Bücher von Nigel Shadbolt

The central themes of the 14th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW 2004) were ontological engineering and the Semantic Web. These provide the key foundational and delivery mechanisms for building open, Web-based knowledge services. However, consistent with the tradition of EKAW conferences, EKAW 2004 was concerned with all aspects of eliciting, acquiring, modelling and managing knowledge, and its role in the construction of knowledge-intensive systems. Indeed a key aspect of the Knowledge Acquisition Workshops (KAWs) held in the US, Europe and Asia over the past 20 years has been the emphasis on 'holistic' knowledge engineering, addressing problem solving, usability, socio-technological factors and knowledge modelling, rather than simply analyzing and designing symbol-level inferential mechanisms. The papers included in this volume are thus drawn from a variety of research areas both at the cutting edge of research in ontologies and the Semantic Web and in the more traditionally grounded areas of knowledge engineering. A Semantic Web service can be seen as the addition of semantic technologies to Web services to produce Web-accessible services that can be described using appropriate ontologies, reasoned about and combined automatically. Since Web services can be seen as Web-accessible computational objects, much of the work in this area is also concerned with problem-solving methods (PSMs).

Social machines are a type of network connected by interactive digital devices made possible by the ubiquitous adoption of technologies such as the Internet, the smartphone, social media and the read/write World Wide Web, connecting people at scale to document situations, cooperate on tasks, exchange information, or even simply to play. Existing social processes may be scaled up, and new social processes enabled, to solve problems, augment reality, create new sources of value, and disrupt existing practice.This book considers what talents one would need to understand or build a social machine, describes the state of the art, and speculates on the future, from the perspective of the EPSRC project SOCIAM - The Theory and Practice of Social Machines. The aim is to develop a set of tools and techniques for investigating, constructing and facilitating social machines, to enable us to narrow down pragmatically what is becoming a wide space, by asking 'when will it be valuable to use these methods on a sociotechnical system?' The systems for which the use of these methods adds value are social machines in which there is rich person-to-person communication, and where a large proportion of the machine's behaviour is constituted by human interaction.

Sets out a series of approaches to the analysis and synthesis of the World Wide Web, and other web-like information structures. A comprehensive set of research questions is outlined, together with a sub-disciplinary breakdown, emphasising the multi-faceted nature of the Web, and the multi-disciplinary nature of its study and development.