Nathalie Steinmetz (de Bruijn)

Authors: James Scicluna, Christoph Blank and Nathalie Steinmetz.

Presentation by Nathalie Steinmetz at the AAAI 2012 Spring Symposium: Intelligent Web Services Meet Social Computing, Palo Alto, CA, United States, March 26nd-28th, 2012.

Web service annotation is of crucial importance to enable efficient search and discovery of such services, especially for those that are REST based. However, the process of annotating such services has several drawbacks, whether automated or not… Show more

Authors: James Scicluna, Christoph Blank and Nathalie Steinmetz.

Presentation by Nathalie Steinmetz at the AAAI 2012 Spring Symposium: Intelligent Web Services Meet Social Computing, Palo Alto, CA, United States, March 26nd-28th, 2012.

Web service annotation is of crucial importance to enable efficient search and discovery of such services, especially for those that are REST based. However, the process of annotating such services has several drawbacks, whether automated or not. Automated processes are quite inaccurate and do not in general provide quality annotations. Manual processes are very expensive, both in time, effort and consequently financially. This work focuses on easing - and thus reducing the cost of manually providing annotations. This is done using a user friendly wizard on the seekda Web services portal in combination with crowd sourcing on Amazon mechanical turk. The approach turned out to be very promising in solving one of the crucial problems of the Semantic Web promise, namely, the acquisition of annotation. Show less

Authors: James Scicluna, Nathalie Steinmetz.

Published in: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Information Technology and Travel & Tourism (ENTER), 2011, Innsbruck, Austria.

One of the main challenges in the e-Tourism industry is to present a potential traveler (or travelers) with exciting holiday possibilities during the booking process in order to deliver her/him a memorable experience. Such an experience is not only bound to services offered by a hotel, but… Show more

Authors: James Scicluna, Nathalie Steinmetz.

Published in: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Information Technology and Travel & Tourism (ENTER), 2011, Innsbruck, Austria.

One of the main challenges in the e-Tourism industry is to present a potential traveler (or travelers) with exciting holiday possibilities during the booking process in order to deliver her/him a memorable experience. Such an experience is not only bound to services offered by a hotel, but also to extra (mostly third-party) services that can be combined together in order to offer a complete and customized holiday package. The diverse nature of such services make it very hard to integrate them together and to achieve this objective. The scope of this paper is to address this problem by defining and describing a set of requirements and data-models that are able to capture different aspects of such services and also a combination thereof. Show less

Authors: Christoph Blank, Nathalie Steinmetz and James Scicluna.

Demo at the 8th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2011), Heraklion, Greece, May 29th - June 2nd, 2011.

The Web is nowadays moving from a Web of data to a Web of things and a Web of services. In order to enable efficient Web Service discovery on large scale we do not only need access to a large number of publicly available services - we also want these services to be semantically annotated. Within this paper we… Show more

Authors: Christoph Blank, Nathalie Steinmetz and James Scicluna.

Demo at the 8th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2011), Heraklion, Greece, May 29th - June 2nd, 2011.

The Web is nowadays moving from a Web of data to a Web of things and a Web of services. In order to enable efficient Web Service discovery on large scale we do not only need access to a large number of publicly available services - we also want these services to be semantically annotated. Within this paper we present the demonstration of seekda! enriched services, a tool that enables the easy annotation of Web APIs, i.e. both WSDL- and REST-based services. With this tool we combine both semi-automatic and human-driven annotation in order to provide a better search experience for users. Show less

Authors: James Scicluna and Nathalie Steinmetz.

Presented at: iSustainability 2010 workshop, 2010, Edinburgh, UK.

One of the main challenges in the e-Tourism industry is to present a potential traveller (or travellers) with exciting holiday possibilities during the booking process in order to deliver her/him a memorable experience. Such an experience is not only bound to services offered by a hotel, but also to extra (mostly third-party) services that can be combined together in… Show more

Authors: James Scicluna and Nathalie Steinmetz.

Presented at: iSustainability 2010 workshop, 2010, Edinburgh, UK.

One of the main challenges in the e-Tourism industry is to present a potential traveller (or travellers) with exciting holiday possibilities during the booking process in order to deliver her/him a memorable experience. Such an experience is not only bound to services offered by a hotel, but also to extra (mostly third-party) services that can be combined together in order to offer a complete and customised holiday package. Many of current holiday packages are however rather fixed, offering little flexibility and many times limited to a few types of services. This paper describes a template based approach for designing and composing such holiday packages - which we call bundles. Templates are designed by business persons, refined by hoteliers and/or end customers and semi-automatically composed by concrete services using a set of specifically-designed algorithms. Show less

Authors: James Scicluna, Nathalie Steinmetz and Michal Zaremba.

Published in: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Information Technology and Travel & Tourism, 2010, Lugano, Switzerland.

The e-Tourism industry has brought incredible benefits to the consumer. A large — and still growing — number of holiday and business travels are today booked via the Internet. With the e-Tourism market becoming larger, consumers are looking beyond the usual travel services like… Show more

Authors: James Scicluna, Nathalie Steinmetz and Michal Zaremba.

Published in: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Information Technology and Travel & Tourism, 2010, Lugano, Switzerland.

The e-Tourism industry has brought incredible benefits to the consumer. A large — and still growing — number of holiday and business travels are today booked via the Internet. With the e-Tourism market becoming larger, consumers are looking beyond the usual travel services like hotel room and flight booking. They are increasingly searching for third party services that fit to their journey (e.g. travel insurances, excursions, renting of equipment). This is however not an easy task as the consumers are obliged to surf through many different websites in order to find and book those services. This paper presents a solution to this problem in form of the seekda! dynamic shop. It provides consumers with a single stop-point, e.g., the hotel’s website, where they can semi-automatically aggregate hotelier and third party services for their specific travel. The dynamic shop automatically suggests desired services to the consumers that then only need to choose the ones they prefer. Show less

Master Thesis, University of Innsbruck, Austria. Supervised by Univ.-Prof. Dr. Dieter Fensel, co-supervised by Dipl.-Inf. Holger Lausen. 2010.

In the last years we see a clear trend in the Computer Science area to a move towards Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs). This move can be observed both on the Web - with the Web of documents changing to a Web of services - and in the traditional software domain - where software starts being seen more and more as resource that itself is a… Show more

Master Thesis, University of Innsbruck, Austria. Supervised by Univ.-Prof. Dr. Dieter Fensel, co-supervised by Dipl.-Inf. Holger Lausen. 2010.

In the last years we see a clear trend in the Computer Science area to a move towards Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs). This move can be observed both on the Web - with the Web of documents changing to a Web of services - and in the traditional software domain - where software starts being seen more and more as resource that itself is a service in a cloud. Research in the service domain encompasses its whole life-cycle, including topics as creation, discovery, selection, ranking and composition. This thesis focuses on the discovery and ranking of Web Services. We describe the methodologies that we have developed for enabling Web Service discovery on Web scale, by crawling the Web for Web Services, gathering WSDL service descriptions and related documents, and building unique service objects from multiple Web resources. Then we provide an overview of how we extract basic service information from all the data and use it to semantically enrich the resulting services with simple annotations. For Web Service ranking we have developed a novel approach based on non-functional properties of services: information that is available about services by analyzing their description that is available on the Web, their hyperlink relations, monitoring information, etc. We make thereby use of semantic technologies, aggregating the various real-world service aspects as described above in a unified model and providing different rank values based on those aspects. Show less

Authors: Saartje Brockmans, Irene Celino, Dario Cerizza, Emanuele Della Valle, Michael Erdmann, Adam Funk, Holger Lausen, Wolfgang Schoch, Nathalie Steinmetz, Andrea Turati.

Published in: Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Interoperability through Semantic Data and Service Integration, co-located with SEBD (Symposium on Advanced Database Systems), Camogli, Italy, 2009.

Authors: Nathalie Steinmetz, Holger Lausen.

Published in: Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Non-Functional Properties and SLA Management in Service-Oriented Computing, 2009, Stockholm, Sweden.

In the last years we see a clear trend in the Computer Science area to a move towards Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs). Research in the service domain encompasses its whole life-cycle, including topics as creation, discovery, selection, ranking and composition. This paper focuses on… Show more

Authors: Nathalie Steinmetz, Holger Lausen.

Published in: Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Non-Functional Properties and SLA Management in Service-Oriented Computing, 2009, Stockholm, Sweden.

In the last years we see a clear trend in the Computer Science area to a move towards Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs). Research in the service domain encompasses its whole life-cycle, including topics as creation, discovery, selection, ranking and composition. This paper focuses on the ranking of discovered Web Services, proposing a novel approach based on non-functional properties of services: information that is available about services by analyzing their description that is available on the Web, their hyperlink relations, monitoring information, etc. The approach is making use of semantic technologies, aggregating the various real-world service aspects as described above in a unified model and providing different rank values based on those aspects. Show less

Authors: Saartje Brockmans, Irene Celino, Dario Cerizza, Daniele Dell’Aglio, Emanuele Della Valle, Michael Erdmann, Adam Funk, Alberto Guarino, Holger Lausen, Wolfgang Schoch, Nathalie Steinmetz, and Andrea Turati.

Presented by Nathalie Steinmetz at the 3rd Annual European Semantic Technology Conference, 2009, Vienna, Austria. Presentation by Nathalie Steinmetz.

Searching for Web Services on the Web today is a hard task. General-purpose search engines are not precise enough and… Show more

Authors: Saartje Brockmans, Irene Celino, Dario Cerizza, Daniele Dell’Aglio, Emanuele Della Valle, Michael Erdmann, Adam Funk, Alberto Guarino, Holger Lausen, Wolfgang Schoch, Nathalie Steinmetz, and Andrea Turati.

Presented by Nathalie Steinmetz at the 3rd Annual European Semantic Technology Conference, 2009, Vienna, Austria. Presentation by Nathalie Steinmetz.

Searching for Web Services on the Web today is a hard task. General-purpose search engines are not precise enough and dedicated service portals are too limited in scale. Service-Finder helps in solving this problem. It employs Information Retrieval and Extraction techniques (like crawling, automatic annotation and indexing) as well as Semantic Technologies, to turn the unstructured and distributed information about Web Services into structured data that expresses service semantics with respect to service-domain ontologies. The result is a Web portal (http://demo.service-finder.eu) offering search functionalities to discover services. In comparison with existing solutions, it achieves both a higher recall, because it indexes more than 25,000 services, and a higher precision, thanks to the semantic annotations that enrich the service descriptions. This represents a big advantage for end users, who can easily discover unknown services that fit their need. Show less

Authors: Nathalie Steinmetz, Holger Lausen, Manuel Brunner.

Published in: Proceedings of the 7th International Joint Conference on Service-Oriented Computing, 2009, Stockholm, Sweden.

The Web is nowadays moving from a Web of data to a Web of services. In this paper we present our approach for Web Service discovery on Web scale, targeted to support flexible and on-demand Web Service usage on the Web. The approach starts with crawling the Web for Web Services, gathering on the one… Show more

Authors: Nathalie Steinmetz, Holger Lausen, Manuel Brunner.

Published in: Proceedings of the 7th International Joint Conference on Service-Oriented Computing, 2009, Stockholm, Sweden.

The Web is nowadays moving from a Web of data to a Web of services. In this paper we present our approach for Web Service discovery on Web scale, targeted to support flexible and on-demand Web Service usage on the Web. The approach starts with crawling the Web for Web Services, gathering on the one hand WSDL service descriptions and related documents, and, on the other hand, Web APIs. We describe our methodology for building unique service objects from multiple Web resources. Then we provide an overview of how we extract basic service information from all the data and use it to semantically annotate the resulting services. Show less

Chapter in: Semantic Service Provisioning, 2008, Springer.

Edited by: Dominik Kuropka, Steffen Staab, Peter Tröger and Mathias Weske.

Chapter authors: Emilia Cimpian, Harald Meyer, Dumitru Roman, Adina Sirbu, Nathalie Steinmetz, Steffen Staab and Ioan Toma.

The word ontology is used with different meanings in different communities. We distinguish between Ontology (uncountable reading and capital initial) and an ontology (countable reading and lower-case initial). In the… Show more

Chapter in: Semantic Service Provisioning, 2008, Springer.

Edited by: Dominik Kuropka, Steffen Staab, Peter Tröger and Mathias Weske.

Chapter authors: Emilia Cimpian, Harald Meyer, Dumitru Roman, Adina Sirbu, Nathalie Steinmetz, Steffen Staab and Ioan Toma.

The word ontology is used with different meanings in different communities. We distinguish between Ontology (uncountable reading and capital initial) and an ontology (countable reading and lower-case initial). In the first case, we refer to a philosophical discipline, namely the branch of philosophy which deals with the nature and the organisation of reality. Unlike the special sciences, each of which investigates a class of beings and their determinations, Ontology regards all the species and tries to answer the question: What is being?, or What are the features common to all beings? In the second case, we refer to an information object and engineering artefact as the most prevalent use in the computer science communities. Show less

Chapter in: Ontology Management Semantic Web and Beyond, 2008, Springer.

Edited by: Martin Hepp, Pieter De Leenheer, Aldo De Moor and York Sure.

Chapter authors: Stijn Heymans, Li Ma, Darko Anicic, Zhilei Ma, Nathalie Steinmetz, Yue Pan, Jing Mei, Achille Fokoue, Aditya Kalyanpur and Aaron Kershenbaum, et al.

Reasoning with large amounts of data together with ontological knowledge is becoming a pertinent issue. In this chapter, we will give an overviewof wellknown… Show more

Chapter in: Ontology Management Semantic Web and Beyond, 2008, Springer.

Edited by: Martin Hepp, Pieter De Leenheer, Aldo De Moor and York Sure.

Chapter authors: Stijn Heymans, Li Ma, Darko Anicic, Zhilei Ma, Nathalie Steinmetz, Yue Pan, Jing Mei, Achille Fokoue, Aditya Kalyanpur and Aaron Kershenbaum, et al.

Reasoning with large amounts of data together with ontological knowledge is becoming a pertinent issue. In this chapter, we will give an overviewof wellknown ontology repositories, including native stores and database based stores, and highlight strengths and limitations of each store. We take Minerva as an example to analyze ontology storage in databases in depth, as well as to discuss efficient indexes for scaling up ontology repositories. We then discuss a scalable reasoning method for handling expressive ontologies, as well as summarize other similar approaches. We will subsequently delve into the details of one particular ontology language based on Description Logics called WSML-DL and show that reasoning with this language can be done by a transformation from WSML-DL to OWL DL and support all main DL-specific reasoning tasks. Finally, we illustrate reasoning and its relevance by showing a reasoning example in a practical business context by presenting the Semantic Business Process Repository (SBPR) for systemical management of semantic business process models. As part of this, we analyze the main requirements on a such a repository. We then compare different approaches for storage mechanisms for this purpose and show how a RDBMS in combination with the IRIS inference engine provides a suitable solution that deals well with the expressiveness of the query language and the required reasoning capabilities even for large amounts of instance data. Show less

Authors: Saartje Brockmans, Irene Celino, Dario Cerizza, Emanuele Della Valle, Michael Erdmann, Adam Funk, Holger Lausen, Wolfgang Schoch, Nathalie Steinmetz, Andrea Turati.

Presented at the 2nd European Semantic Technology Conference (ESTC). Vienna, Austria, 2008.

Chapter in: Implementing Semantic Web Services: The SESA Framework, 2008, Springer.

Edited by: Dieter Fensel, Mick Kerrigan, Michal Zaremba.

Chapter authors: Nathalie Steinmetz and Uwe Keller

Service-oriented computing has become one of the predominant factors in IT research and development efforts over the last few years. In spite of several standardization efforts that advanced from research labs into industrial-strength technologies and tools, there is still much human… Show more

Chapter in: Implementing Semantic Web Services: The SESA Framework, 2008, Springer.

Edited by: Dieter Fensel, Mick Kerrigan, Michal Zaremba.

Chapter authors: Nathalie Steinmetz and Uwe Keller

Service-oriented computing has become one of the predominant factors in IT research and development efforts over the last few years. In spite of several standardization efforts that advanced from research labs into industrial-strength technologies and tools, there is still much human effort required in the process of finding and executing Web services.

Here, Dieter Fensel and his team lay the foundation for understanding the Semantic Web Services infrastructure, aimed at eliminating human intervention and thus allowing for seamless integration of information systems. They focus on the currently most advanced SWS infrastructure, namely SESA and related work such as the Web Services Execution Environment (WSMX) activities and the Semantic Execution Environment (OASIS SEE TC) standardization effort. Their book is divided into four parts: Part I provides an introduction to the field and its history, covering basic Web technologies and the state of research and standardization in the Semantic Web field. Part II presents the SESA architecture. The authors detail its building blocks and show how they are consolidated into a coherent software architecture that can be used as a blueprint for implementation. Part III gives more insight into middleware services, describing the necessary conceptual functionality that is imposed on the architecture through the basic principles. Each such functionality is realized using a number of so-called middleware services. Finally, Part IV shows how the SESA architecture can be applied to real-world scenarios, and provides an overview of compatible and related systems. Show less

Authors: Nathalie Steinmetz, Mick Kerrigan, Holger Lausen, Martin Tanler, Adina Sirbu.

Published in: Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Semantic Metadata Management and Applications (SeMMA 2008), Tenerife, Spain.

One of the crucial reasons for adding semantic descriptions to Web services is to enable intelligent discovery, removing the need for a human to manually search and browse textual descriptions in repositories of services, like UDDI or ebXML. The Web Service… Show more

Authors: Nathalie Steinmetz, Mick Kerrigan, Holger Lausen, Martin Tanler, Adina Sirbu.

Published in: Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Semantic Metadata Management and Applications (SeMMA 2008), Tenerife, Spain.

One of the crucial reasons for adding semantic descriptions to Web services is to enable intelligent discovery, removing the need for a human to manually search and browse textual descriptions in repositories of services, like UDDI or ebXML. The Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO) provides a conceptual model within which the function of a Web service can be described in terms of formalized pre- and postconditions over the information space and assumptions and effects related to the real world; however WSMO is very flexible in the way in which the Semantic Web Service developer can use these elements to describe the functionality of a service. Thus a number of approaches for effectively describing the offered function of a Web service and the requirements of users, along with methods to compare them have surfaced in the last number of years, leaving developers unsure of which approach to use and if it is possible to combine them. In this paper we introduce a framework within which these different approaches can be combined and present some new tools that can be used with this framework by the Semantic Web Service developer. Show less

Authors: M. Andrei, A.-J. Berre, L. Costa, P. Duchesne, D. Fitzner, M. Grcar, J. Hoffmann, E. Klien, J. Langlois, A. Limyr, P. Maué, S. Schade, Nathalie Steinmetz, F. Tertre, L. Vasiliu, R. Zaharia, N. Zastavni.

Published in: Proceedings of 5th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2008), Demo session, Tenerife, Spain.

Geospatial Web services allow to access and to process Geospatial data. Despite significant standardisation efforts, severe heterogeneity and interoperability… Show more

Authors: M. Andrei, A.-J. Berre, L. Costa, P. Duchesne, D. Fitzner, M. Grcar, J. Hoffmann, E. Klien, J. Langlois, A. Limyr, P. Maué, S. Schade, Nathalie Steinmetz, F. Tertre, L. Vasiliu, R. Zaharia, N. Zastavni.

Published in: Proceedings of 5th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2008), Demo session, Tenerife, Spain.

Geospatial Web services allow to access and to process Geospatial data. Despite significant standardisation efforts, severe heterogeneity and interoperability problems remain. The SWING environment1 leverages the Semantic Web Services (SWS) paradigm to address these problems. The environment supports the entire life-cycle of Geospatial SWS. To this end, it integrates a genuine end-user tool, a tool for developers of new Geospatial Web services, a commercial service Catalogue, the Web Service Execution Environment platform (WSMX), as well as an annotation tool. The demonstration includes three usage scenarios of increasing complexity, involving the semantic annotation of a legacy service, the semantic discovery of a Geospatial SWS, as well as the composition of a new
Geospatial SWS. Show less