While RDF was designed to make data easily readable by machines, it does not make data easily usable by end-users. Question Answering (QA) over Knowledge Graphs (KGs) is seen as the technology which is able to bridge this gap. It aims to build systems which are capable of extracting the answer to a user’s natural language question from an RDF dataset. In recent years, many approaches were proposed which tackle the problem of QA over KGs. Despite such efforts, it is hard and cumbersome to create a Question Answering system on top of a new RDF dataset. The main open challenge remains portability, i.e., the possibility to apply a QA algorithm easily on new and previously untested RDF datasets. In this publication, we address the problem of portability by presenting an architecture for a portable QA system. We present a novel approach called QAnswer KG, which allows the construction of on-demand QA systems over new RDF datasets. Hence, our approach addresses non-expert users in QA domain. In this paper, we provide the details of QA system generation process. We show that it is possible to build a QA system over any RDF dataset while requiring minimal investments in terms of training. We run experiments using 3 different datasets. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to design a process for non-expert users. We enable such users to efficiently create an on-demand, scalable, multilingual, QA system on top of any RDF dataset.

International audience

We present QAnswer, a Question Answering system which queries at the same time 3 core datasets of the Semantic Web, that are relevant for end-users. These datasets are Wikidata with Lexemes, LinkedGeodata and Musicbrainz. Additionally, it is possible to query these datasets in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Pourtuguese, Arabic and Chinese. Moreover, QAnswer includes a fallback option to the search engine Qwant when the answer to a question cannot be found in the datasets mentioned above. These features make QAnswer as the first prototype of a Question Answering System over a considerable part of the LOD cloud.

Virtual communities are complex systems interweaving technical and human aspects.We propose here to identify usual functions provided by virtual communities and define a typology based on the common objects or goals shared by their users.The papers included in this special issue show some examples of research works lead in some of these categories of communities.

Web Intelligence deals with intelligent methods and information & communication technologies that are integrated to enhance different web-based applications. Communities are popular, particularly on the World Wide Web, as a means for like-minded

International audience

In this paper we present a methodology for learning user profiles from content shared by people on Social Platforms. Such profiles are specifically tailored to reflect the user's degree of interactivity related to the topics they are writing about. The main novelty in our work is the introduction of Linked Data in the content extraction process and the definition of specific scores to measure expertise and interactivity.

The focus of existing virtual communities is centered on a particular product or social interaction and the role of mobile devices is restricted to exchange a limited amount of contents. Herewith we envisage that the upcoming virtual communities will exploit the potential of social interaction and context information to offer personalized services to its members and mobile devices will play a significant role in this process. As a step towards this direction, in this paper we propose a business model for the mobile virtual communities in which the mobile device takes on the role of a content producer and content consumer. Though there are a number of research issues which need to be addressed to realize such virtual communities, in this paper we focus on the service requirements, architecture and open source software implementation of a technical platform for the content producer and consumer mobile devices.

An enterprise can be considered in a distributed computational paradigm. Multiagent systems have been invented to tackle such problems within artificial intelligence but are today seen also as a management methodology. The agent oriented abstraction has been proposed to describe in a fully generic way a society of agents. In this paper, we are investigating the application of this model to the abstract modeling of corporate knowledge. We show that such an abstraction mechanism leads to very practical applications whether on the web or on any other support and that it covers the broad scope of corporate knowledge. This approach can be further used to better simulate and support knowledge management processes.