Semantic Annotation for Process Models: - Department of Computer ...

56 CHAPTER 3. STATE OF THE ART
3.4.8 ASTAR
A* is the ATHENA semantic annotation system, which is partially supported by the
ATHENA project [57]. A* is a Web application connected with ATHOS tool and
with THEMIS tool — two tools are used to model the resources in RDF repositories.
Ontology-based semantic annotation in this system is aimed at reconciling semantic heterogeneity
among business and technical resources. The following semantic mismatch
cases are identified in Table 3.4 [145].
A* allows four increasing levels of annotation, namely terminological, path, simple
and full level annotations.
• Terminological Annotation. By such annotation, terms are associated with a set
of terms from the ontology. Usually naming mismatch, content mismatch and
abstraction mismatch can be reconciled by terminology annotation.
• Path Annotation. The structure of the schema and the ontology are compared.
Complete paths, from the root element to the leaves, of the annotated schema
are associated with a set of paths of the ontology. Such annotation can solve the
semantic problems such as structural mismatch, subClass-Attribute mismatch,
schema instance mismatch and content mismatch.
• Simple annotation. At this level it is possible to specify the type of mismatch that
each annotation intends to cover. Such information will be re-used for Attribute
Granularity mismatch; Encoding mismatch; Precision mismatch, among others.
• Full Semantic Annotation. It is a complex annotation including OWL expressions.
3.4.9 Discussion on the survey results of annotation tools and methods
Most of annotation tools and methods in the survey are for unstructured Web textual
resources, such as MnM, KIM, AeroDAML and OntoMat-Annotizer, because there
have been many research activities and development in this area. For those unstructured
information, the annotation is to structure and supply semantic descriptions for
information. Information extraction is one of the techniques often applied for the automation
of the semantic annotation of the textual resources. We have also surveyed
the semantic annotation of structured information — WSDL information for the Web
services discovery and composition, such as MWSAF and SAWSDL. Since WSDL is
already structured, the annotation is to build the mapping between the structured information
and the ontological concepts and relations. Some NLP techniques can also
be employed to automate the mapping. Very few work has been completed on the
semantic annotation of semi-structured information. Having the both characters of the
unstructured and the structured, the semantic annotation of semi-structured information
should be able to formalize the structure of information and also build the links
between information and ontology. We has included the related work in the INTEROP
project, which presents some initial ideas and surface results about the semantic annotation
of enterprise models. Another related work — A* provides a tool to annotate
models in order to develop future model transformations. The limitation of A* is that