39,415 research outputs found
Towards Cleaning-up Open Data Portals: A Metadata Reconciliation Approach
This paper presents an approach for metadata reconciliation, curation and
linking for Open Governamental Data Portals (ODPs). ODPs have been lately the
standard solution for governments willing to put their public data available
for the society. Portal managers use several types of metadata to organize the
datasets, one of the most important ones being the tags. However, the tagging
process is subject to many problems, such as synonyms, ambiguity or
incoherence, among others. As our empiric analysis of ODPs shows, these issues
are currently prevalent in most ODPs and effectively hinders the reuse of Open
Data. In order to address these problems, we develop and implement an approach
for tag reconciliation in Open Data Portals, encompassing local actions related
to individual portals, and global actions for adding a semantic metadata layer
above individual portals. The local part aims to enhance the quality of tags in
a single portal, and the global part is meant to interlink ODPs by establishing
relations between tags.Comment: 8 pages,10 Figures - Under Revision for ICSC201
Geospatial information infrastructures
Manual of Digital Earth / Editors: Huadong Guo, Michael F. Goodchild, Alessandro Annoni .- Springer, 2020 .- ISBN: 978-981-32-9915-3Geospatial information infrastructures (GIIs) provide the technological, semantic,organizationalandlegalstructurethatallowforthediscovery,sharing,and use of geospatial information (GI). In this chapter, we introduce the overall concept and surrounding notions such as geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial datainfrastructures(SDI).WeoutlinethehistoryofGIIsintermsoftheorganizational andtechnologicaldevelopmentsaswellasthecurrentstate-of-art,andreflectonsome of the central challenges and possible future trajectories. We focus on the tension betweenincreasedneedsforstandardizationandtheever-acceleratingtechnological changes. We conclude that GIIs evolved as a strong underpinning contribution to implementation of the Digital Earth vision. In the future, these infrastructures are challengedtobecomeflexibleandrobustenoughtoabsorbandembracetechnological transformationsandtheaccompanyingsocietalandorganizationalimplications.With this contribution, we present the reader a comprehensive overview of the field and a solid basis for reflections about future developments
Applying Semantic Web Technologies to Medieval Manuscript Research
Medieval manuscript research is a complex, fragmented, multilingual field of
knowledge, which is difficult to navigate, analyse and exploit. Though printed sources
are still of great importance and value to researchers, there are now many services
on the Web, some commercial and many in the public domain. At present, these
services have to be consulted separately and individually. They employ a range of
different descriptive standards and vocabularies, and use a variety of technologies to
make their information available on the Web. This chapter proposes a new approach to
organizing the international collaborative infrastructure for interlinking knowledge and
research about medieval European manuscripts, based on technologies associated with
the Semantic Web and the Linked Data movement. This collaborative infrastructure
will be an open space on the Web where information about medieval manuscripts can
be shared, stored, exchanged and updated for research purposes. It will be possible to
ask large-scale research questions across the virtual global manuscript collection, in a
quicker and more effective way than has ever been feasible in the past. The proposed
infrastructure will focus on building links between data and will provide the basis
for new kinds of services which exploit these data. It will not aim to impose a single
metadata standard on existing manuscript services, but will build on existing databases
and vocabularies. The article describes the architecture, services and data which will
comprise this infrastructure, and discusses strategies for making th challenging and
exciting goal a reality
From Artifacts to Aggregations: Modeling Scientific Life Cycles on the Semantic Web
In the process of scientific research, many information objects are
generated, all of which may remain valuable indefinitely. However, artifacts
such as instrument data and associated calibration information may have little
value in isolation; their meaning is derived from their relationships to each
other. Individual artifacts are best represented as components of a life cycle
that is specific to a scientific research domain or project. Current cataloging
practices do not describe objects at a sufficient level of granularity nor do
they offer the globally persistent identifiers necessary to discover and manage
scholarly products with World Wide Web standards. The Open Archives
Initiative's Object Reuse and Exchange data model (OAI-ORE) meets these
requirements. We demonstrate a conceptual implementation of OAI-ORE to
represent the scientific life cycles of embedded networked sensor applications
in seismology and environmental sciences. By establishing relationships between
publications, data, and contextual research information, we illustrate how to
obtain a richer and more realistic view of scientific practices. That view can
facilitate new forms of scientific research and learning. Our analysis is
framed by studies of scientific practices in a large, multi-disciplinary,
multi-university science and engineering research center, the Center for
Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS).Comment: 28 pages. To appear in the Journal of the American Society for
Information Science and Technology (JASIST
Metadata enrichment for digital heritage: users as co-creators
This paper espouses the concept of metadata enrichment through an expert and user-focused approach to metadata creation and management. To this end, it is argued the Web 2.0 paradigm enables users to be proactive metadata creators. As Shirky (2008, p.47) argues Web 2.0’s social tools enable “action by loosely structured groups, operating without managerial direction and outside the profit motive”. Lagoze (2010, p. 37) advises, “the participatory nature of Web 2.0 should not be dismissed as just a popular phenomenon [or fad]”. Carletti (2016) proposes a participatory digital cultural heritage approach where Web 2.0 approaches such as crowdsourcing can be sued to enrich digital cultural objects. It is argued that “heritage crowdsourcing, community-centred projects or other forms of public participation”. On the other hand, the new collaborative approaches of Web 2.0 neither negate nor replace contemporary standards-based metadata approaches. Hence, this paper proposes a mixed metadata approach where user created metadata augments expert-created metadata and vice versa. The metadata creation process no longer remains to be the sole prerogative of the metadata expert. The Web 2.0 collaborative environment would now allow users to participate in both adding and re-using metadata. The case of expert-created (standards-based, top-down) and user-generated metadata (socially-constructed, bottom-up) approach to metadata are complementary rather than mutually-exclusive. The two approaches are often mistakenly considered as dichotomies, albeit incorrectly (Gruber, 2007; Wright, 2007) .
This paper espouses the importance of enriching digital information objects with descriptions pertaining the about-ness of information objects. Such richness and diversity of description, it is argued, could chiefly be achieved by involving users in the metadata creation process. This paper presents the importance of the paradigm of metadata enriching and metadata filtering for the cultural heritage domain. Metadata enriching states that a priori metadata that is instantiated and granularly structured by metadata experts is continually enriched through socially-constructed (post-hoc) metadata, whereby users are pro-actively engaged in co-creating metadata. The principle also states that metadata that is enriched is also contextually and semantically linked and openly accessible. In addition, metadata filtering states that metadata resulting from implementing the principle of enriching should be displayed for users in line with their needs and convenience. In both enriching and filtering, users should be considered as prosumers, resulting in what is called collective metadata intelligence
A Survey of Volunteered Open Geo-Knowledge Bases in the Semantic Web
Over the past decade, rapid advances in web technologies, coupled with
innovative models of spatial data collection and consumption, have generated a
robust growth in geo-referenced information, resulting in spatial information
overload. Increasing 'geographic intelligence' in traditional text-based
information retrieval has become a prominent approach to respond to this issue
and to fulfill users' spatial information needs. Numerous efforts in the
Semantic Geospatial Web, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), and the
Linking Open Data initiative have converged in a constellation of open
knowledge bases, freely available online. In this article, we survey these open
knowledge bases, focusing on their geospatial dimension. Particular attention
is devoted to the crucial issue of the quality of geo-knowledge bases, as well
as of crowdsourced data. A new knowledge base, the OpenStreetMap Semantic
Network, is outlined as our contribution to this area. Research directions in
information integration and Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) are then
reviewed, with a critical discussion of their current limitations and future
prospects
Chemical information matters: an e-Research perspective on information and data sharing in the chemical sciences
Recently, a number of organisations have called for open access to scientific information and especially to the data obtained from publicly funded research, among which the Royal Society report and the European Commission press release are particularly notable. It has long been accepted that building research on the foundations laid by other scientists is both effective and efficient. Regrettably, some disciplines, chemistry being one, have been slow to recognise the value of sharing and have thus been reluctant to curate their data and information in preparation for exchanging it. The very significant increases in both the volume and the complexity of the datasets produced has encouraged the expansion of e-Research, and stimulated the development of methodologies for managing, organising, and analysing "big data". We review the evolution of cheminformatics, the amalgam of chemistry, computer science, and information technology, and assess the wider e-Science and e-Research perspective. Chemical information does matter, as do matters of communicating data and collaborating with data. For chemistry, unique identifiers, structure representations, and property descriptors are essential to the activities of sharing and exchange. Open science entails the sharing of more than mere facts: for example, the publication of negative outcomes can facilitate better understanding of which synthetic routes to choose, an aspiration of the Dial-a-Molecule Grand Challenge. The protagonists of open notebook science go even further and exchange their thoughts and plans. We consider the concepts of preservation, curation, provenance, discovery, and access in the context of the research lifecycle, and then focus on the role of metadata, particularly the ontologies on which the emerging chemical Semantic Web will depend. Among our conclusions, we present our choice of the "grand challenges" for the preservation and sharing of chemical information
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