Flavio De Paoli

Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca | UNIMIB · Department of Informatics, Systems and Communication (DISCo)

Enriching geospatial data, particularly through address geocoding, is fundamental to many geospatial analytical solutions, facilitating resource allocation, accessibility assessment, and urban development planning. This paper explores the address geocoding approaches from traditional GIS-based methods to advanced data-driven solutions, emphasising...

Designing interactive prototypes involves multiple tools and skills. In addition, several design cycles are required to iterate through idea generation, evaluation of design alternatives, and development. Consequently, prototyping tools should offer flexibility and adaptability to allow designers to quickly test and evaluate different ideas, design...

When information available in unstructured or semi struc-tured formats, e.g., tables or texts, comes in, finding links between strings appearing in these sources and the entities they refer to in some background Knowledge Graphs (KGs) is a key step to integrate, enrich and extend the data and/or KGs. This Entity Linking task is usually decomposed i...

The large availability of datasets fosters the use of \acrshort{ml} and \acrshort{ai} technologies to gather insights, study trends, and predict unseen behaviours out of the world of data. Today, gathering and integrating data from different sources is mainly a manual activity that requires the knowledge of expert users at an high cost in terms of...

Data enrichment is a critical task in the data preparation process in which a dataset is extended with additional information from various sources to perform analyses or add meaningful context. Facilitating the enrichment process design for data workers and supporting its execution on large datasets are only supported to a limited extent by existin...

Recent developments in data analysis and machine learning support novel data-driven operations. Event data provide social and environmental context, thus, such data may become essential for the workflow of data analytic pipelines. In this paper, we introduce our Business Event Exchange Ontology (BEEO), based on Schema.org that enables data integrat...

EW-Shopp is an innovation project, the aim of which is to build a platform for support of data linking, integration, and analytics in companies from the e-commerce, retail, and marketing industries. The project consortium joins several business partners from different sectors of e-commerce including marketing, price comparison, and both web and bri...

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in extracting and annotating tables on the Web. This activity allows the transformation of text data into machine-readable formats to enable the execution of various artificial intelligence tasks, e.g. semantic search and dataset extension. Semantic Table Interpretation is the process of annota...

Digital marketing is a domain where data analytics are a key factor to gaining competitive advantage and return of investment for companies running and monetizing digital marketing campaigns on, e.g., search engines and social media. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end approach to enrich marketing campaigns performance data with third-party eve...

This paper describes MantisTable, an open source Semantic Table Interpretation tool, which automatically annotates tables using a Knowledge Graph. MantisTable provides a graphical interface allowing users to analyse the results of the semantic table interpretation process and validate the final annotations. The tool also provides a guided mode for...

Digital marketing is a domain where data analytics are a key factor to gaining competitive advantage and return of investment for companies running and monetizing digital marketing campaigns on, e.g., search engines and social media. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end approach to enrich marketing campaigns performance data with third-party eve...

This paper presents a subsystem of a comprehensive platform dedicated to data transformation, linking and extension of large data sets. Furthermore, we detail and discuss both the main requirements that have led to the design and development of the platform, and the devised approach, which is a direct outcome of the requirement elicitation and disc...

Services composition has been much investigated over the last decade without reaching shared and consolidated results mainly for the lack of interoperable descriptions of services and the consequent need of extensive user intervention. In this paper, we propose a light and prac- tical approach to create machine-readable descriptions of output data...

As Linked Data available on the Web continue to grow, understanding their structure and content remains a challenging task making such the bottleneck for their reuse. ABSTAT is an online profiling tool which helps data consumers in better understanding the data by extracting ontology-driven patterns and statistics about the data. This demo paper pr...

Cloud computing and Internet of Things are imposing a dramatic change in software development and delivery. Moreover, ICT solutions are paving innovation in every sector and therefore becoming a business factor for the success of any enterprise. The implications are manifold since technical issues need to be harmonised with social, organisational a...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th IFIP WG 2.14 European Conference on Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing, ESOCC 2018, held in Como, Italy, in September 2018. The 10 full and 5 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 32 submissions. The volume also contains one invited talk in full pa...

The ability to provide appropriate and complete API descriptions to let users discover services that satisfy a set of requirements and compose them to fulfil more complex users’ needs is critical for the success of any modern ICT solution. Composition suffers from the lack of semantic matching between properties included in published API descriptio...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th IFIP WG 2.14 European Conference on Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing, ESOCC 2017, held in Oslo, Norway, in September 2017. The 6 short and 10 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 37 submissions. The volume also contains one invited talk in full...

We present Touch&Screen, a wide set of interaction techniques for the remote control of widgets (menu, lists, videos, maps etc.) for large screens through smartphones. After presenting the design of these widgets and the related control interfaces of the smartphone, we evaluated the interaction through two user studies. The first study (48 users) a...

The Human Genome Project has deeply transformed biology and the field has since then expanded to the management, processing, analysis and visualization of large quantities of data from genomics, proteomics, medicinal chemistry and drug screening. This huge amount of data and the heterogeneity of software tools that are used implies the adoption on...

In recent years several description tools and formats have been introduced for describing REST Web APIs both in human and machine readable formats. Although these descriptions provide functional information about the APIs (e.g. HTTP methods, URIs, model schema, etc.), the information that qualifies the properties of APIs (e.g. classification of inp...

In recent years several description tools and formats have been introduced for describing REST Web APIs both in human and machine readable formats. Although these descriptions provide functional information about the APIs (e.g. HTTP methods, URIs, model schema, etc.), the information that qualifies the properties of APIs (e.g. classification of inp...

In this paper we discuss some principles to design face-to-face social applications according to the Collective Interaction approach. To foster social involvement an application should encourage participants to take the initiative by supporting social awareness to let them make informed decisions and prevent conflicts. Moreover, applications should...

Web services promise universal interoperability through integration of services developed by independent providers. The coming of the Cloud Computing paradigm extends the need to share resources (e.g., platform, infrastructure, data) that are accessible as Web services. This means that a key factor to build complex and valuable business processes a...

YouTube4Two is an application that exploits the YouTube media library (through its API) to demonstrate a new style of social interaction. Two co-present people can share a video and act autonomously to navigate the related-video and comment lists, and search for videos. The novelty is that they can use their own smartphones connected via Internet t...

The increasing number of services available on the Web requires sophisticated mechanisms for the matchmaking, selection and composition of services based on business criteria. Such mechanisms require descriptions that address business terms, but existing approaches for the modeling of service properties are inadequate for expressing business condit...

REST principles define services as resources that can be manipulated by a set of well-known methods. The same approach is suitable to define service descriptions as resources. In this paper, we try to unify the two concepts (services and their descriptions) by proposing a set of best practices to build self-descriptive RESTful services accessible b...

In the rapidly ageing world, evolving information and communication technologies are both welcomed as useful tools and also criticized as an important reason for social exclusion. This is because of the difficulty to retrieve required information and services from the volume of information and plethora of services available on the Web. So it is nee...

The presence of heterogeneous communication protocols and interfaces prevents from giving self-managing capabilities to service systems. This paper proposes the exploitation of the widely adopted HTTP protocol to create a shared platform that fosters the definition of services that can be easily integrated and controlled. Such services will be prov...

PoliMaR-Web provides experts and ordinary Web users with a tool to discover suitable Web APIs among the ones published in repositories. Given a set of constraints, either soft or hard, semantic descriptions are extracted from repositories and heterogeneous sources available on the Web, and then matchmade to deliver a personalized ranked list of API...

Currently, rich and diverse data types have been increasingly provided using the data-as-a-service (DaaS) model, a form of cloud computing services and the core element of data marketplaces. This facilitates the on-the-fly data composition and utilisation for several dataintensive applications in e-science and business domains. However, data offere...

The composition of Web APIs provides a great opportunity to Web engineers that can reuse existing software components available on the Web. Finding the best API, fulfilling a set of user requirements, among the many described on the Web is a key step in order to develop an effective Web application; however, Web engineers have little support in sol...

In this chapter, we describe a solution to the Logistics Management Scenario based on the Web service discovery engine Glue2, which provides support for both functional and non functional discovery components. The solution addresses the two main aspects this scenario focuses on: (a) the radically different perspectives adopted by the final users to...

This paper describes the work done in the project MoseForAgrofood (Ms4A) whose goal is to take advantage of mobile technologies to develop augmented Web services for the agrofood domain. The use of personal devices, such as smart phones and tablets, brings in specific issues such as the need to consider quality of protection, quality of services, q...

The book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Software Composition, SC 2012, held in Prague, Czech Republic, in May/June 2012, co-located with TOOLS 2012 Federated Conferences. The 12 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 42 submissions for inclusion in the book. The papers reflect all...

Semantic Web service (SWS) technology promotes the definition of Web service descriptions with semantic annotations to better support Web service selection. Unfortunately, SWS descriptions tend to be huge and complex and their evaluation is characterized by limited scalability. The result is that very few descriptions exist in reality. Web service...

Nowadays businesses as well as the Web require information to be available in real-time in order to reply to requests, make effective decisions and generally remain competitive. This in turn requires data to be processed in realtime. In general in service-oriented architecture (SOA) one is less concerned with latency in data processing. Clearly, th...

Currently, rich and diverse data types have been increasingly provided using the Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) model, a form of cloud computing services. However, data offered by DaaS are constrained by several data concerns that, if not automatically being reasoned properly, will lead to a wrong way of using them. In this paper, we support the assumpti...

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) are a widespread solution for realizing distributed applications. Empowered by semantic technologies these architectures will evolve in what is known as Semantically Enabled Service Oriented Architectures (SESAs) providing automatic support for various service related tasks such as discovery, ranking, compositi...

The increasing availability of massive information on the Web causes the need for information aggregation by filtering and ranking according to user’s goals. In the last years both industrial and academic researchers have investigated the way in which quality of services can be described, matched, composed and monitored for service selection and co...

The addition of semantic information to Web Service de-scriptions enables for automatic discovery, selection and composition of Web services. In this context, WSMO and OWL-S have been the major initiatives aiming at providing Semantic Web Services with appropriate models, languages and tools that enable for an effective exploitation of semantic ann...

Human capital is more and more the key factor of economic growth and competitiveness in the information age and knowledge economy. But due to a still fragmented employment market compounded by the enlargement of the EU, the human resources are not effectively exchanged and deployed. The business innovation of SEEMP1 develops a vision of an Employme...

The NEUROWEB project supports cerebrovascular researchers' association studies, intended as the search for statistical correlations between a feature (e.g., a genotype) and a phenotype. In this project the phenotype refers to the patients' pathological state, and thus it is formulated on the basis of the clinical data collected during the diagnosti...

Web services are increasingly used as an effective means to create and streamline processes and collaborations among governments, businesses, and citizens. As the number of available web services is steadily increasing, there is a growing interest in providing methodologies that address the design of web services according to specific qualities of...

Recently, the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model has been increasingly supported, becoming a major part of the new emerging cloud computing paradigms. Although SaaS exists in different forms, supporting and providing SaaS developed based Web services has attracted a large effort from industries and academics because this form of SaaS allows softwar...

In this paper, we discuss the challenges posed by the NEUROWEB project, as a case study of ontological modeling at a knowledge interface between neurovascular medicine and genomics. The aim of the project is the development of a support system for association studies. We identify the notion of clinical phenotypes, that is, the pathological conditio...

Web service evaluation is a phase of the Web service selection in which discovered Web services are evaluated with respect to user request, which means that the non functional properties (NFPs) offered by Web services are compared with the non functional properties requested by users. The fact that users and providers can express their NFPs in very...

Service discovery is a key activity to actually identify the Web services (WSs) to be invoked and composed. Since it is likely that more than one service fulfill a set of user requirements, some ranking mechanisms based on non-functional properties (NFPs) are needed to support automatic or semi-automatic selection. This paper introduces an approac...

A service provider defines individual services with corresponding service licenses which consumers should follow. Often, service consumers are interested in selecting a service based on certain licensing clauses. For a set of requested licensing clauses by a consumer, there can be several licenses that differ in the set of offered license specifica...

The increasing availability of Web services asked for investigating ways to automate the discovery process. Discovery processes enhanced with semantics can be recognize to be general, but often they lack the flexibility needed in specific domains. In this paper, we propose the flexible architecture of the discovery engine Glue2, which comes with a...

In this paper we propose a meta-model for non- functional property descriptions targeted to support the se- lection of Web Services. The approach is based on the ex- plicit distinction between NFP offered by providers and re- quested by users, on the concept of policy that aggregates NFP descriptions into single entities with an applicability condi...

The distribution of services spanning across organiza- tional boundaries raises problems related to intellectual value that are less explored in current service oriented re- search. Being a way to manage the intellectual rights be- tween service consumers and service providers, licenses are critical to be considered in services. A service license d...

SEEMP is a European Project that promotes increased partnership between labour market actors and the development of closer relations between private and public employment services, making optimal use of the various actors’ specific characteristics, thus providing job-seekers and employers with better services. The need for a flexible collaboration...

The Semantic Web Service Challenge is one of the major ini- tiative dedicated to work on Semantic Web Service (SWS) discovery and selection. It represents an efiective manner for evaluating the functional- ity of SWS technologies. In this paper, we provide a new SWS-Challenge scenario proposal with new interesting problems to be solved on the basis...

One of the challenges in Service Oriented Computing con-sists in supporting service discovery and composition according to the so-called non functional properties (NFP). In this paper we propose a linguistic framework to describe NFPs of services independently of the grounding technology by means of semantic Web technologies. In partic-ular, the ap...

The discovery of a semantic web service (SWS) is the act of locating a machine-processable description of a SWS-related resource that may have been previously unknown and that meets certain functional criteria. The increasing availability of services that offer similar functionalities requires the discovery process to be enhanced with a selection p...

The first workshop on Non-Functional Properties (NFP) and Service Level Agreements (SLA) in Service-Oriented Computing was held on September 17th, 2007 in Vienna, Austria in conjunction with the International Conference on Service Oriented Computing. This workshop aimed to bring together researchers and industry practitioners to foster a greater un...

Web services are increasingly used as an effective means to create and streamline processes and collaborations among governments, businesses, and citizens. As the number of available Web services is steadily increasing, there is a growing interest in providing methodologies that address the design of Web services according to specific qualities of...

The huge amount of biological information, its distribution over the Internet and the heterogeneity of available software tools makes the adoption of new data integration and analysis network tools a necessity in bioinformatics. ICT standards and tools, like Web Services and Workflow Management Systems (WMS), can support the creation and deployment...

Increased mobility and team distribution may hinder collaboration in organization by hampering spontaneous communication in workplaces. Tools are required to be integrated and not intrusive with respect to users' activities, in order to provide effective support to workers for the development of joint projects. In this paper we present the enhancem...

Web Services are the current most promising technology based on the concept of Service Oriented Computing that provides the basis for the development and execution of business processes that are distributed over the network and available via standard interfaces and protocols. Quality of Services (QoS) represents a major issue that covers the challe...

One of the key factors for successful SOC-based systems is the ability to assure the achievement of Quality of Services. The knowledge and the enforcement of the Quality of Services allows for the definition of agreements that are the basis for any business process. In this paper we discuss a method for the evaluation of qualities associated with s...