WEB APPLICATION AND SERVICES –II

CONTENTS:
 Web Based Software,

 Semantic Web,

 Agent - Oriented Computing.

 E- Business,

 E-Commerce,

 E- Government,

 Ontology engineering,

 Portal Technologies.
WEB-BASED SOFTWARE
 Web-Based Software is software you use over
the internet with a web browser.
 You don’t have to install any CDs, download
any software, or worry about upgrades.
 If you use an online bank or web-based email
program like Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo Mail
then you’ve already used web-based software
before.
ADVANTAGE OF WEB BASED
SOFTWARE
 There’s nothing to install, ever.
With web based software there’s nothing to download or
install
 Your data is automatically backed up daily

Our backups are stored in multiple locations for

additional redundancy. You could say our backups
have backups.
 You’re always using the latest and greatest
Whenever you use our products you’re always using the
latest and greatest version
CONTD...
 You can work from home, work, or on the road: When you use
web-based software your office is everywhere. At work, at home, a
hotel, at a client’s office, even on your mobile phone. You data is
accessible anywhere with internet access.
 Saves money :Web based software can also save the upfront costs of
purchasing a server based software along with the required licensing,
support, and updates.
 You’ll never have to ask “Is it compatible?”
Software used to only be available for certain platforms. There was
Windows software, Mac software, etc. Our software works on any
platform with a web browser and internet connection. Mac,
Windows, Linux are all supported.
WHAT IS THE SEMANTIC WEB?

 The Semantic Web is a web that is able to describe things in a way that
computers can understand.
 The Beatles was a popular band from Liverpool.
 John Lennon was a member of the Beatles.
 "Hey Jude" was recorded by the Beatles.
 Sentences like the ones above can be understood by people. But how can
they be understood by computers?
 Statements are built with syntax rules. The syntax of a language defines the
rules for building the language statements. But how can syntax become
semantic?
 This is what the Semantic Web is all about. Describing things in a way that
computers applications can understand it.
 The Semantic Web is not about links between web pages.
 The Semantic Web describes the relationships between things (like A is a
part of B and Y is a member of  Z) and the properties of things (like size,
weight, age, and price)
SEMANTIC WEB
 The Semantic Web is an evolving development
of the World Wide Web in which the meaning
(semantics) of information and services on the
web is defined, making it possible for the web to
understand and satisfy the requests of people and
machines to use the web content.
 It derives from World Wide Web Consortium
director Sir Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the Web
as a universal medium for data, information, and
knowledge exchange.
PURPOSE
 Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks
such as finding the Finnish word for "monkey",
reserving a library book, and searching for a low price
for a DVD. However, a computer cannot accomplish the
same tasks without human direction because web pages
are designed to be read by people, not machines. The
semantic web is a vision of information that is
understandable by computers, so that they can perform
more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing,
and combining information on the web.
 In particular, the semantic web is expected to
revolutionize scientific publishing, such as real-time
publishing and sharing of experimental data on the
Internet.
THE RESOURCE
DESCRIPTION FRAMEWORK

 The RDF (Resource Description Framework) is

a language for describing information and
resources on the web.
 Putting information into RDF files, makes it
possible for computer programs ("web spiders")
to search, discover, pick up, collect, analyze and
process information from the web.
 The Semantic Web uses RDF to describe web
resources.
HOW CAN IT BE USED?

 If information about music, cars, tickets, etc. were stored

in RDF files, intelligent web applications could collect
information from many different sources, combine
information, and present it to users in a meaningful way.
 Information like this:
 Car prices from different resellers
 Information about medicines
 Plane schedules
 Spare parts for the industry
 Information about books (price, pages, editor, year)
 Dates of events
 Computer updates
CAN IT BE UNDERSTOOD?

 The Semantic Web is not a very fast growing

technology.
 One of the reasons for that is the learning curve.
RDF was developed by people with academic
background in logic and artificial intelligence.
For traditional developers it is not very easy to
understand.
 One fast growing language for building semantic
web applications is RSS.
SIMPLE SEMANTIC WEB
APPLICATION.

Buying and selling used cars

 Suppose a semantic web system was built to
administer the selling and buying of used cars
over the Internet.
 The system would contain two main
applications:
 One for people who wanted to buy a car
 One for people who wanted to put up a car for sale
 Let'scall the Internet applications for IBA (I Buy
Application), and ISA (I Sell Application).
IBA - THE I BUY APPLICATION

 People who want to buy a car could use an IBA

application much like this:
 In a "real live" application you would be asked to
identify yourself the first time you used it. Your ID
would be stored in an RDF file. Your ID would identify
you as a person with name, address, email, and ID
number.
 When you submitted the query, the application would
return a list of cars for sale, and the list could be drilled
down and sorted by year, price, location and availability.
This information would be returned from a web spider
continuously searching the web for RDF files.
ISA - THE I SELL APPLICATION

 People who want to sell a car could use an ISA

application much like this:
 When you submitted the form, the application
would ask you for more information and store
your ID and the information in an RDF file made
available to the web.
 The RDF file would contain information like:

Your ID: Name, address, email, ID number.

Your selling item: type, model, picture, price,
description.
BEHIND THE SCENES

 Behind the scenes, the "ISA" application creates an RDF

file with a lot of RDF pointers.
 It creates an RDF pointer to a file with information about
you, an RDF pointer to information about Volvo and
Volvo models, an RDF pointer to Volvo dealers and
resellers, about parts, about prices, and much more.
 An RDF pointer is a pointer (actually an URL) to
information about things (like a knowledge database).
 The beauty about this is that you don't have to describe
yourself, or the car model. The RDF application will sort
it out for you.
CHALLENGES
 Vastness: The World Wide Web contains at least 48 billion pages as of this writing
(August 2, 2009). Any automated reasoning system will have to deal with truly huge
inputs.
 Vagueness: These are imprecise concepts like "young" or "tall". This arises from the
vagueness of user queries, of concepts represented by content providers, of
matching query terms to provider terms and of trying to combine different
knowledge bases with overlapping but subtly different concepts. Fuzzy logic is the
most common technique for dealing with vagueness.
 Uncertainty: These are precise concepts with uncertain values. For example, a
patient might present a set of symptoms which correspond to a number of different
distinct diagnoses each with a different probability. Probabilistic reasoning
techniques are generally employed to address uncertainty.
 Inconsistency: These are logical contradictions which will inevitably arise during
the development of large ontologies, and when ontologies from separate sources are
combined. Deductive reasoning fails catastrophically when faced with
inconsistency, because "anything follows from a contradiction". Defeasible
reasoning and paraconsistent reasoning are two techniques which can be employed
to deal with inconsistency.
 Deceit: This is when the producer of the information is intentionally misleading the
consumer of the information. Cryptography techniques are currently utilized to
ameliorate this threat.
PROJECTS
 DBpedia - DBpedia is an effort to publish structured data extracted from Wikipedia: the data
is published in RDF and made available on the Web for use under the GNU Free
Documentation License, thus allowing Semantic Web agents to provide inferencing and
advanced querying over the Wikipedia-derived dataset and facilitating interlinking, re-use and
extension in other data-sources.

 FOAF - A popular application of the semantic web is Friend of a Friend (or FoaF), which
uses RDF to describe the relationships people have to other people and the "things" around
them. FOAF permits intelligent agents to make sense of the thousands of connections people
have with each other, their jobs and the items important to their lives; connections that may or
may not be enumerated in searches using traditional web search engines. Because the
connections are so vast in number, human interpretation of the information may not be the
best way of analyzing them. FOAF is an example of how the Semantic Web attempts to make
use of the relationships within a social context.

 GoodRelations for e-commerce - A huge potential for Semantic Web technologies lies in
adding data structure and typed links to the vast amount of offer data, product model features,
and tendering / request for quotation data. The GoodRelations ontology is a popular
vocabulary for expressing product information, prices, payment options, etc. It also allows
expressing demand in a straightforward fashion. GoodRelations has been adopted by
BestBuy, Yahoo, OpenLink Software, the Book Mashup, and many others.
PROJECTS
 SIOC - The Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities provides a
vocabulary of terms and relationships that model web data spaces.
Examples of such data spaces include, among others: discussion forums,
weblogs, blogrolls / feed subscriptions, mailing lists, shared bookmarks,
image galleries.
 Open GUID - Aimed at providing context for the Semantic Web, Open
GUID maintains a global Identifier repository for use in the linked web.
Domain-specific Ontologies and content publishers establish identity
relationships with Open GUIDs.
 SIMILE - Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in
unLike Environments. SIMILE is a joint project, conducted by the MIT
Libraries and MIT CSAIL, which seeks to enhance interoperability among
digital assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, meta data, and services.
 NextBio - A database consolidating high-throughput life sciences
experimental data tagged and connected via biomedical ontologies. Nextbio
is accessible via a search engine interface. Researchers can contribute their
findings for incorporation to the database. The database currently supports
gene or protein expression data and is steadily expanding to support other
biological data types.
SEMANTIC WEB AGENTS

 The semantic web will not be searchable in free text. To

search (or access) the semantic web, we will need some
software to help us.
 To use the semantic web, we will need "Semantic Web
Agents" or "Semantic Web Services". These "Agents" or
"Services" will help us to find what we are looking for
on the semantic web.
 On the semantic web, we might want to look for information
about:
 The cheapest airline tickets
 Styling that would fit my car
 Books, DVDs, and CDs
 Weather forecasts
 Time schedules and calendar events
 Stock prices and exchange rates
ONTOLOGY ENGINEERING
 Ontology engineering in computer science and
information science is a new field, which studies the
methods and methodologies for building ontologies:
formal representations of a set of concepts within a
domain and the relationships between those concepts.
ONTOLOGY

 An ontology is a taxonomy of concepts and their definitions supported by a

logical theory, such as first-order predicate calculus.
 Ontologies have been defined as an explicit specification of a
conceptualization.
 An ontology expresses, for a particular domain, the set of terms, entities,
objects, classes and the relationships between them, and provides formal
definitions and axioms that constrain the interpretation of these terms.
 An ontology permits a rich variety of structural and nonstructural
relationships, such as generalization, inheritance, aggregation, and
instantiation and can supply a precise domain model for software
applications.
 For instance, an ontology can provide the object schema of object-oriented
systems and class definitions for conventional software.
 Ontologies provide a common vocabulary of an area and define, with
different levels of formality, the meaning of the terms and the relationships
between them.
USES

 Ontologies are now widely used in

 knowledge engineering,
 artificial intelligence and
 computer science;
 in applications related to areas such as knowledge management,
 natural language processing,
 e-commerce,
 intelligent information integration,
 bio-informatics, education; and
 in new emerging fields like the semantic web.
ENTERPRISE ONTOLOGY

 The main purpose of an enterprise ontology according to Leppänen

(2007) is to "promote the common understanding between people
across enterprises as well as to serve as a communication medium
between people and application and between different applications".
 Enterprise-modeling ontologies according to Fox and Gruninger
(1998) are
 Distinguished by their scope and the central role of integrating multiple
ontologies.
 The ontologies must be able to represent concepts in the domains of
activity, time, resource, product, service, organization, goal, and policy.
 Further, these ontologies must be integrated to support reasoning that
requires the use of multiple ontologies and support interoperability
among tools using different ontologies.
 For example, the notion of manufacturability requires reasoning about
the product properties, preconditions, and effects of activities and the
capabilities of resources.
SEMANTIC PLURALITY

 Throughout the manufacturing life cycle, software applications, such as process

planning, process modeling, scheduling, workflow and simulation, use process
information to describe the activities involved in production, resource requirements,
ordering relations and temporal constraints. These applications do not usually inter-
operate, although the output data and processes of one application may constitute the
input of another. For each software application and vendor, a translator must therefore
be written to allow for data and process sharing.
 Because the process definitions are not explicit, one encounters incompatibilities due
to problems of synonymy and inconsistencies due to semantic plurality. Synonymy
occurs when two objects or classes representing the same function are called with a
different name or string. It is not obvious in machine communication that automobile
(application A) = vehicle (application B).
 Semantic plurality occurs when the same names cover two different meanings in two
applications. For instance, resource (application A) = consumable-resource, whereas
resource (application B) = machine-tool.
 Point-to-point translators have traditionally been designed for problems of this kind.
But when many applications need to inter-operate, the number of translators to be
written increases exponentially, and so does the cost of implementing interoperability.
AGENT ORIENTED COMPUTING
 Agent-orientation has been regarded as a
promising approach to meet challenges for
developing more and more complicated software
to operate in open and dynamic environments.
 The recent years have seen a rapid growth of
research in agent oriented methodologies. A
number of different approaches have been
proposed and advanced in the literature.
WHAT IS AN AGENT?

 An agent is any entity whose state is viewed as

consisting of mental components (e.g., beliefs,
capabilities, choices, and commitments).
 So agenthood is in the mind of the programmer.
 While anything can be viewed as having mental states,
it’s not always advantageous to do so.
AOP VERSUS OOP
Basic Unit Object Agent
 Use mental constructs to design the
computational system. Mental categories appear
in the programming language. Programming
language semantics relates to the semantics of
mental constructs. The agent-oriented Parameters unconstrained beliefs,
programming (AOP) framework specializes the defining commitments,
object-oriented programming (OOP) paradigm in state of basic choices
the sense of Hewitt’s Actors: view a unit
computational system as composed of
communicating modules, each with its own way Process of message message
of handling messages. AOP fixes the (mental) computation passing and passing and
state of the modules (agents) to consist of response response
components such as beliefs, capabilities, and methods methods
decisions.
 A computation consists of these agents Types of unconstrained inform, request,
informing, requesting, offering,accepting, messages offer,
rejecting, competing, and assisting one another. promise, decline
According to speech act theory, each type of
communication act involves different
presuppositions and has different effects. Constraints on none honesty,
methods consistency
TWO SCENARIOS

 The first scenario is complex -- the type of

application envisioned.
 The second is a toy example serving three
purposes:
 · It crisply illustrates several AOP ideas.
 · It’s implementable in the simple AGENT-0
language defined
 later.
 · It illustrates the fact that agents needn’t be
robotic agents.
MANUFACTURING
AUTOMATION
Agents:
 Alfred handles regular-order cars.
 Brenda handles special-order cars.
 Calvin is a welding robot.
 Dashiel is a coordinating program controlling the plant.

 8:00: Alfred requests that Calvin promise to weld ten bodies for him that day. Calvin agrees to do so.
 8:30: Alfred requests that Calvin accept the first body, Calvin agrees, and the first body arrives. Calvin
starts welding it and promises Alfred to notify him when it is ready for the next body.
 8:45: Brenda requests that Calvin work on a special-order car which is needed urgently. Calvin
responds that it cannot right then. but that it will when it finishes the current job, at approximately 9:00.
 9:05: Calvin completes welding Alfred's first car, ships it out, and offers to weld Brenda's car. Brenda
ships it the car, and Calvin starts welding.
 9:15: Alfred enquires why Calvin is not yet ready for his (Alfred's) next car. Calvin explains why, and
also that it (Calvin) expects to be ready by about 10:00.
 9:55: Calvin completes welding Brenda's car, and ships if out. Brenda requests that it reaccept it and do
some painting, but Calvin refuses, explaining that it does not-know how to paint. Calvin then offers to
weld another car for Alfred, and proceeds to weld Alfred's cars for a while.
 12:15: Brenda requests that Calvin commit to welding four more special-order cars that day. Calvin
replies that it cannot, since that conflicts with its commitment to Alfred, who still has six unwelded cars.
Brenda requests Alfred to release Calvin from its commitment to Alfred. Alfred refuses.Brenda requests
that Dashiel (remember Dashiel?) order Calvin.to accept her important request and revoke its
commitment to Alfred. Dashiel orders Calvin to weld two of Brenda's cars, and then as many of Alfred's
as time allows.
OVERVIEW OF THE AOP
FRAMEWORK

 A complete AOP system includes three primary

components:
 a restricted formal language (including several modalities such
as belief and commitment) with clear syntax and semantics for
describing mental states;
 an interpreted programming language in which to define and
program agents, with primitive commands (e.g., REQUEST,
INFORM);
 an “agentifier”, converting neutral devices into programmable
agents.
 Component 2 relies on component 1.
 Component 3 remains rather mysterious.
ELECTRONIC COMMERCE
 Electronic Commerce, commonly known as (electronic marketing)
e-commerce or eCommerce, consists of the buying and selling of
products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and
other computer networks.
 The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown
extraordinarily with widespread Internet usage.
 Electronic commerce is generally considered to be the sales
aspect of e-business. It also consists of the exchange of data to
facilitate the financing and payment aspects of the business
transactions.
WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENT
TYPES OF E-COMMERCE?
 The major different types of e-commerce are:
 business-to-business (B2B)

 business-to-consumer (B2C)

 business-to-government (B2G)

 consumer-to-consumer (C2C)

 mobile commerce (m-commerce).

WHAT IS B2B E-COMMERCE?
 B2B e-commerce is simply defined as e-commerce between
companies.
 About 80% of e-commerce is of this type, and most experts
predict that B2B e-commerce will continue to grow faster than
the B2C segment.
 The B2B market has two primary components:
 e-frastructure and e-markets.
 Efrastructure is the architecture of B2B, primarily consisting of
the following:
 logistics - transportation, warehousing and distribution (e.g.,
Procter and Gamble);
 application service providers - deployment, hosting and
management of packaged software from a central facility (e.g.,
Oracle and Linkshare);
WHAT IS B2C E-COMMERCE?
 Business-to-consumer e-commerce, or commerce between companies and
consumers, involves customers gathering information; purchasing physical
goods (i.e., tangibles such as books or consumer products) or information
goods (or goods of electronic material or digitized content, such as
software, or e-books); and, for information goods, receiving products over
an electronic network.
 It is the second largest and the earliest form of e-commerce.
 Its origins can be traced to online retailing (or e-tailing).
 Thus, the more common B2C business models are the online retailing
companies such as Amazon.com, Drugstore.com, Other B2C examples
involving information goods are E-Trade and Travelocity.
 The more common applications of this type of e-commerce are in the areas
of purchasing products and information, and personal finance management,
which pertains to the management of personal investments and finances
with the use of online banking tools
WHAT IS B2G E-COMMERCE?
 Business-to-government e-commerce or B2G is generally defined as
commerce between companies and the public sector. It refers to the use of
the Internet for public procurement, licensing procedures, and other
government-related operations. This kind of e-commerce has two features:
first, the public sector assumes a pilot/leading role in establishing e-
commerce; and second, it is assumed that the public sector has the greatest
need for making its procurement system more effective.15
 Web-based purchasing policies increase the transparency of the
procurement process (and reduces the risk of irregularities). To date,
however, the size of the B2G e-commerce market as a component of total e-
commerce is insignificant, as government e-procurement systems remain
undeveloped
WHAT IS C2C E-COMMERCE?
 Consumer-to-consumer e-commerce or C2C is simply commerce between
private individuals or consumers.
 This type of e-commerce is characterized by the growth of electronic
marketplaces and online auctions, particularly in vertical industries where
firms/businesses can bid for what they want from among multiple suppliers.
It perhaps has the greatest potential for developing new markets.
 This type of e-commerce comes in at least three forms:
 auctions facilitated at a portal, such as eBay, which allows online real-time
bidding on items being sold in the Web;
 peer-to-peer systems, such as the Napster model (a protocol for sharing
files between users used by chat forums similar to IRC) and other file
exchange and later money exchange models; and
 classified ads at portal sites such as Excite Classifieds and eWanted (an
interactive, online marketplace where buyers and sellers can negotiate and
which features “Buyer Leads & Want Ads”).
CONTD...
 Consumer-to-business (C2B) transactions involve
reverse auctions, which empower the consumer to
drive transactions. A concrete example of this when
competing airlines gives a traveler best travel and
ticket offers in response to the traveler’s post that she
wants to fly from New York to San Francisco.
 There is little information on the relative size of
global C2C e-commerce. However, C2C figures of
popular C2C sites such as eBay and Napster indicate
that this market is quite large. These sites produce
millions of dollars in sales every day.
E-COMMERCE ADVANTAGES
 Being able to conduct business 24 x 7 x 365 .

 Access the global marketplace

 Speed

 Marketspace

 Opportunity to reduce costs

 Allowing customer self service and 'customer outsourcing'

E-COMMERCE DISADVANTAGES
 Time for delivery of physical products

 Physical product, supplier & delivery uncertainty

 Perishable goods

 Limited and selected sensory information.

 Returning goods.

 Privacy, security, payment, identity, contract

 Personal service
WHAT IS A PORTAL?
A portal is a gate, a door, or entrance. In the context of the
World Wide Web, it is the next logical step in the evolution
toward a digital culture.
 Portals have become one of the most visible information
technology (IT) issues in higher education, as well as the
commercial sector.
 IBM defined Portal as “a single integrated, ubiquitous,and
useful [point of] access to information (data), applications
and people” (IBM, 2000)
 A portal may look like a Web site, but it is much more than that.