In response to the call for agent-based solutions that leverage the ever-increasing capabilities of the deep models' ecosystem, we introduce a comprehensive solution for selecting appropriate models and subsequently planning a set of atomic actions to satisfy the end-users' instructions. Our system, Hive, operates over sets of models and, upon receiving natural language instructions, schedules and executes, explainable plans of atomic actions. These actions can involve one or more of the available models to achieve the overall task, while respecting end-users specific constraints. Hive is able to plan complex chains of actions while guaranteeing explainability, using an LLM-based formal logic backbone empowered by PDDL operations. We introduce the MuSE benchmark in order to offer a comprehensive evaluation of the multi-modal capabilities of agent systems. Our findings show that our framework redefines the state-of-the-art for task selection, outperforming other competing systems that plan operations across multiple models while offering transparency guarantees while fully adhering to user constraints.

Reproducibility is a desirable property of scientific research. On the one hand, it increases confidence in results. On the other hand, reproducible results can be extended on a solid basis. In rapidly developing fields such as machine learning, the latter is particularly important to ensure the reliability of research. In this paper, we present a systematic approach to reproducing (using the available implementation), replicating (using an alternative implementation) and reevaluating (using different datasets) state-of-the-art experiments. This approach enables the early detection and correction of deficiencies and thus the development of more robust and transparent machine learning methods. We detail the independent reproduction, replication, and reevaluation of the initially published experiments with a method that we want to extend. For each step, we identify issues and draw lessons learned. We further discuss solutions that have proven effective in overcoming the encountered problems. This work can serve as a guide for further reproducibility studies and generally improve reproducibility in machine learning.

During the last three decades, the Web has been growing considerably in terms of number of available resources, traffic, types of media, usages, etc. In parallel, with 30+ editions, the WebConf series (ex. WWW, soon-to-be ACM WebConf) has witnessed how academia has been dealing with the Web as an object of research. In this study, we focus on the small story within the great one of the Web. In particular, by analysing the WebConf’s accepted papers and yearly events, we review how the conference has evolved across these decades and “driven” the evolution of the Web.

Big Data Analytics is a crucial component of the Big Data paradigm and deals with the extraction of knowledge from the enormous amount of data. As the number of Big Data related methods, tools, frameworks, and solutions is growing, there is a need to systematize the knowledge about the domain. Moreover, as this domain is rapidly involving, it is difficult to keep up to date with its latest and most efficient technologies; and this is thereby especially challenging for countries which have so far suffered from a lack of infrastructure in Big Data.

As the number of Big Data related methods, tools, frameworks, and solutions is growing, there is a need to classify and make available the knowledge related to this domain. This is especially useful for countries which, so far, have suffered from some lack of infra-structure in Big Data. In this article, we describe the deployment of an open online platform gathering lectures and resources, from multiple partnered European institutions, tailored for West Balkan students with a particular focus on local Big Data challenges.

Semantic Web applications integrating very different software and data sources have to face the heterogeneity of the quality and compliance to standards exhibited by each involved resource. In this paper we propose a uniform way of adapting and customizing the behavior of both the client and the server components of an HTTP exchange to cope with this diversity. We revisit the classical SERVICE clause in SPARQL federated queries in order to parameterize the behavior of both the SPARQL client and the SPARQL service. We propose mechanisms to identify and specify SPARQL federated query services and extended SPARQL-based services.

Over the past decade, knowledge graphs became popular for capturing structured domain knowledge. Relational learning models enable the prediction of missing links inside knowledge graphs. More specifically, latent distance approaches model the relationships among entities via a distance between latent representations. Translating embedding models (e.g., TransE) are among the most popular latent distance approaches which use one distance function to learn multiple relation patterns. However, they are mostly inefficient in capturing symmetric relations since the representation vector norm for all the symmetric relations becomes equal to zero. They also lose information when learning relations with reflexive patterns since they become symmetric and transitive. We propose the Multiple Distance Embedding model (MDE) that addresses these limitations and a framework to collaboratively combine variant latent distance-based terms. Our solution is based on two principles: 1) we use a limit-based loss instead of a margin ranking loss and, 2) by learning independent embedding vectors for each of the terms we can collectively train and predict using contradicting distance terms. We further demonstrate that MDE allows modeling relations with (anti)symmetry, inversion, and composition patterns. We propose MDE as a neural network model that allows us to map non-linear relations between the embedding vectors and the expected output of the score function. Our empirical results show that MDE performs competitively to state-of-the-art embedding models on several benchmark datasets.

Increasing data volumes have extensively increased application possibilities. However, accessing this data in an ad hoc manner remains an unsolved problem due to the diversity of data management approaches, formats and storage frameworks, resulting in the need to effectively access and process distributed heterogeneous data at scale. For years, Semantic Web techniques have addressed data integration challenges with practical knowledge representation models and ontology-based mappings. Leveraging these techniques, we provide a solution enabling uniform access to large, heterogeneous data sources, without enforcing centralization; thus realizing the vision of a Semantic Data Lake. In this paper, we define the core concepts underlying this vision and the architectural requirements that systems implementing it need to fulfill. Squerall, an example of such a system, is an extensible framework built on top of state-of-the-art Big Data technologies. We focus on Squerall's distributed query execution techniques and strategies, empirically evaluating its performance throughout its various sub-phases.

The growing interest in free and open-source software which occurred over the last decades has accelerated the usage of versioning systems to help developers collaborating together in the same projects. As a consequence, specific tools such as git and specialized open-source on-line platforms gained importance. In this study, we introduce and share SemanGit which provides a resource at the crossroads of both Semantic Web and git web-based version control systems. SemanGit is actually the first collection of linked data extracted from GitHub based on a git ontology we designed and extended to include specific GitHub features. In this article, we present the dataset, describe the extraction process according to the ontology, show some promising analyses of the data and outline how SemanGit could be linked with external datasets or enriched with new sources to allow for more complex analyses. Resource type: Dataset Website: http://www.semangit.de/ Permanent URL: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2176047

Squerall is a tool that allows the querying of heterogeneous, large-scale data sources by leveraging state-of-the-art Big Data processing engines: Spark and Presto. Queries are posed on-demand against a Data Lake, i.e., directly on the original data sources without requiring prior data transformation. We showcase Squerall's ability to query five different data sources, including inter alia the popular Cassandra and MongoDB. In particular, we demonstrate how it can jointly query heterogeneous data sources, and how interested developers can easily extend it to support additional data sources. Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are offered to support users in (1) building intra-source queries, and (2) creating required input files.

SPARQL is the standard language for querying RDF data. There exists a variety of SPARQL query evaluation systems implementing different architectures for the distribution of data and computations. Differences in architectures coupled with specific optimizations, for e.g. preprocessing and indexing, make these systems incomparable from a purely theoretical perspective. This results in many implementations solving the SPARQL query evaluation problem while exhibiting very different behaviors, not all of them being adapted in any context. We provide a new perspective on distributed SPARQL evaluators, based on multi-criteria experimental rankings. Our suggested set of 5 features (namely velocity, immediacy, dynamicity, parsimony, and resiliency) provides a more comprehensive description of the behaviors of distributed evaluators when compared to traditional runtime performance metrics. We show how these features help in more accurately evaluating to which extent a given system is appropriate for a given use case. For this purpose, we systematically benchmarked a panel of 10 state-of-the-art implementations. We ranked them using a reading grid that helps in pinpointing the advantages and limitations of current technologies for the distributed evaluation of SPARQL queries.