of all semantics useful in performing schema integration. On several research lines, including research on geographic information system integration, ontologies have been introduced to facilitate knowledge sharing among various agents. Particularly, one of the aspects of ontology sharing is performing some sort of mapping between ontology constructs. Further, some research suggests that we should also be able to combine ontologies where the product of this combination will be, at the very least, the intersection of the two given ontologies. However, few approaches built integrations upon standard and normalized information, which might improve accuracy of mappings and therefore commitment and understandability of the integration. In this work, we propose a novel system (called GeoMergeP) to integrate geographic sources by formalizing their information as normalized ontologies. Our integral merging process-including structural, syntactic and semantic aspects-assists users in finding the more suitable correspondences. The system has been empirically tested in the context of projects of the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA, ex APAT), providing a consistent and complete integration of their sources.

In this work we propose an extension of a Federated System, named Information Broker, developed w... more In this work we propose an extension of a Federated System, named Information Broker, developed with the Italian Agency for Environmental Protection and Technical Services (APAT). The main objective of this proposal is to build an integrated system taking into account autonomous, distributed and heterogeneous geographic sources. Our extension is aimed at improving aspects as redundancy, consistency, and scalability by adding semantic interoperability through the use of ontologies and the ISO 19100 standards.

New Challenges in Applied Intelligence Technologies, May 21, 2008

Author Index Akiyoshi, Masanori 203 Andrade, Javier 183 Ares, Juan 183 Awais, Mian Muhammad 155 B... more Author Index Akiyoshi, Masanori 203 Andrade, Javier 183 Ares, Juan 183 Awais, Mian Muhammad 155 Badica, Costin 111 Baldazzi, Paola 255 Barhoumi, Walid 173 Bernardino, Anabela Moreira 279 Bernardino, Eugenia Moreira 279 Boldt, Martin 373 Buccella, Agustina 135 Cadenas, JM 225 Cechich, Alejandra 135 Chandrasekaran, Pravin 55 Chohra, Amine 23 Colagrossi, Attilio 135 da Silva, Fernando Jose Mateus 309 Date, Hiroshi 245 Davidsson, Paul 373 de Carvalho, Andre CPLF 319 Dias, Sergio M. 163 Frackowiak, Grzegorz 111 Fujimoto, ...

Www, 2009

User-generated content on the Social Web is often locked within information silos. Inadequate API... more User-generated content on the Social Web is often locked within information silos. Inadequate APIs or, worst, the lack of APIs obstruct reuse and prevent the opportunity to integrate similar content from different communities. In this paper we present a Web mashup which combines information from different social libraries. Aggregated information, including both classic book metadata and user-generated content, is represented as linked data in RDF to allow machine computation and foster reuse among different applications.

The organization of the knowledge on the web is increasingly becoming a social task performed by ... more The organization of the knowledge on the web is increasingly becoming a social task performed by online communities whose members share a common interest in classifying different types of information for a later retrieval. Collaborative tagging systems allow people to organize a set of resources of interest through unconstrained annotations based on free keywords commonly named tags. Suggestive tagging techniques support users in this organization process and have shown to be helpful also in fostering a quick convergence to a shared tag vocabulary. In this paper, we propose a tag recommender which relies on the content analysis of the resource to be tagged, as well as on the personal and collective tagging history. The main contribution of this work is a model which combines semantic content analysis methods with existing suggestive tagging techniques. The expected benefit is the improvement of the user experience in social bookmarking systems, and more generally in collaborative tagging systems.

The ontology development process is typically led by single or small groups of experts, with user... more The ontology development process is typically led by single or small groups of experts, with users mostly playing a passive role. Such an elitist approach in building ontologies hinders the primary purpose of large-scale knowledge sharing. Collaborative tagging systems have emerged as a new web annotation method proving appealing features in fostering users to collaboratively organize information through their own metadata. Collaborative tagging shifts the creation of metadata for indexing web resources, from an individual professional activity to a collective endeavor, where every user is a potential contributor. In this paper we introduce an approach to knowledge evolution which aims to exploit the ability of collaborative tagging in fostering community members participation to move forward an initial knowledge structure. We present user scenarios about how subscribers of a scientific digital library might play the role of knowledge organizers through personal organization and sharing of citations of interest.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007

The appearance of powerful tools for lightweight metadata creation, such as collaborative tagging... more The appearance of powerful tools for lightweight metadata creation, such as collaborative tagging systems, is harnessing the power of online communities, although such metadata are limited to human consumption only. In this paper we first propose an abstract model for representing a generic collaborative tagging system which uses RDF as the underlying technology to store metadata created by different online

IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, 2006

Data integration systems have been developed to provide an integrated view of related data source... more Data integration systems have been developed to provide an integrated view of related data sources, so that all the information needed can be accessed uniformly, transparently and independently of the physical storage. In this paper we report our experience in developing the first prototype of an information broker for APAT, the Italian Agency for Environmental Protection and Technical Services. The broker provides integrated access to a huge amount of hydrological information stored into a collection of heterogeneous data sources.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2006

The Semantic Web mission is to enable a better organization of the Web content to improve the sea... more The Semantic Web mission is to enable a better organization of the Web content to improve the searching, navigation and integration of the available information. Although the Semantic Web is intended for machines, the process of creating and maintaining it is a social one: only people, for example, have necessary skills to create and maintain ontologies. While most existing ontologies are designed by single individuals or small groups of experts, actual ontology users are not involved in the development process. Such an individual approach in creating ontologies, lead to a weak community grounding. On the other hand, Social Software is becoming increasingly popular among web users, giving opportunities to exploit the potential of collaboration within a community. Tools like wikis and folksonomies allow users to easily create new content and share contributions over a social network. Social Software tools can go beyond their current limits, by exploiting the power provided by semantic technologies. Conversely, Semantic Web tools can benefit from the ability of Social Software in fostering collaboration among users, by lowering entry barriers. In this paper we propose a new approach for ontology evolution, considering collaborative tagging systems as an opportunity to complement classic approaches used in maintaining ontologies.

ACM SIGWEB Newsletter, 2010

Domenico Gendarmi received his PhD in computer science from the University of Bari, Italy in Apri... more Domenico Gendarmi received his PhD in computer science from the University of Bari, Italy in April 2010. He is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at Collaborative Development Group of the same University. His recent research activities focus around the Social Web and Global Software Engineering: in particular, how these fields can interact with each other in order to extend

Collaborative development tools have become mainstream technologies for distributed teams, but th... more Collaborative development tools have become mainstream technologies for distributed teams, but they fall short when both agility and distance occur at the same time. Recently the use of social software applications, such as wikis and blogs, have emerged as a practical and economical option to consider as global teams may use them to organize, track, and publish their work and then, share knowledge.

A Collaborative Development Environments (CDE) provides a project workspace with a standardized t... more A Collaborative Development Environments (CDE) provides a project workspace with a standardized toolset to help distributed development teams cope with geographical distance. However, there is a lack of support to reduce socio-cultural distance, which poses practical barriers to the development of connections and shared context/culture between team members. The rise of the Social Web has created several opportunities to publish personal information, often further composed through Web mashups, which can be regarded as a valuable data source in order to establish a shared context among remote developers, with little or no chances to meet.

Modern collaborative development environments have recently introduced tagging as a new feature i... more Modern collaborative development environments have recently introduced tagging as a new feature in order to let developers annotate software artifacts with free keywords. Since tagging has the potential to have an impact on task management in software development processes, there is a need to understand how developers use tagging in projects supported by collaborative development environments and how developers' behavior

User-generated content on the Social Web is often locked within information silos. Inadequate API... more User-generated content on the Social Web is often locked within information silos. Inadequate APIs or, worst, the lack of APIs obstruct reuse and prevent the opportunity to integrate similar content from different communities. In this paper we present a Web mashup which combines information from different social libraries. Aggregated information, including both classic book metadata and user-generated content, is represented as linked data in RDF to allow machine computation and foster reuse among different applications.

The organization of the knowledge on the web is increasingly becoming a social task performed by ... more The organization of the knowledge on the web is increasingly becoming a social task performed by online communities whose members share a common interest in classifying different types of information for a later retrieval. Collaborative tagging systems allow people to organize a set of resources of interest through unconstrained annotations based on free keywords commonly named tags. Suggestive tagging techniques support users in this organization process and have shown to be helpful also in fostering a quick convergence to a shared tag vocabulary. In this paper, we propose a tag recommender which relies on the content analysis of the resource to be tagged, as well as on the personal and collective tagging history. The main contribution of this work is a model which combines semantic content analysis methods with existing suggestive tagging techniques. The expected benefit is the improvement of the user experience in social bookmarking systems, and more generally in collaborative tagging systems.

One of the most prominent themes concerning environment is the inner and marine water protection.... more One of the most prominent themes concerning environment is the inner and marine water protection. The information required for developing such a theme is very large, having to cover numerous and various fields of knowledge: geography, chemistry, hydrology, geology, biology, physics, economics and social sciences. The national Institutions devoted to cope with this theme, such as the Italian Agency for Environmental Protection and Technical Services (APAT), have to solve two fundamental problems: how to collect such a large mass of information, and how to access the information and retrieve coherent data to process in order to perform easy, fast and reliable decision making. The first problem has been solved by APAT in successive steps, as the technology progressively changed, producing large collections of data stored in several technologically distinct repositories. However, accessing data sources individually and then combining the results manually every time an information is nee...

ABSTRACT Architectural solutions to information integration have extensively appeared during the ... more ABSTRACT Architectural solutions to information integration have extensively appeared during the last years, mostly from the federated system research field. Some of these solutions were created to deal with geographic information, whose inherent features make the integration process particularly complex. Among others, the use of ontologies has been proposed as a way of supporting an automated integration. However, how to specify and use a geographic ontology is not so clear in this context. In this paper, we introduce an ontology-based architectural solution as an extension of a federated system (Information Broker) built by the Italian Agency for Environmental Protection and Technical Services (APAT). Our extension is aimed at improving integration by adding semantic features through the use of ontologies and the ISO 19100 standards.

New Generation Computing, 2010

The combination of the use of advanced Information and Communication Technology, especially the I... more The combination of the use of advanced Information and Communication Technology, especially the Internet, to enable new ways of working, with the enhanced provision of information and interactive services accessible over different channels, is the foundation of a new family of information systems. Particularly, this information explosion on the Web, which threatens our ability to manage information, has affected the geographic information systems. Interoperability is a key word here,

Computers & Geosciences, 2011

Nowadays, the proliferation of geographic information systems has caused great interest in integr... more Nowadays, the proliferation of geographic information systems has caused great interest in integration. However, an integration process is not as simple as joining several systems, since any effort at information sharing runs into the problem of semantic heterogeneity, which requires the identification and representation of all semantics useful in performing schema integration. On several research lines, including research on geographic information system integration, ontologies have been introduced to facilitate knowledge sharing among various agents. Particularly, one of the aspects of ontology sharing is performing some sort of mapping between ontology constructs. Further, some research suggests that we should also be able to combine ontologies where the product of this combination will be, at the very least, the intersection of the two given ontologies. However, few approaches built integrations upon standard and normalized information, which might improve accuracy of mappings and therefore commitment and understandability of the integration. In this work, we propose a novel system (called GeoMergeP) to integrate geographic sources by formalizing their information as normalized ontologies. Our integral merging process-including structural, syntactic and semantic aspects-assists users in finding the more suitable correspondences. The system has been empirically tested in the context of projects of the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA, ex APAT), providing a consistent and complete integration of their sources.

In this work we propose an extension of a Federated System, named Information Broker, developed w... more In this work we propose an extension of a Federated System, named Information Broker, developed with the Italian Agency for Environmental Protection and Technical Services (APAT). The main objective of this proposal is to build an integrated system taking into account autonomous, distributed and heterogeneous geographic sources. Our extension is aimed at improving aspects as redundancy, consistency, and scalability by adding semantic interoperability through the use of ontologies and the ISO 19100 standards.

New Challenges in Applied Intelligence Technologies, May 21, 2008

Author Index Akiyoshi, Masanori 203 Andrade, Javier 183 Ares, Juan 183 Awais, Mian Muhammad 155 B... more Author Index Akiyoshi, Masanori 203 Andrade, Javier 183 Ares, Juan 183 Awais, Mian Muhammad 155 Badica, Costin 111 Baldazzi, Paola 255 Barhoumi, Walid 173 Bernardino, Anabela Moreira 279 Bernardino, Eugenia Moreira 279 Boldt, Martin 373 Buccella, Agustina 135 Cadenas, JM 225 Cechich, Alejandra 135 Chandrasekaran, Pravin 55 Chohra, Amine 23 Colagrossi, Attilio 135 da Silva, Fernando Jose Mateus 309 Date, Hiroshi 245 Davidsson, Paul 373 de Carvalho, Andre CPLF 319 Dias, Sergio M. 163 Frackowiak, Grzegorz 111 Fujimoto, ...