Semanticize data for decision support: development and deployment of an ontological vocabulary on the web of data.
Résumé
Introduced by Tim Berners-Lee in 1998, the Semantic Web is a set of technologies designed to make the content of Web resources accessible for use by programs and software agents through a system of formal metadata and using languages developed and standardized by the W3C. The semantic web is based entirely on the current web. It uses as a backbone the classical standards of the web and a set of additional open standards: RDF (conceptual model for describing any data), RDF Schema (language used to create vocabularies, sets of terms used to describe things), OWL (language for creating ontologies, vocabularies supporting more complex relations such as logical inferences), SPARQL (query language for information from RDF graphs). From this work emerged the initiative "Linked Data" which refers to a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the web. This set of best practices, adopted by an increasing number of data providers over the past five years, leading to the creation of a global data space, containing billions of assertions, is commonly called "the web data". We believe that this expressive layer added to the current web will make the mass of data - always more important, diverse, geolocalized and moving - more understandable for both human as autonomous digital agents. They can thus more easily analyze this mass of information in order to make decisions. In this context, we wish to develop and deploy a vocabulary devoted to decision support and interconnect it with other resources in the "web of data". We believe that the development of semantic web and more particularly to put online specialized vocabularies in decision-making will enable the advent of ambient intelligence by offering to multiple objects communicating a way to "contextualize" and "semanticize" their relation to their environment both at the policy level and at the ethic level. This vocabulary will be freely available for reuse in any computer application dealing with the MCDA, and we think especially in the generic software platform for MCDA "Decision Deck" by adding an expressive layer to its standardised data schema XMCDA.