Calling on a million minds for community annotation in WikiProteins.

WikiProteins enables community annotation in a Wiki-based system. Extracts of major data sources have been fused into an editable environment that links out to the original sources. Data from community edits create automatic copies of the original data. Semantic technology captures concepts co-occurring in one sentence and thus potential factual statements. In addition, indirect associations between concepts have been calculated. We call on a 'million minds' to annotate a 'million concepts' and to collect facts from the literature with the reward of collaborative knowledge discovery. The system is available for beta testing at http://www.wikiprofessional.org.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are

An Ontology for Modeling Cultural Heritage Knowledge in Urban Tourism

Urban tourism information available on Internet has been of enormous relevance to motivate the tourism in many countries. There exist many applications focused on promoting and preserving the cultural heritage, through urban tourism, which in turn demand a well-defined and standard model for representing the whole knowledge of this domain, thus ensuring interoperable and flexible applications. Current studies propose the use of ontologies to formally model such knowledge. Nonetheless, most of them only represent partial knowledge of cultural heritage or are restrictive to an indoor perspective (i.e., museum ontologies). In this context, we propose the ontology CURIOCITY ( Cultural Heritage for Urban Tourism in Indoor/Outdoor environments of the CITY ), to represent the cultural heritage knowledge based on UNESCO’s definitions. CURIOCITY ontology has a three-level architecture (Upper, Middle, and Lower ontologies) in accordance with a purpose of modularity and levels of specificity. In this paper, we describe in detail all modules of CURIOCITY ontology and perform a comparative evaluation with state-of-the-art ontologies. Additionally, to demonstrate the suitability of CURIOCITY ontology, we show several touristic services offered through a framework supported in the ontology. The framework includes an automatic population process, that allows transforming a museum data repository (in CSV format) into RDF triples of CURIOCITY ontology to automatically populate the CURIOCITY repository, and facilities to develop a set of tourism applications and services, following the UNESCO’s definitions

Leveraging the value of crowdsourced geographic information to detect cultural ecosystem services

Within ecological research and environmental management, there is current focus on demonstrating the links existing between human well-being and nature conservation. There is a need for better understanding how and why people value certain places over others. At the same time, there is a lack of consolidated methodologies, and limited experimentation in the detection of places connected to the immaterial benefits we get from nature. Those benefits are termed Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES). This research analyses the potential of Crowdsourced Geographic Information (CGI) to support the detection of CES with large scale insights derived from the analysis of digital cultural practices. CGI is produced through social media, in situations where individuals choose to share content. Therefore, a CGI project is often the expression of a community of interest and different projects have different supporting communities with different demographics and cultural profiles. The research combines multiple projects pertaining to three different categories of CGI to avoid focusing only on a community or on a digital cultural practice. Using ecological and social considerations, this thesis contributes to the evaluation of such projects as potential analytical tools for CES research. The degree of appreciation of a specific place is derived from the number of people creating, sharing, or refining the information about it. The sequence of decisions and actions that leads to the sharing of information leaves digital proxies of spatial preferences, with people sharing specific information considering the place not only “worth visiting” but also “worth sharing”. Using south Wales and London as case studies, we demonstrate how the analysis of CGI can be included in methodologies used to detect CES. These results highlight how the inclusion of CGI, can be very effective in addressing some of the current priorities in conservation. It could potentially be used for better prioritisation, planning and management of natural and cultural resources towards a more sustainable development

Digital Twins in Industry

Digital Twins in Industry is a compilation of works by authors with specific emphasis on industrial applications. Much of the research on digital twins has been conducted by the academia in both theoretical considerations and laboratory-based prototypes. Industry, while taking the lead on larger scale implementations of Digital Twins (DT) using sophisticated software, is concentrating on dedicated solutions that are not within the reach of the average-sized industries. This book covers 11 chapters of various implementations of DT. It provides an insight for companies who are contemplating the adaption of the DT technology, as well as researchers and senior students in exploring the potential of DT and its associated technologies

Knowledge and Management Models for Sustainable Growth

In the last years sustainability has become a topic of global concern and a key issue in the strategic agenda of both business organizations and public authorities and organisations. Significant changes in business landscape, the emergence of new technology, including social media, the pressure of new social concerns, have called into question established conceptualizations of competitiveness, wealth creation and growth. New and unaddressed set of issues regarding how private and public organisations manage and invest their resources to create sustainable value have brought to light. In particular the increasing focus on environmental and social themes has suggested new dimensions to be taken into account in the value creation dynamics, both at organisations and communities level. For companies the need of integrating corporate social and environmental responsibility issues into strategy and daily business operations, pose profound challenges, which, in turn, involve numerous processes and complex decisions influenced by many stakeholders. Facing these challenges calls for the creation, use and exploitation of new knowledge as well as the development of proper management models, approaches and tools aimed to contribute to the development and realization of environmentally and socially sustainable business strategies and practices