SEMANTIC ANNOTATION AND REVISION CONTROL
Kiavash Bahreini and Atilla Elci
Department of Computer Engineering, and Internet Technologies Research Centre
Eastern Mediterranean University,T.R.N.C., Famagusta, via Mersin 10, Turkey
Keywords: Annotation, Metadata, OWL, Revision Control.
Abstract: Software engineers and programmers will probably find themselves needing to manage multiple versions of
their software. This entails, among others, managing source codes, inserting metadata tags for annotation,
tracing source changes from current to previous versions, checking respective change logs, retrieving
different versions of the source code, etc. The issues are more pronounced for software teams and especially
those working in distributed development environments. Similar issues are observed in the case of dealing
with OWL files and other enterprise systems documentation resources. It is noted that, although currently
not being practiced, ontology-based annotation techniques in revision control can be influential in
surmounting many of the problems associated with such issues. These issues and related new approaches on
revision control are considered in this paper. We introduce a novel revision control approach based on
semantic ontology annotation in distributed environments.
1 INTRODUCTION
This paper concerns source code control, making
separate ontologies in distributed environments
using OWL (OWL 2004), applying annotation
techniques into semantic ontology making, and
security model for data and documents sharing based
on multilevel security in enterprise systems.
First issue is source code control (SCC) which
is only one step in software configuration
management (CCC 1984). SCC is especially very
important for any software development team
working in distributed environment (Sink 2004).
Distributed revision control is the other hot topic
which software development team deal with the
problem of controlling shared documents in
enterprise systems. Distributed revision control takes
a peer-to-peer approach, as opposed to the client-
server approach of centralized systems. Rather than
a single, central repository on which clients
synchronize, each peer's working copy of the code
base is a bona-fide repository (Wheeler 2004).
An open system of distributed revision control
is characterized by its support for independent
branches, and its heavy reliance on merge
operations.
Next important issue, managing separate
ontologies in distributed environments using OWL,
involves the related information resources placed in
distributed systems on the Web. So, for providing
seamless services at any distance, efficient
management of the distributed information resources
is required (Kim et al 2007).
It is useful to keep some general questions in
mind while reading this paper. How can we manage
shared documents or resources among individual or
distributed ontologies? How can we process text
based documents? How can we investigate essential
lines which have been changed in text? How can we
check the version of source code via ontologies?
How can we annotate ontologies using version
control? How can we merge contents of ontologies?
How can we run queries over ontologies to retrieve
some new changes inside source codes? Would it be
better to put all of the content of changed-source
code inside ontologies or is it better to have just the
lines which are changed as compared with old
version.
In the Semantic Web, the dispensability will be
increased. Among languages for describing metadata
and ontology, only OWL can support the
dispensability of Web; (Kim et al. 2007) so in this
research, we considered using OWL as a semantic
language in our distributed ontologies to annotate
documents.
Next issue which has been considered for
years is talking about metadata based ontology and
294
Bahreini K. and Elci A. (2008).
SEMANTIC ANNOTATION AND REVISION CONTROL.
In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies, pages 294-297
DOI: 10.5220/0001522102940297
Copyright
c
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one founded answer for this problem was
annotation. Annotation is defined as the extra
information asserted at a particular point in a
document or other piece of information (Annotation
2007). Offering a way to enable semantic
annotations that could be easily organized and found
is one of the advantages of semantic web (Pereira et
al 2006). For convenience, annotations are
represented as an extension of the ontology, but they
could be implemented by any other means, as they
are not a proper part of the domain knowledge
(Castells et al 2007). Annotation can be used to
overcoming two of the major challenges of the
semantic Web initiative which are availability of
semantic Web content, and the challenge of
ontology based information retrieval (Abrahams
2005). In our approach, annotation is used as a high
level tier to work with OWL files on top of the
source code files to handle metadata over text
(source code), to hold versioning of codes, and to
retrieve change history of data.
In this paper, we consider features of revision
control for supporting in distributed environment on
the semantic web, repository, text processing. Then,
we classify features of OWL and ontology for
supporting distributed environment on the Web and
consider of metadata in distributed systems. Then,
we consider, semantic annotation, and finally
conclusion and future work.
2 REVISION CONTROL
Several different forms of version controlling have
been pursued to solve problems faster by doing slice
controlling in the source codes. The main goal of
those forms can be described by just relating
changes to the metadata files. The first major
division of kinds of version controlling is based on
revision control over any changed items versus
revision control over the whole content of the
documents. There is probably a better understanding
of the changeable analysis source code of
transformation of data inside the source codes than
there is of full of control transformations, which is
an old technique in the source code control issue.
2.1 Repository
Repository and working folder are two terms in
revision control, in which, repository is a place to
store the source code and a working folder is a place
which each individual developer works on it. All
version control systems have to solve the same
fundamental problem: how will the system allow
users to share information, but prevent them from
accidentally stepping on each other's feet? It's all too
easy for users to accidentally overwrite each other's
changes in the repository (Ben Collins et al 2007).
2.2 Distributed Revision Control
Distributed source controlling approaches to
discovery would require remote methods are
regularly synchronized. Because of distributed
revision control tasks involve comparing several
sources, analyzing and understanding relations
between their elements can be cognitively difficult.
In this case, we strongly suggest taking advantage of
using semantic metadata files.
In distributed revision control model on the
Internet, there exist many aspect like: repository
replication, repository backup, access controls,
supporting multiple repository access methods,
customizing subversion experience, branching and
merging, entries file, metadata files etc.
2.3 Text Processing
Text processing is an important task in revision
control. Our aim in this investigation did not involve
making of metadata using text processing algorithm
to retrieve source code changes. Thus, it can be
concluded that known text search processing would
suit this goal. This subject has been discussed in
great depth in others’ research.
3 ONTOLOGY AND METADATA
Metadata and ontology will play important roles for
advanced information retrieval systems. Metadata is
data about data describing the content, quality,
condition, and other characteristics of data. And
metadata can represent semantic relations between
information resources. Ontology defines vocabulary
and represents relations between terms for a specific
domain (Kim et al 2007).
OWL has rich expressive power and is
considered as the next standard language for
describing metadata and ontology. In the Semantic
Web, the dispensability will be increased. Among
languages for describing metadata and ontology,
only OWL can support the dispensability of Web
(Kim et al 2007).
All ontologies in our model are distributed in
the network. So, for providing seamless services
without concern for distance, integration of
distributed ontologies is required. If we want to get
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programmers codes, we should use integrating
techniques over ontologies on the network. Special
relations between classes or properties in the
ontologies should be expressed. Some features of
OWL are used to support the integration of
distributed ontologies are: disjointWith,
equivalentClass, and equivalentProperty. Many
writers (e.g. YounHee Kim, YongWook Kim)
modified the storage part of Sesame to support
distributed ontologies written in OWL. Their
structure consists of four tables on RDB. For further
info the reader is directed to Kim et al, 2007 paper.
4 DATA INTEGRATION
One of the greatest challenges facing the distributed
revision control today is the integration of data and
resources. Two approaches for integrating
applications are commonly used today: point-to-
point and services bus integration (Microsoft Journal
2006a). We simply can expand the above
approaches to realize our goal of data integration for
revision control over enterprise systems.
In the first approach, one direct link is created
to establish a connection between two nodes while
message passing is used in the second approach.
When a new node add to enterprise architecture,
managing a complete integration between nodes
exponentially increase in the cost of each node in
turn (Microsoft Journal 2006a).
5 SEMANTIC ANNOTATION
Semantic annotation is a specific metadata
generation and usage schema aiming to enable new
information access methods and to enhance existing
ones (SWT 2006). Annotation is extra information
asserted with a particular point in a document or
other piece of information (Annotation 2007).
In our approach, either we use annotation
over OWL files or source code we can apply some
metadata over codes already tagged or make new
tags for any other changes in source files. Some
highlighting text and posting sticky notes on our
metadata documents or web pages and share these
with other people would be very useful. We simply
can insert many tags inside our metadata files
between these two tags <owl:AnnotationProperty
rdf:ID=""> and </owl:AnnotationProperty> which
were declared to use in OWL files to annotate data.
Some criteria should apply in OWL files to use
annotation in our model in source codes. First of all,
author(s) information e.g. name and surname, then
many fields like date and time of implementation of
document, line number, changed line numbers, size
of the file before and after changes, owner of file,
number of history records exist in OWL files related
to this file etc. The sample code lines below are
prepared to show in which way we are able to apply
annotation tags in our model.
…
<owl:AnnotationProperty rdf:ID="Smith">
<rdf:type
rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#
DatatypeProperty"/>
<rdfs:domain
rdf:resource="#LowLevelProgrammer"/>
<rdfs:range>
<owl:DataRange>
<owl:oneOf rdf:parseType="Resource">
<rdf:first
rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSche
ma#string">Smith</rdf:first>
<rdf:rest
rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-
rdf-syntax-ns#nil"/>
</owl:oneOf>
</owl:DataRange>
</rdfs:range>
</owl:AnnotationProperty>
…
In a nutshell, semantic annotation is about assigning
to entities and relations in the text links to their
semantic descriptions in ontology. Most importantly,
automatic semantic annotation enables many new
applications: highlighting, semantic search,
categorisation, generation of more advanced
metadata, smooth traversal between unstructured
text and formal knowledge. Semantic annotation is
applicable to any kind of content-web pages, regular
(nonweb) documents, text fields in databases, video,
etc (SWT 2006). Since using OWL files in semantic
web environment are going to be standard and
approximately all applications like semantic web
programs, semantic web sites etc are going to use
them, so we prefer introducing OWL files as our
standard and use them as metadata and annotation.
6 CONCLUSIONS
Investigating the security impact of semantically-
enhanced OWL-based programs opens a new
research area in OWL database security. Ontologies
are used extensively in XML-based applications to
improve data exchange in decentralized
environments. We discussed that these new
technologies might lead to undesirable data
disclosure. Ontologies and OWL-based tools can
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facilitate inference attacks on large, publicly
available XML documents.
We proposed some theoretical and practical
ways on source code control based on semantic web,
annotation techniques, and use of OWL as metadata
file via secure connection in enterprise architecture.
This approach uses an ontology-aided inference
process to identify ontology equivalent information
with inconsistent security classification. We
represented some solutions to build a system which
is able to monitor users’ source code, capable of text
processing, annotate metadata in OWL files in
distributed environments.
As it is mentioned above, our approach helps
software architects, project managers, programmers,
developers, etc to obtain a secure distributed control
over source codes and annotate the whole content of
documents in the best manner.
7 FUTURE WORK
Designing and implementing a source code control
which can be called knowledge-based SCC
(KBSCC) based on semantic distributed ontologies
annotation using enhanced multilevel security in
enterprise systems is the first goal in the future.
Semantic web is going to define the next generation
of web, so grafting some ideas from current
applications such as web-based programs to the
semantic web is useful for future. Making a secure
system, and using multiagents or service-oriented
architecture are three important issues on the
distributed networks; hence, using multiagents
approach or SOA for implementing semantic web-
based programs via secure connections is our next
target to establish a high level and stable system.
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