UML models and OWL ontologies constitute modeling approaches with different strength and weaknesses that make them appropriate for use of specifying different aspects of software systems. In particular, OWL ontologies are well suited to specify classes using an expressive logical language with highly flexible, dynamic and polymorphic class membership, while UML diagrams are much more suitable for specifying not only static models including classes and associations, but also dynamic behavior. Though MOF based metamodels and UML profiles for OWL have been proposed in the past, an integrated use of both modeling approaches in a coherent framework has been lacking so far. We present such a framework, TwoUse, for developing integrated models, comprising the benefits of UML models and OWL ontologies

The Semantic Web is based on accessing and reusing RDF data from many different sources, which one may assign different levels of authority and credibility. Existing Semantic Web query languages, like SPARQL, have targeted the retrieval, combination and reuse of facts, but have so far ignored all aspects of meta knowledge, such as origins, authorship, recency or certainty of data, to name but a few. In this paper, we present an original, generic, formalized and implemented approach for managing many dimensions of meta knowledge, like source, authorship, certainty and others. The approach re-uses existing RDF modeling possibilities in order to represent meta knowledge. Then, it extends SPARQL query processing in such a way that given a SPARQL query for data, one may request meta knowledge without modifying the query proper. Thus, our approach achieves highly flexible and automatically coordinated querying for data and meta knowledge, while completely separating the two areas of concern.

Semantic desktop environments aim at improving the effectiveness and efficiency of users carrying out daily tasks within their personal information management infrastructure (PIM). They support the user by transferring and exploiting the explicit semantics of data items across different PIM applications. Whether such an approach does indeed reach its aim of facilitating users" life and—if so—to which extent, however, remains an open question that we address in this paper with the first summative evaluation of a semantic desktop approach. We approach the research question exploiting our own semantic desktop infrastructure, X-COSIM. As data corpus, we have used over 100 emails and 50 documents extracted from the organizers of a conference-like event at our university. The evaluation has been carried out with 18 subjects. We have developed a test environment to evaluate COSIMail and COSIFile, two semantic PIM applications based on X-COSIM. As result, we have found a significant improvement for typical PIM tasks compared to a standard desktop environment.

The processing of data is often restricted by contractual and legal requirements for protecting privacy and IPRs. Policies provide means to control how and by whom data is processed. Conditions of policies may depend on the previous processing of the data. However, existing policy languages do not provide means to express such conditions. In this work we present a formal model and language allowing for specifying conditions based on the history of data processing. We base the model and language on XACML.