Information visualisation workshop

Web access to real time and numeric data (Web-SCADA) (David: Leal, CAESAR Systems Limited)

The project will develop a flexible Internet based solution to the sharing and exchange of system monitoring and control data. The project will bring together two technologies:

• 
  XML for the definition of the semantics of the data (based upon the EPISTLE core model developed by the European process industry, and the MathML DTD);
  
• 
  the portable binary format HDF5 for tables of numeric values.
  

The project will support access to:

• 
  real time information about current system status; and
  
• 
  historic information over any time scale - minutes, hours, days.
  

The demonstrators will cover the following applications:

• 
  a flood warning system based upon measurements of rainfall and river flows;
  
• 
  the planning, control and metering of a distributed electrical generation system with many small hydro and wind generation producers
  
• 
  the operation of a generator-consumer 'balance-group' within an electric power market;
  
• 
  a condition based maintenance system, based upon on-line condition monitoring of components in electrical networks and production sites;
  
• 
  a system for domestic market access and energy control, allowing on-line household metering.
  

e-mail: [e-mail]
URL: http://www.cedarlon.demon.co.uk

Web and text mining through the Online Analyst (Alessandro Zanasi, IBM)

While the amount of data available to us through the Web and the Intranets is increasing, our capacity of reading and analyzing this information remains constant. Search engines instead of reducing the problem augment it making more and more documents quickly available to us. Web (and text) mining is a new research area that tries to solve the information overload problem by exploiting recent advances in different fields of technology: language and data mining technology. Documents and web pages are a source of knowledge in an unstructured data format that can be decodified, analyzed and turned into actionable intelligence thanks to online analysis by text mining.

In this paper an example of a real and operative application to competitive intelligence (CI) is given: the Online Analyst. The final objective of this application is to give to end-users an intelligent agent to read and quickly analyze huge volumes of documents retrieved online, especially from the web (almost 5000 press sources and more than 70 web sites). Its typical users are intelligence analysts, in military as in business or politics field.

The most exciting conclusion is that the shown approach, as also the prototype, here shown in a CI application case, may be already easily used in all e-commerce applications (currently under development worldwide), that take into account the necessity of working with web and /or text data: e-commerce market places, CRM, competitive intelligence.

e-mail: [e-mail] [e-mail]

URL: http://open.cineca.it/datamining

ANNEX1: Business opportunities on the Semantic Web - slide texts (Janne Saarela, ProSolutions, Nice)

Overview

Business potential on

• 
  Business-to-customer (B2C)
  
• 
  Business-to-business (B2B) interfaces
  

Requirements for

• 
  content providers
  
• 
  service providers
  
• 
  end-users
  

Action proposals for

• 
  EC
  
• 
  companies
  

Business opportunities in B2C

Users of electronic services look for

• 
  configurability while being
  
• 
  independent on the type of content
  

Variety of content objects poses challenges:

• 
  can we write software that understands ~400 different file formats?
  
• 
  of course not: some of the formats encode little semantics (e.g. audio, video)
  
• 
  aren’t formats supposed to be only for presentation purposes for human beings?
  
• 
  human-consumption
  

Machine-consumption can be accomplished by:

• 
  remaining independent of the file formats
  
• 
  introducing metadata
  
• 
  metadata needs common ontologies i.e. shared vocabularies
  
• 
  Side note: marketing departments are not doing a wonderful job for XML when they say that ’everybody can invent their own element names’
  

Customers are used to interactivity at the office but morning and evening are rather spent ’relaxing’

Examples:

• 
  deliver the financial news on home TV in the morning
  
• 
  deliver the calendar entries in to the car stereo system while driving to work
  
• 
  get shopping reminders from your home fridge
  
• 
  get news summaries on TV in the evening
  

Can I have all of the above without interactivity, please.
Business opportunities in B2B

Ecommerce in B2B has so far consisted of

• 
  textual and numeric content for which XML has been a perfect match!
  
• 
  e.g. online transactions
  

Multimedia is getting associated with standardized metadata

• 
  Web (W3C) provides us today with Resource Description Framework (RDF)
  
• 
  next year ISO will deliver MPEG-7
  

Media sector: content sales over the Internet

• 
  business customers order for specific type of content both in format (e.g. text, graphics, images, audio, video) and in content (e.g. domestic, forestry, financial)
  
• 
  Example: a forestry company is interested in receiving notifications in real-time about all new content related to forestry in EU area
  

Requirements for content providers

Understand the benefits of spending more time on generating metadata

• 
  e.g. in media sector the journalists need to understand the new way of working
  

Requirements for service providers

Creation of new services that no longer operate on content but on metadata

• 
  E.g. news summaries are enabled by (who, where, when, what) type of metadata on videos
  
• 
  E.g. demonstration versions of new PC games are automatically notified to interested customers
  

Requirements for end-users

End-user software is today a browser

• 
  whether an HTML browser or a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA)
  

Main observation: the browser only views data

• 
  could we integrate browser better with other applications?
  
• 
  could this integration benefit from metadata? (today the integration is typically done through MIME types e.g. application/pdf is managed by Acrobat Reader)
  

Take advantage of the available metadata with new tools
Action proposal for EC

• 
  If EC cannot be asked to produce common vocabularies i.e. ontologies for different business areas
  
• 
  Can we ask for vocabulary tools (creation/maintenance?) development support?
  

Action proposal for companies

In order to create common vocabularies

• 
  stay tuned to relevant interest groups (national/international)
  
• 
  participate in the interest groups
  
• 
  promote the shared vocabularies
  

Why?

• 
  in order to promote openness
  
• 
  in order to interoperate with other ’semantic systems’
  

Summary

Business potential on

• 
  Business-2-customer (B2C)
  
• 
  Business-2-business (B2B) interfaces
  

Requirements for

• 
  content providers
  
• 
  service providers
  
• 
  end-users
  

Action proposals for

• 
  EC
  
• 
  companies