ourSpaces - A Semantic Virtual Research Environment

Abstract

In this demo we present ourSpaces, a semantic virtual research environment designed to support inter-disciplinary research teams. The system utilizes technologies such as OWL, RDF and a rule-based reasoner to support the management of provenance information, social networks, online communication and policy enforcement within the VRE. 1 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2010/vrelandscapestudy.aspx 2 This work is supported by the UK Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) under the Digital Social Research programme; award RES-149-25-1075. 3 http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/ 4 http://www.w3.org/RDF/

Keywords

• provenance
• virtual research environment
• eResearch

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Introduction In recent years, scienti c research has become increasingly interdisciplinary in nature and a range of information and communication technologies have been adopted by researchers to support collaboration, and to facilitate transfer of ideas, knowledge and resources. Web-based virtual research environments (VREs)1 have been proposed as one way to help researchers in all disciplines to manage the increasingly complex range of tasks involved in carrying out research. Semantic web technologies are seen as crucial in this context in order to provide a common framework to allow intelligent applications and services to make use of information about data resources and other (research) objects held in a VRE.

The ourSpaces virtual research environment (described in Edwards et al. [ 1 ]) has been developed by the PolicyGrid2 Digital Social Research project to provide a collaboration space for interdisciplinary academic research communities using state-of-the-art Semantic Web technologies. Groups using ourSpaces work in socio-environmental and health-related domains and there are currently around 183 registered users. A screenshot of the ourSpaces web interface is presented in Figure 1.

Provenance in ourSpaces is crucial in order to support transparency and accountability of the research process by documenting the derivation history of research artefacts. The system utilizes technologies such as OWL3, RDF4 and a SPIN-based5 reasoner to support the following system functionalities: representing and tracking the provenance of digital artefacts and processes; capturing the provenance associated with a user's social network; managing policies associated with use and re-use of data, security and privacy; controlling the behaviour of services within the application using policy-based reasoning; visualising provenance information using di erent modalities (natural language or graphical).

During the demonstration, we will illustrate how semantic web technologies have been deployed to support key research activities within the system such as uploading and annotating research artefacts; managing project information e.g. membership, sub-projects, data, noti cations; writing comments and blogs; and visualising information about research artefacts and their provenance. 5 http://spinrdf.org/

A Semantic Framework for Provenance At the heart of ourSpaces is an ontological framework (see Figure 2) describing di erent aspects of the provenance of the research process. In order to support basic provenance we use a Web Ontology Language (OWL) representation of the Open Provenance Model [ 2 ]. This ontology de nes entities such as Artefact, Agent and Process and causal relationships between them (e.g. wasGeneratedBy, used and wasControlledBy ). OPM is a generic solution and as a result, our framework supports additional domain-speci c provenance ontologies that are created by extending the concepts de ned in the OPM ontology with domainspeci c classes. Using these ontologies it is possible, for example, to describe a physical research activity (e.g. an interview) as an opm:Process, and how such an activity causes an opm:Artifact to be generated (e.g. interview notes).

For research groups utilising ourSpaces, it is important to situate research artefacts and processes alongside people and their associated organisational structures. The current OPM speci cation supports limited information about a person (agent) controlling a process. Friend-of-a-Friend6 (FOAF) is an established RDF vocabulary for describing people and their social networks and we have opted to utilise this within our framework; a foaf:Profile is thus a subclass of opm:Agent.

Provenance

hasCause hasEffect opm:Process

Event

Esvent

Communication

Action QueryAction StateChange Action CausalRelation hasCause hasEffect opm:Artifact hasCause hasEffect opm:Agent

Social Networking

sioc:about sioc:Post sioc:creatorOf foaf:Person foaf:knows Authority Prohibition Permission

Policy

ActivationCondition basedOnEvent

activePolicy PolicyActivation

ActionRequest hasActivation*

hasAuthority Policy

PolicyCondition hasCondition* basedOnCondition aboutResource

Obligation owl:Thing

In an environment like ourSpaces, online communication is often used to comment about research artefacts or to discuss research issues. Documenting such interactions within in the VRE is a crucial requirement for achieving a full and transparent provenance representation. The SIOC7 (Semantically-Interlinked On6 http://www.foaf-project.org/ 7 http://sioc-project.org/ line Communities) ontology is designed to describe aspects of online communication by providing a model to express user-generated content such as posting a message in a blog or posting a comment. We have also integrated this vocabulary within our provenance framework, e.g. a sioc:post generated by a foaf:user can be associated with an opm:Artifact, opm:Process or opm:Agent.

Within the system we have developed a service enabling users to visualise short textual descriptions of the provenance of resources. This service translates RDF statements into English sentences using a Natural Language Generation algorithm based on the approach described by Bouttaz et al. [ 3 ].

Within the environment, there is also a need to manage users and their behaviours so that they comply with certain policies. For example, a user may impose certain access constraints on digital artefacts that he/she owns, e.g. an artefact may only be accessible to people within that user's social network. We have extended our ontological framework to de ne such policies as a combination of conditions such as obligations, prohibitions or permissions [ 4 ]. We make use of the SPIN ontology 8 to support the use of the SPARQL query language to specify rules and logical constraints necessary to reason about policies. Policies in ourSpaces are activated based on events taking place in the environment, e.g. download/upload artefact, add/remove metadata, etc. When an activity is detected, an event manager initiates a policy reasoning task. Using this approach in ourSpaces we were able to implement a number of policies for use by the project teams using the system.

References

1. Edwards , P. , Pignotti , E. , Eckhardt , A. , Ponnamperuma , K. , Chris , Bouttaz, T.: ourspaces - design and deployment of a semantic virtual research environment . In: International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2012 ) - Semantic Wen in Use Track, Springer-Verlag ( 2012 ) to appear.

2. Moreau , L. , Cli ord , B. , Freire , J. , Futrelle , J. , Gil , Y. , Groth , P. , Kwasnikowska , N. , Miles , S. , Missier , P. , Myers , J. , Plale , B. , Simmhan , Y. , Stephan , E., den Bussche, J.V.: The open provenance model core speci cation (v1.1) . Future Generation Computer Systems (July 2010 )

3. Bouttaz , T. , Pignotti , E. , Mellish , C. , Edwards , P.: A policy-based approach to context dependent natural language generation . In: Proceedings of the 13th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation , Nancy, France, Association for Computational Linguistics ( September 2011 ) 151 { 157

4. Pignotti , E. , Edwards , P. : Using web services and policies within a social platform to support collaborative research . In: Working Notes of AAAI 2012 Stanford Spring Symposium on Intelligent Web Services Meet Social Computing. (March 2012 )