MOVIO: A Toolkit for Creating Curated Digital Exhibitions

AbstractIn 2011, the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Tourism (MiBACT) published a guideline reference book analysing the state of the art and best practices of digital exhibitions made available on-line and offered a handbook successfully translated in English and even in Arabic. To satisfy the needs expressed by museum curators (but not limiting to them) GruppoMeta has implemented the MOVIO platform under the coordination of ICCU: MOVIO is a semantic CMS which provides tools to support the development of virtual/digital exhibitions, touristic and didactic applications. MOVIO supports the creation of a media archive and ‘non-scaring’ ontology builder for a storytelling approach and it allows cultural content publishing (it includes the creation of visit paths, up to mapping, time-line, galleries and social tools). The MOVIO open source SCMS platform is an easy and ready to use toolkit to build online and mobile virtual/digital exhibitions and narrations. It has begun to be experimented by several Italian institutions and several European partners from the AthenaPlus consortium

Information Inference in Scholarly Communication Infrastructures: The OpenAIREplus Project Experience

Kobos M, Bolikowski Ł, Horst M, Manghi P, Manola N, Schirrwagen J. Information Inference in Scholarly Communication Infrastructures: The OpenAIREplus Project Experience. Procedia Computer Science. 2014;38:92-99.The Information Inference Framework presented in this paper provides a general-purpose suite of tools enabling the definition and execution of flexible and reliable data processing workflows whose nodes offer application-specific processing capabilities. The IIF is designed for the purpose of processing big data, and it is implemented on top of Apache Hadoop-related technologies to cope with scalability and high-performance execution requirements. As a proof of concept we will describe how the framework is used to support linking and contextualization services in the context of the OpenAIRE infrastructure for scholarly communication

A Curated Database for Linguistic Research: The Test Case of Cimbrian Varieties

In this paper we present the definition of a conceptual approach for the information space entailed by a multidisciplinary and collaborative project, \u201cCimbrian as a test case for synchronic and diachronic language variation\u201d, which provides linguists with a test bed for formal hypotheses concerning human language. Aims of the project are to collect, digitize and tag linguistic data from the German variety of Cimbrian - spoken in three areas of northern Italy: Giazza (VR), Luserna (TN), and Roana (VI) - and to make available on-line a valuable and innovative linguistic resource for the in-depth study of Cimbrian. The task is addressed by a multidisciplinary team of linguists and computer scientists who, combining their competence, aim to make available new tools for linguistic analysis

OpenAIRE's DOIBoost - Boosting CrossRef for Research

Research in information science and scholarly communication strongly relies on the availability of openly accessible datasets of scholarly entities metadata and, where possible, their relative payloads. Since such metadata information is scattered across diverse, freely accessible, online resources (e.g. CrossRef, ORCID), researchers in this domain are doomed to struggle with (meta)data integration problems, in order to produce custom datasets of often undocumented and rather obscure provenance. This practice leads to waste of time, duplication of efforts, and typically infringes open science best practices of transparency and reproducibility of science. In this article, we describe how to generate DOIBoost, a metadata collection that enriches CrossRef with inputs from Microsoft Academic Graph, ORCID, and Unpaywall for the purpose of supporting high-quality and robust research experiments, saving times to researchers and enabling their comparison. To this aim, we describe the dataset value and its schema, analyse its actual content, and share the software Toolkit and experimental workflow required to reproduce it. The DOIBoost dataset and Software Toolkit are made openly available via Zenodo.org. DOIBoost will become an input source to the OpenAIRE information graph

Research on Geolinguistic Linked Data: The Test Case of Cimbrian Varieties

In this paper, we present a geolinguistic linked open data approach of a multidisciplinary and collaborative project, "Cimbrian as a test case for synchronic and diachronic language variation", which provides linguists with a test bed for formal hypotheses concerning human language. Aims of the project are to collect, digitize and tag linguistic data from the German dialect varieties of Cimbrian - spoken in three areas of northern Italy: Giazza (province of Verona), Luserna (province of Trento), and Asiago/Roana (province of Vicenza) - and to make available on-line a valuable and innovative linguistic resource for the in-depth study of Cimbrian

Towards better social crisis data with HERMES: Hybrid sensing for EmeRgency ManagEment System

People involved in mass emergencies increasingly publish information-rich contents in online social networks (OSNs), thus acting as a distributed and resilient network of human sensors. In this work, we present HERMES, a system designed to enrich the information spontaneously disclosed by OSN users in the aftermath of disasters. HERMES leverages a mixed data collection strategy, called hybrid crowdsensing, and state-of-the-art AI techniques. Evaluated in real-world emergencies, HERMES proved to increase: (i) the amount of the available damage information; (ii) the density (up to 7x) and the variety (up to 18x) of the retrieved geographic information; (iii) the geographic coverage (up to 30%) and granularity

Data science: a game changer for science and innovation

AbstractThis paper shows data science's potential for disruptive innovation in science, industry, policy, and people's lives. We present how data science impacts science and society at large in the coming years, including ethical problems in managing human behavior data and considering the quantitative expectations of data science economic impact. We introduce concepts such as open science and e-infrastructure as useful tools for supporting ethical data science and training new generations of data scientists. Finally, this work outlines SoBigData Research Infrastructure as an easy-to-access platform for executing complex data science processes. The services proposed by SoBigData are aimed at using data science to understand the complexity of our contemporary, globally interconnected society

Geographical trends in academic conferences: An analysis of authors’ affiliations

In the last decade, the research literature has reached an enormous volume with an unprecedented current annual increase of 1.5 million new publications. As research gets ever more global and new countries and institutions, either from academia or corporate environments, start to contribute, it is important to monitor this complex phenomenon and understand its dynamics and equilibria. We present a study on a conference proceedings dataset extracted from Springer Nature SciGraph that illustrates insightful geographical trends and highlights the unbalanced growth of competitive research institutions worldwide in the 1996–2016 period. The main contribution of this work is fourfold. In the first instance, we found that the distributions of institutions and publications among countries follow a power law, consistently with previous literature, i.e., very few countries keep producing most of the papers accepted by high-tier conferences. Secondly, we show how the turnover rate of country rankings is extremely low and steadily declines over time, suggesting an alarmingly static landscape in which new entries struggle to emerge. We also performed an analysis of the venue locations and their effect on the distribution of countries involved in the publications, underlining the central role of Europe and China as knowledge hubs. Finally, we evidence the presence of an increasing gap between the number of institutions initiating and overseeing research endeavours (i.e. first and last authors’ affiliations) and the total number of institutions participating in research. The paper also discusses our experience in working with authors’ affiliations: an utterly simple matter at first glance, that is instead revealed to be a complex research and technical challenge