GEORDi: Supporting lightweight end-user authoring and exploration of Linked Data

The US and UK governments have recently made much of the data created by their various departments available as data sets (often as csv files) available on the web. Known as ”open data” while these are valuable assets, much of this data remains useless because it is effectively inaccessible for citizens to access for the following reasons: (1) it is often a tedious, many step process for citizens simply to find data relevant to a query. Once the data candidate is located, it often must be downloaded and opened in a separate application simply to see if the data that may satisfy the query is contained in it. (2) It is difficult to join related data sets to create richer integrated information (3) it is particularly difficult to query either a single data set, and even harder to query across related data sets. (4) To date, one has had to be well versed in semantic web protocols like SPARQL, RDF and URI formation to integrate and query such sources as reusable linked data. Our goal has been to develop tools that will let regular, non-programmer web citizens make use of this Web of Data. To this end, we present GEORDi, a set of integrated tools and services that lets citizen users identify, explore, query and represent these open data sources over the web via Linked Data mechanisms. In this paper we describe the GEORDi process of authoring new and translating existing open data in a linkable format, GEORDi’s lens mechanism for rendering rich, plain language descriptions and views of resources, and the GEORDI link-sliding paradigm for data exploration. With these tools we demonstrate that it is possible to make the Web of open (and linked) data accessible for ordinary web citizen users

End-users publishing structured information on the web: an observational study of what, why, and how

End-users are accustomed to filtering and browsing styled collections of data on professional web sites, but they have few ways to create and publish such information architectures for themselves. This paper presents a full-lifecycle analysis of the Exhibit framework - an end-user tool which provides such functionality - to understand the needs, capabilities, and practices of this class of users. We include interviews, as well as analysis of over 1,800 visualizations and 200,000 web interactions with these visualizations. Our analysis reveals important findings about this user population which generalize to the task of providing better end-user structured content publication tools.Intel Science & Technology Center for Big Dat

Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Mashup Personal Learning Environments

Wild, F., Kalz, M., & Palmér, M. (Eds.) (2008). Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Mashup Personal Learning Environments (MUPPLE08). September, 17, 2008, Maastricht, The Netherlands: CEUR Workshop Proceedings, ISSN 1613-0073. Available at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-388.The work on this publication has been sponsored by the TENCompetence Integrated Project (funded by the European Commission's 6th Framework Programme, priority IST/Technology Enhanced Learning. Contract 027087 [http://www.tencompetence.org]) and partly sponsored by the LTfLL project (funded by the European Commission's 7th Framework Programme, priority ISCT. Contract 212578 [http://www.ltfll-project.org

A Spatial Analysis of African Oil and Gas Infrastructure Security

Many countries and governments around the world rely on the production of oil and gas resources. The high cost of the assets and infrastructure used to produce these resources makes them a prime target for terrorist attack and theft. As a result, the security of oil and gas infrastructure is becoming exceedingly important. Both governments and private companies are interested in protecting the infrastructure used to extract, transport, and refine these resources in many places, including Africa. Geographic information systems (GIS) has the ability to assist with mapping infrastructure and assets, performing spatial analysis concerning areas of high-risk or vulnerability, and creating web-mapping systems that allow users to view and upload information as they acquire it. The end goal is to contribute to the protection of the oil and gas industry, and government’s dependent on this industry, from imminent and future threats

ALT-C 2011 Abstracts

This is a PDF of the abstracts for all the sessions at the 2011 ALT conference. It is designed to be used alongside the online version of the conference programme. It was made public on 1 September, with a "topped and tailed" made live on 2 September

A rapid deployment model for VGI projects in mobile field data collection

Spatial data collection in an organizational setup is growing in terms of the number of applications. While these applications are similar in providing the capability to collect and store spatial data, they are inherently different in the domains they cater to. For instance, they range from collecting data for facilitated Voluntary Geographic Information (VGI) like evaluating children’s walkability to schools or visual quality assessment of a community to crowd sourcing or emergency dispatch and large–scale census gathering. Mobile devices are a great medium to collect such VGI. Several constraints with respect to time, manpower and efficiency contribute to the lack of a technology model to enable dynamic creation and delivery of such projects. In this thesis, we address the research questions as to what a model for rapidly deploying a mobile VGI should look like and how to create one. We demonstrate this by creating a web–based project authoring system. The data collected from this system is fed into a Geographic Information System (GIS) model that automates creation of necessary spatial components and exposes them as Representational State Transfer (REST) services. An iOS mobile application consumes the web services and enables field data collection. The model also integrates multiple projects for a user while providing a domain specific means for collecting non–spatial attributes. Existing solutions for gathering data do not consider the relationship of attributes to one other. This thesis presents a dynamic decision tree implementation for the same, which improves efficiency and ensures correctness of the data collected in the field

Autonomous Unmanned Vehicle (AUV) Workbench Rehearsal and Replay: Mapping Diverse Vehicle Telemetry Outputs to Common XML Data Archives

15th International Symposium on Unmanned Untethered Submersible Technology (UUST), Autonomous Undersea Systems Institute (AUSI), Durham New Hampshire, 19-22 August 2007.NPS AUV Workbench: Paper

Designing digital constructive visualization tools

The emergence of tools that support fast and easy creation of visualizations has made the benefits of Information Visualization (InfoVis) more accessible. The predominant design for visualization authoring tools often includes features such as automated mappings and visualization templates, which make tools effective and easy-to-use. These features, however, still impose barriers to non-experts (i.e., people with no formal training on visualization concepts). The paradigm of Constructive Visualization (ConstructiveVis) has shown potential to overcome some of these barriers, but it has only been investigated through the use of physical tokens that people manipulate to create representations of data. This dissertation investigates how the principles of ConstructiveVis can be applied in the design and implementation of digital constructive visualization tools. This thesis presents the results of several observational studies that uncover how tools that promote a constructive approach to visualization compare to more conventional ones. It also sheds light on what kind of benefits and limitations digital ConstructiveVis brings into non-experts' visualization design process. The investigations here presented lay the foundations for the design of better visualization tools that not only allow people to create effective visualizations but also promote critical reflection on design principles