According to a 2008 OECD review of national policies for education in South Africa, typically only 15 percent to 18 percent of secondary school students who sit for their final year exams every year qualify automatically for university-level education; and this number seems to be decreasing as more students choose to complete subjects on so-called standard grade instead of higher grade, a trend that is especially apparent for mathematics and science, the two fields with critical skills shortages in the country. The South African tertiary education sector is quite small for a country with a population of around 50 million, with 11 "traditional" universities, 6 technical universities, and 6 comprehensive universities. The latter university types focus on more technical or vocational education. The public sector also funds 16 research institutions. In spite of these obstacles, South African universities participate in world-class research activities in many fields and range among the best on the African continent.

This paper presents complexity analysis and variational methods for inference in probabilistic description logics featuring Boolean operators, quantification, qualified number restrictions, nominals, inverse roles and role hierarchies. Inference is shown to be PEXP-complete, and variational methods are designed so as to exploit logical inference whenever possible.

Without Linked Data, transport data is limited to applications exclusively around transport. In this paper, we present a workflow for publishing and linking transport data on the Web. So we will be able to develop transport applications and to add other features which will be created from other datasets. This will be possible because transport data will be linked to these datasets. We apply this workflow to two datasets: NEPTUNE, a French standard describing a transport line, and Passim, a directory containing relevant information on transport services, in every French city.

We are interested in bridging the world of natural language and the world of the semantic web in particular to support natural multilingual access to the web of data. In this paper we introduce a new type of lexical ontology called interlingual lexical ontology (ILexicOn), which uses semantic web formalisms to make each interlingual lexical unit class (ILUc) support the projection of its semantic decomposition on itself. After a short overview of existing lexical ontologies, we briefly introduce the semantic web formalisms we use. We then present the three layered architecture of our approach: i) the interlingual lexical meta-ontology (ILexiMOn); ii) the ILexicOn where ILUcs are formally defined; iii) the data layer. We illustrate our approach with a standalone ILexicOn, and introduce and explain a concise human-readable notation to represent ILexicOns. Finally, we show how semantic web formalisms enable the projection of a semantic decomposition on the decomposed ILUc.

The Information Artifact Ontology is an ontology in the domain of information entities. Core to the definition of what it is to be an information entity is the claim that an information entity must be `about' something, which is encoded in an axiom expressing that all information entities are about some entity. This axiom comes into conflict with ontological realism, since many information entities seem to be about non-existing entities, such as hypothetical molecules. We discuss this problem in the context of diagrams of molecules, a kind of information entity pervasively used throughout computational chemistry. We then propose a solution that recognizes that information entities such as diagrams are expressions of diagrammatic languages. In so doing, we not only address the problem of classifying diagrams that seem to be about non-existing entities but also allow a more sophisticated categorisation of information entities.

3D city models - which represent in 3 dimensions the geometric elements of a city - are increasingly used for an intended wide range of applications. Such uses are made possible by using semantically enriched 3D city models and by presenting such enriched 3D city models in a way that allows decision-making processes to be carried out from the best choices among sets of objectives, and across issues and scales. In order to help in such a decision-making process we have defined a framework to find the best visualization technique(s) for a set of potentially heterogeneous data that have to be visualized within the same 3D city model, in order to perform a given task in a specific context. We have chosen an ontology-based approach. This approach and the specification and use of the resulting ontology of 3D visualization techniques are described in this paper.

A useful step towards better interpretation and analysis of the usage patterns is to formalize the semantics of the resources that users are accessing in the Web. We focus on this problem and present an approach for the semantic formalization of usage logs, which lays the basis for eective techniques of querying expressive usage patterns. We also present a query answering approach, which is useful to nd in the logs expressive patterns of usage behavior via formulation of semantic and temporal-based constraints. We have processed over 30 thousand user browsing sessions extracted from usage logs of DBPedia and Semantic Web Dog Food. All these events are formalized semantically using respective domain ontologies and RDF representations of the Web resources being accessed. We show the eectiveness of our approach through experimental results, providing in this way an exploratory analysis of the way users browse theWeb of Data.

Novel research in the field of Linked Data focuses on the problem of entity summarization. This field addresses the problem of ranking features according to their importance for the task of identifying a particular entity. Next to a more human friendly presentation, these summarizations can play a central role for semantic search engines and semantic recommender systems. In current approaches, it has been tried to apply entity summarization based on patterns that are inherent to the regarded data. The proposed approach of this paper focuses on the movie domain. It utilizes usage data in order to support measuring the similarity between movie entities. Using this similarity it is possible to determine the k-nearest neighbors of an entity. This leads to the idea that features that entities share with their nearest neighbors can be considered as significant or important for these entities. Additionally, we introduce a downgrading factor (similar to TF-IDF) in order to overcome the high number of commonly occurring features. We exemplify the approach based on a movie-ratings dataset that has been linked to Freebase entities.

Informledge System (ILS) is a knowledge network with autonomous nodes and intelligent links that integrate and structure the pieces of knowledge. In this paper, we aim to put forward the link dynamics involved in intelligent processing of information in ILS. There has been advancement in knowledge management field which involve managing information in databases from a single domain. ILS works with information from multiple domains stored in distributed way in the autonomous nodes termed as Knowledge Network Node (KNN). Along with the concept under consideration, KNNs store the processed information linking concepts and processors leading to the appropriate processing of information.

To achieve scalability of query answering, the developers of Semantic Web applications are often forced to use incomplete OWL 2 reasoners, which fail to derive all answers for at least one query, ontology, and data set. The lack of completeness guarantees, however, may be unacceptable for applications in areas such as health care and defence, where missing answers can adversely affect the application's functionality. Furthermore, even if an application can tolerate some level of incompleteness, it is often advantageous to estimate how many and what kind of answers are being lost. In this paper, we present a novel logic-based framework that allows one to check whether a reasoner is complete for a given query Q and ontology T---that is, whether the reasoner is guaranteed to compute all answers to Q w.r.t. T and an arbitrary data set A. Since ontologies and typical queries are often fixed at application design time, our approach allows application developers to check whether a reasoner known to be incomplete in general is actually complete for the kinds of input relevant for the application. We also present a technique that, given a query Q, an ontology T, and reasoners R_1 and R_2 that satisfy certain assumptions, can be used to determine whether, for each data set A, reasoner R_1 computes more answers to Q w.r.t. T and A than reasoner R_2. This allows application developers to select the reasoner that provides the highest degree of completeness for Q and T that is compatible with the application's scalability requirements. Our results thus provide a theoretical and practical foundation for the design of future ontology-based information systems that maximise scalability while minimising or even eliminating incompleteness of query answers.