Development of a Notification Mechanism for SciMantic's Knowledge Sharing System

The SciMantic project aims at designing and developing a modular software infrastructure termed Semantic Content Infrastructure (SCI). SCI will leverage the Semantic Web technology by providing applications, which are built on top of it, the capability to efficiently relate and search for semantic contents distributed over the Internet and shared securely among independent instances of these applications. The key technologies behind this capability are an integration of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) mechanisms with the Semantic Web. In SciMantic, a Knowledge Sharing scenario is defined, in which knowledge is shared among community members who have the same interest. Community members can join (and leave) Knowledge Sharing Networks of various topics, e.g., Information Technology, Solar System, and Badminton. The whole knowledge in the database is divided into (knowledge) units. Sharing of knowledge units is done by entering it into the system's database using a sofware tool termed Knowledge Sharing System (KSS) and then publish it.

A KSS consists of three services deployed on each KSS Node:

• Knowledge Unit Sharing Service (KUSS): This service interacts with users of KSS and allows a user to publish her knowledge units. It also provides for functionality to notify users about changes happened to knowledge units determined by user defined criteria.
• Knowledge Unit Management Service (KUMS): This service provides for storage of knowledge units and management operations including create, read, update, and delete (CRUD).
• Knowledge Unit Tagging and Searching Service (KUTSS): This service allows a user to tag a knowledge unit with appropriate keywords and to search for knowledge units tagged with specific keywords. Note that, searching of knowledge units is not restricted to local storage.

A prototypical implementation of a KSS is available. The key goal of this thesis is to analyze various notification mechanisms that suit the needs of the KSS, design a new mechanism or improve an existing one which suits best, and implement it. An example for such mechanisms is a subscription mechanism, where users can subscribe to knowledge units of specific topics or based on specific keywords assigned to knowledge units. The creation of new knowledge units and changes to existing ones will then be notified to the subscribers. The task in this thesis includes the design and implementation of the communication interface among various components involved in the notification mechanism. Furthermore, the scalability of the mechanism with respect to number of nodes and modified knowledge units must be evaluated analytically and/or experimentally to show whether it poses a problem for the KSS. Finally, a Graphical User Interface of services which are needed for knowledge unit sharing and the notification mechanism must be designed and implemented.