Complete Semantics to empower Touristic Service Providers

The tourism industry has a significant impact on the world's economy, contributes 10.2% of the world's gross domestic product in 2016. It becomes a very competitive industry, where having a strong online presence is an essential aspect for business success. To achieve this goal, the proper usage of latest Web technologies, particularly schema.org annotations is crucial. In this paper, we present our effort to improve the online visibility of touristic service providers in the region of Tyrol, Austria, by creating and deploying a substantial amount of semantic annotations according to schema.org, a widely used vocabulary for structured data on the Web. We started our work from Tourismusverband (TVB) Mayrhofen-Hippach and all touristic service providers in the Mayrhofen-Hippach region and applied the same approach to other TVBs and regions, as well as other use cases. The rationale for doing this is straightforward. Having schema.org annotations enables search engines to understand the content better, and provide better results for end users, as well as enables various intelligent applications to utilize them. As a direct consequence, the region of Tyrol and its touristic service increase their online visibility and decrease the dependency on intermediaries, i.e. Online Travel Agency (OTA).Comment: 18 pages, 6 figure

Report of the Stanford Linked Data Workshop

The Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SULAIR) with the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) conducted at week-long workshop on the prospects for a large scale, multi-national, multi-institutional prototype of a Linked Data environment for discovery of and navigation among the rapidly, chaotically expanding array of academic information resources. As preparation for the workshop, CLIR sponsored a survey by Jerry Persons, Chief Information Architect emeritus of SULAIR that was published originally for workshop participants as background to the workshop and is now publicly available. The original intention of the workshop was to devise a plan for such a prototype. However, such was the diversity of knowledge, experience, and views of the potential of Linked Data approaches that the workshop participants turned to two more fundamental goals: building common understanding and enthusiasm on the one hand and identifying opportunities and challenges to be confronted in the preparation of the intended prototype and its operation on the other. In pursuit of those objectives, the workshop participants produced:1. a value statement addressing the question of why a Linked Data approach is worth prototyping;2. a manifesto for Linked Libraries (and Museums and Archives and …);3. an outline of the phases in a life cycle of Linked Data approaches;4. a prioritized list of known issues in generating, harvesting & using Linked Data;5. a workflow with notes for converting library bibliographic records and other academic metadata to URIs;6. examples of potential “killer apps” using Linked Data: and7. a list of next steps and potential projects.This report includes a summary of the workshop agenda, a chart showing the use of Linked Data in cultural heritage venues, and short biographies and statements from each of the participants

Discovering Links for Metadata Enrichment on Computer Science Papers

At the very beginning of compiling a bibliography, usually only basic information, such as title, authors and publication date of an item are known. In order to gather additional information about a specific item, one typically has to search the library catalog or use a web search engine. This look-up procedure implies a manual effort for every single item of a bibliography. In this technical report we present a proof of concept which utilizes Linked Data technology for the simple enrichment of sparse metadata sets. This is done by discovering owl:sameAs links be- tween an initial set of computer science papers and resources from external data sources like DBLP, ACM and the Semantic Web Conference Corpus. In this report, we demonstrate how the link discovery tool Silk is used to detect additional information and to enrich an initial set of records in the computer science domain. The pros and cons of silk as link discovery tool are summarized in the end.Comment: 22 pages, 4 figures, 7 listings, presented at SWIB1

Towards two-stage service representation and reasoning: from lightweight annotations to comprehensive semantics

Semantics are used to mark up a wide variety of data-centric Web resources but are not used to annotate online functionality in significant numbers. That is despite considerable research dedicated to Semantic Web Services (SWS). This has led to the emergence of a new Linked Services approach with simplified and less costly to produce service models, which targets a wider audience and allows even non-SWS developers to annotate services. However, such models merely aim at enabling semantic search by humans or automated service clustering rather than automation of service tasks such as discovery or orchestration. Thus, more expressive solutions are still required to achieve automated discovery and orchestration of services. In this paper, we describe our investigation into combining the strengths of two distinct approaches to modeling semantic Web services – 'lightweight' Linked Services and 'heavyweight' SWS automation - into a coherent SWS framework. In our vision, such integration is achieved by means of model cross-referencing and model transformation and augmentation

The role of linked data and the semantic web in building operation

Effective Decision Support Systems (DSS) for building service managers require adequate performance data from many building data silos in order to deliver a complete view of building performance. Current performance analysis techniques tend to focus on a limited number of data sources, such as BMS measured data (temperature, humidity, C02), excluding a wealth of other data sources increasingly available in the modern building, including weather data, occupant feedback, mobile sensors & feedback systems, schedule information, equipment usage information. This paper investigates the potential for using Linked Data and Semantic Web technologies to improve interoperability across AEC domains, overcoming many of the roadblocks hindering information transfer currently