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In current Open Banking services, the European Payment Services Directive (PSD2) allows the secure collection of bank customer information, on their behalf and with their consent, to analyze their financial status and needs. The PSD2 directive has lead to a massive number of daily transactions between Fintech entities which require the automatic management of the data involved, generally coming from multiple and heterogeneous sources and formats. In this context, one of the main challenges lies in defining and implementing common data integration schemes to easily merge them into knowledge-base repositories, hence allowing data reconciliation and sophisticated analysis. In this sense, Semantic Web technologies constitute a suitable framework for the semantic integration of data that makes linking with external sources possible and enhances systematic querying. With this motivation, an ontology approach is proposed in this work to operate as a semantic data mediator in real-world open banking operations. According to semantic reconciliation mechanisms, the underpinning knowledge graph is populated with data involved in PSD2 open banking transactions, which are aligned with information from invoices. A series of semantic rules is defined in this work to show how the financial solvency classification of client entities and transaction concept suggestions can be inferred from the proposed semantic model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graph-based databases are concerned with performance and flexibility. Most of the existing approaches used to design secure NoSQL databases are limited to the final implementation stage, and do not involve the design of security and access control issues at higher abstraction levels. Ensuring security and access control for Graph-based databases is difficult, as each approach differs significantly depending on the technology employed. In this paper, we propose the first technology-ascetic framework with which to design secure Graph-based databases. Our proposal raises the abstraction level by using ontologies to simultaneously model database and security requirements together. This is supported by the TITAN framework, which facilitates the way in which both aspects are dealt with. The great advantages of our approach are, therefore, that it: allows database designers to focus on the simultaneous protection of security and data while ignoring the implementation details; facilitates the secure design and rapid migration of security rules by deriving specific security measures for each underlying technology, and enables database designers to employ ontology reasoning in order to verify whether the security rules are consistent. We show the applicability of our proposal by applying it to a case study based on a hospital data access control. • Database designers can focus on data to be protected, ignoring the implementation. • Facilitates quick migration of security rules to each underlying database technology. • Enable checking whether the security rules are consistent through ontology reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, an ontology-driven approach is proposed for semantic conflict detection and classification in rule-based expert systems. It focuses on the critical case of anti-fraud rule repositories for the inspection of Card Not Present (CNP) transactions in e-commerce environments. The main motivation is to examine and curate anti-fraud rule datasets to avoid semantic conflicts that could lead the underpinning expert system to incorrectly perform, e. g., by accepting fraudulent transactions and/or by discarding harmless ones. The proposed approach is based on Web Ontology Language (OWL) and Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) technologies to develop an anti-fraud rule ontology and reasoning tasks, respectively. The three main contributions of this work are: first, the creation of a conceptual knowledge model for describing anti-fraud rules and their relationships; second, the development of semantic rules as conflict-resolution methods for anti-fraud expert systems; third, experimental facts are gathered to evaluate and validate the proposed model. A real-world use case in the e-commerce (e-Tourism) industry is used to explain the ontological knowledge design and its use. The experiments show that ontological approaches can effectively discover and classify conflicts in rule-based expert systems in the field of anti-fraud applications. The proposal is also applicable to other domains where knowledge rule bases are involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last years, Learning Management systems (LMSs) are acquiring great importance in online education, since they offer flexible integration platforms for organising a vast amount of learning resources, as well as for establishing effective communication channels between teachers and learners, at any direction. These online platforms are then attracting an increasing number of users that continuously access, download/upload resources and interact each other during their teaching/learning processes, which is even accelerating by the breakout of COVID-19. In this context, academic institutions are generating large volumes of learning-related data that can be analysed for supporting teachers in lesson, course or faculty degree planning, as well as administrations in university strategic level. However, managing such amount of data, usually coming from multiple heterogeneous sources and with attributes sometimes reflecting semantic inconsistencies, constitutes an emerging challenge, so they require common definition and integration schemes to easily fuse them, with the aim of efficiently feeding machine learning models. In this regard, semantic web technologies arise as a useful framework for the semantic integration of multi-source e-learning data, allowing the consolidation, linkage and advanced querying in a systematic way. With this motivation, the e-LION (e-Learning Integration ONtology) semantic model is proposed for the first time in this work to operate as data consolidation approach of different e-learning knowledge-bases, hence leading to enrich on-top analysis. For demonstration purposes, the proposed ontological model is populated with real-world private and public data sources from different LMSs referring university courses of the Software Engineering degree of the University of Malaga (Spain) and the Open University Learning. In this regard, a set of four case studies are worked for validation, which comprise advance semantic querying of data for feeding predictive modelling and time-series forecasting of students' interactions according to their final grades, as well as the generation of SWRL reasoning rules for student's behaviour classification. The results are promising and lead to the possible use of e-LION as ontological mediator scheme for the integration of new future semantic models in the domain of e-learning. • e-LION semantic approach is proposed for e-learning data source integration. • An OWL Ontology is designed for e-learning, including SWRL reasoning rules. • The proposal is validated with four real-world (Moodle) and academic cases study. • Obtained semantised data successfully feed predictive machine learning models. • We provide actual e-learning users with a model to enhance their analytics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • A semantic approach to represent and validate Big Data analytics is proposed. • An OWL Ontology and SWRL rules are developed for reasoning in workflow design. • The proposal is validated with two real-world (traffic) and academic cases study. • Obtained semantized data successfully recommends and validate Big Data tasks. • We provide actual Big Data practitioners with software to enhance their analytics. Abstract Knowledge extraction and incorporation is currently considered to be beneficial for efficient Big Data analytics. Knowledge can take part in workflow design, constraint definition, parameter selection and configuration, human interactive and decision-making strategies. This paper proposes BIGOWL, an ontology to support knowledge management in Big Data analytics. BIGOWL is designed to cover a wide vocabulary of terms concerning Big Data analytics workflows, including their components and how they are connected, from data sources to the analytics visualization. It also takes into consideration aspects such as parameters, restrictions and formats. This ontology defines not only the taxonomic relationships between the different concepts, but also instances representing specific individuals to guide the users in the design of Big Data analytics workflows. For testing purposes, two case studies are developed, which consists in: first, real-world streaming processing with Spark of traffic Open Data, for route optimization in urban environment of New York city; and second, data mining classification of an academic dataset on local/cloud platforms. The analytics workflows resulting from the BIGOWL semantic model are validated and successfully evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

E-government services are subject to a growing level of complexity, which requires a disruptive approach that better support the citizen needs concerning the government administration. Nowadays, available information technologies facilitate the description and online execution of administrative tasks, saving time and reducing possible errors. These technologies reduce administrative costs but require a complex electronic government system.We propose using semantic technologies to describe the e-government organisational units and services in the Open Government Data and Services context. The use of semantics improves government management, service delivery and decision-making processes.This article presents an extension of related work, introducing the evolution of the Ontology for Electronic Government (EGO): integrating other existing ontologies, supporting new features to describe e-government services and widening the usage scenarios. This extension enables the use in a real scenario with four use cases: the electronic government in the Province of Misiones (Argentina). However, the use in the domain of electronic government in a provincial context is also a proof of concept that this approach is general enough to expand into superior domains of countries that adopt the republican system of government with the division of government into the executive, legislative and judicial branches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]