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Restructuring a business process (BP) model may enhance the BP performance and improve its understandability. So-far proposed restructuring methods use either refactoring which focuses on structural aspects, social network discovery which uses semantic information to guide the affiliation process during its analysis, or social network rediscovery which uses structural information to identify clusters of actors according to their relationships. The purpose of this paper is to propose a hybrid method that exploits both the semantic and structural aspects of a BP model.

The proposed method first generates a social network from the BP model. Second, it applies hierarchical clustering to determine the performers’ partitions; this step uses the social context which specifies features related to performers, and two new distances that account for semantic and structural information. Finally, it applies a set of behavioral and organizational restructuring rules adapted from the graph optimization domain; each rule uses the identified performers’ partitions and the business context to reduce particular quality metrics.

The efficiency of the proposed method is illustrated through well-established complexity metrics. The illustration is made through the development of a tool that fully supports the proposed method and proposes a strategy for the application of the restructuring rules.

The proposed method has the merit of combining the semantic and structural aspects of a Business Process Modeling Notation model to identify restructuring operations whose ordered application reduces the complexity of the initial model.

The semantic and structural heterogeneity of large Extensible Markup Language (XML) digital libraries emphasizes the need of supporting approximate queries, i.e. queries where the matching conditions are relaxed so as to retrieve results that possibly partially satisfy the user's requests. The paper aims to propose a flexible query answering framework which efficiently supports complex approximate queries on XML data.

To reduce the number of relaxations applicable to a query, the paper relies on the specification of user preferences about the types of approximations allowed. A specifically devised index structure which efficiently supports both semantic and structural approximations, according to the specified user preferences, is proposed. Also, a ranking model to quantify approximations in the results is presented.

Personalized queries, on one hand, effectively narrow the space of query reformulations, on the other hand, enhance the user query capabilities with a great deal of flexibility and control over requests. As to the quality of results, the retrieval process considerably benefits because of the presence of user preferences in the queries. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposal, as well as its scalability.

Future developments concern the evaluation of the effectiveness of personalization on queries through additional examinations of the effects of the variability of parameters expressing user preferences.

The paper is intended for the research community and proposes a novel query model which incorporates user preferences about query relaxations on large heterogeneous XML data collections.

Aims to bridge the gap between grid computing and semantic exploitation of information commonly met in digital library infrastructures.

This paper introduces a semantic digital library framework based on grid technology. It follows the OGSA specifications for the development of grid infrastructures capable of efficiently handling such information. It is a service‐oriented approach based on common web technologies such as the web browser and web server. The design principles of the proposed framework take into account the emerging need to exploit the semantics of its underlying information through the employment of adequate open standard technologies such as RDF and OWL.

Although semantic exploitation of large data sets used to be a difficult and resource‐consuming activity usually taking place in specialized, highly equipped laboratories, this work demonstrates that emerging technologies like the grid and emerging standards like RDF/OWL are capable of bringing such research closer to the average workstation.

The lack of a working prototype based on the proposed framework limits the usefulness of the results deriving from this paper.

This paper can serve as a starting point to researchers wishing to conduct research in the area of the semantic grid as applied to digital library infrastructures.

This paper seeks to develop a specified typology of various levels of semantic interoperability, designed to provide semantically expressive and functional means to interconnect typologically different sub‐systems in an international comprehensive knowledge organization system, supporting advanced information retrieval and exploration strategies.

Taking the analysis of rudimentary forms of a functional interoperability based on simple pattern matching as a starting‐point, more refined strategies to provide semantic interoperability, which is actually reaching the conceptual and even thematic level, are being developed. The paper also examines the potential benefits and perspectives of the selective transfer of modelling strategies from the field of semantic technologies for the refinement of relational structures of inter‐system and inter‐concept relations as a requirement for expressive and functional indexing languages supporting advanced types of semantic interoperability.

As the principles and strategies of advanced information retrieval systems largely depend on semantic information, new concepts and strategies to achieve semantic interoperability have to be developed.

The approach has been developed in the functional and structural context of an international comprehensive system integrating several heterogeneous knowledge organization systems and indexing languages by interconnecting them to a central conceptual structure operating as a spine in an overall system designed to support retrieval and exploration of bibliographic records representing complex conceptual entities.

Research and development aimed at providing technical and structural interoperability has to be complemented by a thorough and precise reflection and definition of various degrees and types of interoperability on the semantic level as well. The approach specifies these levels and reflects the implications and their potential for advanced strategies of retrieval and exploration.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel quality of service (QoS)‐aware service composition approach, called SEQOIA, capable of defining at run‐time a service composition plan meeting both functional and non‐functional constraints and optimizing the overall quality of service.

SEQOIA is a semantic‐driven QoS‐aware dynamic composition approach leveraging on an integer linear programming technique (ILP). It exploits the expressiveness of an ontology‐based service profile model handling structural and semantic properties of service descriptions. It represents the service composition problem as a set of functional and non‐functional constraints and an objective function.

The authors developed a proof of concept implementing SEQOIA, as well as an alternative composition solution based on state‐of‐the‐art AI planning and ILP techniques. Results of testing activities show that SEQOIA performs better than the alternative solution over a limited set of candidate services. This behaviour was expected, as SEQOIA guarantees to find the service composition providing the optimal QoS value, while the alternative approach does not provide this guarantee, as it handles separately the specification of the functional service composition flow and the QoS‐based service selection step.

SEQOIA leverages on semantic annotations in order to make service composition feasible by coping with syntactic and structural differences typically existing across different, even similar, service implementations. To ease the adoption of SEQOIA in real enterprise scenarios, the authors chose to leverage on an XML‐based message model of services interfaces (including but not strictly requiring the use of WSDL).

A web service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine‐to‐machine or application‐to‐application interactions over networks. Descriptions enable web services to be discovered, used by other web services, and composed into new web services. Web service composition is a mechanism for creating new web services by reusing existing ones. In order to compose a web service, the right primitive services have to be discovered. A matchmaking technique enables discovering these services. Web services have functional, non‐functional, behavioral, and semantic characteristics. These four aspects of web services provide different key information about the service; therefore they have to be considered for description, matching, and composition. The purpose of this paper is to propose a formal description framework and a formal matchmaking technique that allows describing and discovering web services by considering their four characteristics.

In this paper, the description framework combines two existing languages for functional, semantic, and behavioral description, along with a simple and new language for non‐functional description.

A case study is used to illustrate the description framework and the matchmaking technique. The implementation and performance evaluation of the matchmaking technique is presented. The framework formalizes and integrates the languages in a common semantic domain in order to match and manipulate the different aspects together and formally. Isabelle is used by the matchmaking technique for discovering the partially and fully matched services.

The contribution of this paper lies in the new description framework and the new matchmaking technique.

This paper aims to reorganize the relevant information of Chinese ancient architectures with the use of Semantic Web technologies and thus facilitate its deep discovery and usage.

This paper proposes an ontology model for Chinese ancient architectures based on architectural narratives theory. To verify the availability of the ancient architecture ontology, we designed and implemented three experiments, including semantic retrieval based on SPARQL query, semantic reasoning with the use of Jena reasoner and visual analysis based on the Chinese Online Digital Humanities Resources Platform.

The proposed ontology provided a solution for the semantic annotation of the unstructured information of Chinese ancient architectures. On this basis, deep knowledge services such as semantic retrieval, semantic reasoning and visual analysis can be provided.

The proposed semantic model of ancient architectures can effectively improve the organization and access quality of the semantic content of Chinese ancient architectures.

This paper focuses on the semantic modelling for the unstructured information of Chinese ancient architectures to semantically describe the related entities (e.g. persons, events, places and times) and uncover their relationships, and thus it made contribution to the deep semantic annotations on ancient architectures.

The purpose of the paper is to compare the aesthetic responses of three groups (architects, engineers and non‐experts) to a set of non‐conventional structures.

A group of 150 respondents (divided into three equal sub‐groups of architects, structural engineers, and non‐experts) were selected to participate in the main study, which used 14 different non‐conventional structural systems. The images of these systems were derived from an earlier pilot study. The evaluation tool included 38 semantic items, also derived from the pilot study. Two statistical analyses were applied to the collected data: factor analysis and ANOVA.

Finds, first, that factor analysis revealed a set of factors identified by all participants as meaningful dimensions, by which they evaluate structural systems. Second, ANOVA revealed differences between the three groups when evaluating different structural systems using the identified factors. Differences between the groups were attributed to their different backgrounds and technical training.

The study argues that understanding the aesthetic experience of architects, engineers and ordinary users of structures is essential. First, it helps the designers to establish the basis for selecting appropriate structural methods and materials in relation to building design. Second, it would also help the designers to better understand the relationship between the structure and architecture in terms of a trade‐off between the technical and aesthetic issues. Third, it helps the designers to better understand how their designed structures are perceived by the public.

This study introduces an alternative approach to the study of the aesthetics of structures, with a focus on non‐conventional structures.

The conception of markets as interfaces connecting semi-autonomous systems of producers and customers has led to an extensive use of social network analysis. So far, the network focus has been on connections among people, paying less attention to the crucial role played by connections between cultural elements (e.g., concepts, representations, ideas) in the way markets are formed and sustained. Such connections constitute “semantic networks” and are the focus of the present article. We attend to them by developing a network view of the cultural dimension of markets and apply it in an empirical setting where culture plays a crucial role – luxury watchmaking – to illustrate the impact of market semantic networks on a major outcome: price.