Linked data enrichment with self-unfolding URIs

Linked Data resources are identified by Uniform Resource Identifiers. It is an important step in any Linked Data project to define the conventions for URI assignments. In some cases resources already have their natural identifiers, or they can be inherited from previous databases. However, there are cases when frequent insertions of triple sets occur without any convenient way for identification and grouping of them. In this paper we elaborate on a mechanism that makes handling complex and frequent insertions easier, and also provides the benefits of simple authoring together with rich querying and reasoning on the data. We show how to eliminate some of the time consuming and error prone aspects of Linked Data authoring by introducing the self-unfolding URI concept. This solution generates RDF description to entities based on information encoded in their URIs. For the generation of these new RDF triples we propose templates that can be implemented by SPARQL Insert queries

Current state of Linked Data in digital libraries

The Semantic Web encourages institutions, including libraries, to collect, link and share their data across the Web in order to ease its processing by machines to get better queries and results. Linked Data technologies enable us to connect related data on the Web using the principles outlined by Tim Berners-Lee in 2006. Digital libraries have great potential to exchange and disseminate data linked to external resources using Linked Data. In this paper, a study about the current uses of Linked Data in digital libraries, including the most important implementations around the world, is presented. The study focuses on selected vocabularies and ontologies, benefits and problems encountered in implementing Linked Data in digital libraries. In addition, it also identifies and discusses specific challenges that digital libraries face, offering suggestions for ways in which libraries can contribute to the Semantic Web. The study uses an adapted methodology for literature review, to find data available to answer research questions. It is based on the information found in the library websites recommended by W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group in 2011, and scientific publications from Google Scholar, Scopus, ACM and Springer from the last 5 years. The selected libraries for the study are the National Library of France, the Europeana Library, the Library of Congress of the USA, the British Library and the National Library of Spain. In this paper, we outline the best practices found in each experience and identify gaps and future trends.This work was supported by the Prometeo Project from the Secretary of Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation (SENESCYT) of the Ecuadorian Government and by the project GEODAS-BI (TIN2012-37493-C03-03) supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of Spain (MINECO). Alejandro Mate´ was funded by the Generalitat Valenciana (APOSTD/2014/064)

Metajournals. A federalist proposal for scholarly communication and data aggregation

While the EU is building an open access infrastructure of archives (e.g. OpenAIRE) and it is trying to implement it in the Horizon 2020 program, the gap between the tools and the human beings – researchers, citizen scientists, students, ordinary people – is still wide. The necessity to dictate open access publishing as a mandate for the EU funded research – ten years after the BOAI - is an obvious symptom of it: there is a chasm between the net and the public use of reason. To escalate the advancement and the reuse of research, we should federate the multitude of already existing open access journals in federal open overlay journals that receive their contents from the member journals and boost it with their aggregation power and their semantic web tools. The article contains both the theoretical basis and the guidelines for a project whose goals are: 1. making open access journals visible, highly cited and powerful, by federating them into wide disciplinary overlay journals; 2. avoiding the traps of the “authors pay” open access business model, by exploiting one of the virtue of federalism: the federate journals can remain little and affordable, if they gain visibility from the power of the federal overlay journal aggregating them; 3. enriching the overlay journals both through semantic annotation tools and by means of open platforms dedicated to host ex post peer review and experts comments; 4. making the selection and evaluation processes and their resulting data as much as possible public and open, to avoid the pitfalls (e. g, the serials price crisis) experienced by the closed access publishing model. It is about time to free academic publishing from its expensive walled gardens and to put to test the tools that can help us to transform it in one open forest, with one hundred flowers – and one hundred trailblazers

Metajournals. A federalist proposal for scholarly communication and data aggregation

Abstract   While the EU is building an open access infrastructure of archives (e.g., Openaire) and it is trying to implement it in the Horizon 2020 program, the gap between the tools and the human beings – researchers, citizen scientists, students, ordinary people – is still wide. The necessity to dictate open access publishing as a mandate for the EU funded research – ten years after the BOAI - is an obvious symptom of it: there is a chasm between the net and the public use of reason. To escalate the advancement and the reuse of research, we should federate the multitude of already existing open access journals in federal open overlay journals that receive their contents from the member journals and boost it with their aggregation power and their semantic web tools.The article contains both the theoretical basis and the guidelines for a project whose goals are:making open access journals visible, highly cited and powerful, by federating them into wide disciplinary overlay journals; avoiding the traps of the “authors pay” open access business model, by exploiting one of the virtue of federalism: the federate journals can remain little and affordable, if they gain visibility from the power of the federal overlay journal aggregating them;enriching the overlay journals both through semantic annotation tools and by means of open platforms dedicated to host ex post peer review and experts comments;making the selection and evaluation processes and their resulting data as much as possible public and open, to avoid the pitfalls (e.g., the serials price crisis) experienced by the closed access publishing model.It is about time to free academic publishing from its expensive walled gardens and to put to test the tools that can help us to transform it in one open forest, with one hundred flowers – and one hundred trailblazers

Datos abiertos enlazados (LOD) y su implantación en bibliotecas: iniciativas y tecnologías

The web of data is becoming one of the largest global information repositories, thanks to initiatives like LOD (linked open data) that facilitate the standardized publication of open data. The use of this paradigm offers great opportunities for libraries, applying semantic technologies to expedite data management and publication and promoting their connection to other repositories, increasing their presence and impact. In order to ensure the future of libraries in the Web of data, it is necessary to raise awareness among librarians about LOD opportunities and challenges. With this aim, we present the major initiatives in this area, along with the pioneering organizations in the use of linked data in the library domai

Datos abiertos enlazados (LOD) y su implantación en bibliotecas: iniciativas y tecnologías

The web of data is becoming one of the largest global information repositories, thanks to initiatives like LOD (linked open data) that facilitate the standardized publication of open data. The use of this paradigm offers great opportunities for libraries, applying semantic technologies to expedite data management and publication and promoting their connection to other repositories, increasing their presence and impact. In order to ensure the future of libraries in the Web of data, it is necessary to raise awareness among librarians about LOD opportunities and challenges. With this aim, we present the major initiatives in this area, along with the pioneering organizations in the use of linked data in the library domai

Distributed aggregation of heterogeneous Web-based Fine Art Information: enabling multi-source accessibility and curation

The sources of information on the Web relating to Fine Art and in particular to Fine Artists are numerous, heterogeneous and distributed. Data relating to the biographies of an artist, images of their artworks, location of the artworks and exhibition reviews invariably reside in distinct and seemingly unrelated, or at least unlinked, sources. While communication and exchange exists, there is a great deal of independence between major repositories, such as museum, often owing to their ownership or heritage. This increases the individuality in the repository’s own processes and dissemination. It is currently necessary to browse through numerous different websites to obtain information about any one artist, and at this time there is little aggregation of Fine Art Information. This is in contrast to the domain of books and music, where the aggregation and re-grouping of information (usually by author or artist/band name) has become the norm. A Museum API (Application Programming Interface), however, is a tool that can facilitate a similar information service for the domain of Fine Art, by allowing the retrieval and aggregation of Web-based Fine Art Information, whilst at the same time increasing public access to the content of a museum’s collection. In this paper, we present the case for a pragmatic solution to the problems of heterogeneity and distribution of Fine Art Data and this is the first step towards the comprehensive re-presentation of Fine Art Information in a more ‘artist-centric’ way, via accessible Web applications. This paper examines the domain of Fine Art Information on the Web, putting forward the case for more Web services such as generic Museum APIs, highlighting this via a prototype Web application known as the ArtBridge. The generic Museum API is the standardisation mechanism to enable interfacing with specific Museum APIs

HTML5 audio and video annotations with resource detection under consideration of usability and user experience

Gegenwärtig herrscht ein Trend immer mehr Multimedia im Web zu veröffentlichen. Es existiert bereits eine grosse Anzahl an Applikationen, die es EndbenutzerInnen ermöglicht Inhalte zu organisieren und darüber hinaus noch zusätzliche Anmerkungen hinzuzufügen. Bis jetzt existiert aber keine EndbenutzerInnen freundliche Applikation, die es BenutzerInnen ermöglicht Audio und Video Dateien mit relevanten Informationen aus offenen Web-Quellen zu annotieren, zu verknüpfen und die auch auf offenen Standards basiert. Grundlage für diese Arbeit bietet das von Europeana eingesetzte LEMO Framework. Dieses Framework macht Fragment Identifikation nutzbar und ermöglicht damit Annotierungen und Verlinkungen von kontinuierlichen Medien. Durch die Verlinkung von kontextuell relevanten Ressourcen, kann die Dokumentation der Medien erheblich verbessert werden. Neue Entwicklungen im Forschungsgebiet von Linked Data ermöglichen es, automatisiert auf eine Menge öffentlich zugänglicher und wohl definierter Daten zuzugreifen. Ziel der vorliegenden Arbeit ist es fest zu stellen, ob durch eine Kombination von neuen Standards eine Implementierung einer Web-basierten Audio und Video Anwendung möglich ist, die usable ist, den Zielen von Linked Data entspricht und auf offenen Standards basiert. Abschliessend lässt sich festhalten, dass eine solche Anwendung entwickelt werden kann. Das Ergebnis basiert auf zwei durchgeführten Studien; eine qualitativ durchgeführte Studie, welche usability Probleme aufzeigte - die im Anschluss eliminiert wurden - und eine weitere durchgeführte Studie, welche wiederum aufzeigte, dass ein semi-automatischer Ansatz zur Generierung von Tags die effizienteste und effektivste Möglichkeit zur Annotierung und Verlinkung darstellt. Dieser Arbeit ist eine DVD, zur Installation und Ausführung des Projektes, angefügt.Currently there is an ongoing trend to publish more and more multimedia on the Web. A range of solutions exists that allow end-users to organize content and to add additional information by means of annotations. Until now, however, there exists no open standard-based solution which allows users to annotate and link audio and video to contextually relevant information from other sources on the Web. Foundation for this thesis constitutes the LEMO framework deployed by Europeana. This solution enables fragment identification and therefore introduces annotating and linking of continuous media. Due to the linkage of contextually relevant resources, the overall documentation can significantly be improved. New developments in the research area of Linked Data enable automatic access to a huge amount of well defined public data. The goal of this thesis is to determine whether a combination of new standards enables developing a Web-based audio and video application, that is usable, considers the four rules of Linked Data and that is standard-based. The concluding statement of this master thesis is that such an application can be built. The result is based on two case studies; a qualitative research study which revealed usability issues - subsequently eliminated - and a case study, which in turn showed that a semi-automatic approach for generating and retrieving tags would prove to be efficient when annotating and linking resources. Attached to this master thesis, readers can find a DVD for installing and running this project

An efficient management system for large digital object collections

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 87-91)Cultures evolve continuously, and it is therefore vital to track and record these changes, and most importantly of all, manage the resulting huge mass of data such as images, video clips, audio recordings and documents. This thesis examines the design of a Web-based solution, hereafter referred to as the Information Management System (IMS), to handle the efficient, accurate and secure management of a large number of objects