Visualizing Statistical Linked Knowledge for Decision Support

In a global and interconnected economy, decision makers often need to consider information from various domains. A tourism destination manager, for example, has to correlate tourist behavior with financial and environmental indicators to allocate funds for strategic long-term investments. Statistical data underpins a broad range of such cross-domain decision tasks. A variety of statistical datasets are available as Linked Open Data, often incorporated into visual analytics solutions to support decision making. What are the principles, architectures, workflows and implementation design patterns that should be followed for building such visual cross-domain decision support systems. This article introduces a methodology to integrate and visualize cross-domain statistical data sources by applying selected RDF Data Cube (QB) principles. A visual dashboard built according to this methodology is presented and evaluated in the context of two use cases in the tourism and telecommunications domains

A Survey of the First 20 Years of Research on Semantic Web and Linked Data

International audienceThis paper is a survey of the research topics in the field of Semantic Web, Linked Data and Web of Data. This study looks at the contributions of this research community over its first twenty years of existence. Compiling several bibliographical sources and bibliometric indicators , we identify the main research trends and we reference some of their major publications to provide an overview of that initial period. We conclude with some perspectives for the future research challenges.Cet article est une étude des sujets de recherche dans le domaine du Web sémantique, des données liées et du Web des données. Cette étude se penche sur les contributions de cette communauté de recherche au cours de ses vingt premières années d'existence. En compilant plusieurs sources bibliographiques et indicateurs bibliométriques, nous identifions les principales tendances de la recherche et nous référençons certaines de leurs publications majeures pour donner un aperçu de cette période initiale. Nous concluons avec une discussion sur les tendances et perspectives de recherche

AgroPortal: a vocabulary and ontology repository for agronomy

Many vocabularies and ontologies are produced to represent and annotate agronomic data. However, those ontologies are spread out, in different formats, of different size, with different structures and from overlapping domains. Therefore, there is need for a common platform to receive and host them, align them, and enabling their use in agro-informatics applications. By reusing the National Center for Biomedical Ontologies (NCBO) BioPortal technology, we have designed AgroPortal, an ontology repository for the agronomy domain. The AgroPortal project re-uses the biomedical domain’s semantic tools and insights to serve agronomy, but also food, plant, and biodiversity sciences. We offer a portal that features ontology hosting, search, versioning, visualization, comment, and recommendation; enables semantic annotation; stores and exploits ontology alignments; and enables interoperation with the semantic web. The AgroPortal specifically satisfies requirements of the agronomy community in terms of ontology formats (e.g., SKOS vocabularies and trait dictionaries) and supported features (offering detailed metadata and advanced annotation capabilities). In this paper, we present our platform’s content and features, including the additions to the original technology, as well as preliminary outputs of five driving agronomic use cases that participated in the design and orientation of the project to anchor it in the community. By building on the experience and existing technology acquired from the biomedical domain, we can present in AgroPortal a robust and feature-rich repository of great value for the agronomic domain. Keyword

Practice and Prestige

Practice and Prestige: An Exploration of Neolithic Warfare, Bell Beaker Archery, and Social Stratification from an Anthropological Perspective investigates the appearance of the ‘archer’s package’ in select Bell Beaker burials raising questions of daily life, warfare, and social stratification during the Neolithic period. It draws on a recent study by the author that applied an anthropological methodology to assess the bone morphology of these skeletons for signs of specialised archery activity. These analyses revealed results at both a population as well as an individual level. In order to contextualise these osteological findings, the book explores the evidence for warfare and archery throughout the Neolithic period in general and the Bell Beaker period in particular. This perspective considers warfare to be a primary function of archery, thereby associating ‘archer’ burials with concepts of warfare and the warrior. A second perspective delves into prehistoric concepts of specialisation and social hierarchy in order to situate archers, archery, and warfare within potentially stratified populations. These two perspectives allow for the contextualisation of the anthropological results within a broad archaeological framework in which archers and archery were prominent parts of a complex Bell Beaker society

Scalable Data Integration for Linked Data

Linked Data describes an extensive set of structured but heterogeneous datasources where entities are connected by formal semantic descriptions. In thevision of the Semantic Web, these semantic links are extended towards theWorld Wide Web to provide as much machine-readable data as possible forsearch queries. The resulting connections allow an automatic evaluation to findnew insights into the data. Identifying these semantic connections betweentwo data sources with automatic approaches is called link discovery. We derivecommon requirements and a generic link discovery workflow based on similaritiesbetween entity properties and associated properties of ontology concepts. Mostof the existing link discovery approaches disregard the fact that in times ofBig Data, an increasing volume of data sources poses new demands on linkdiscovery. In particular, the problem of complex and time-consuming linkdetermination escalates with an increasing number of intersecting data sources.To overcome the restriction of pairwise linking of entities, holistic clusteringapproaches are needed to link equivalent entities of multiple data sources toconstruct integrated knowledge bases. In this context, the focus on efficiencyand scalability is essential. For example, reusing existing links or backgroundinformation can help to avoid redundant calculations. However, when dealingwith multiple data sources, additional data quality problems must also be dealtwith. This dissertation addresses these comprehensive challenges by designingholistic linking and clustering approaches that enable reuse of existing links.Unlike previous systems, we execute the complete data integration workflowvia a distributed processing system. At first, the LinkLion portal will beintroduced to provide existing links for new applications. These links act asa basis for a physical data integration process to create a unified representationfor equivalent entities from many data sources. We then propose a holisticclustering approach to form consolidated clusters for same real-world entitiesfrom many different sources. At the same time, we exploit the semantic typeof entities to improve the quality of the result. The process identifies errorsin existing links and can find numerous additional links. Additionally, theentity clustering has to react to the high dynamics of the data. In particular,this requires scalable approaches for continuously growing data sources withmany entities as well as additional new sources. Previous entity clusteringapproaches are mostly static, focusing on the one-time linking and clustering ofentities from few sources. Therefore, we propose and evaluate new approaches for incremental entity clustering that supports the continuous addition of newentities and data sources. To cope with the ever-increasing number of LinkedData sources, efficient and scalable methods based on distributed processingsystems are required. Thus we propose distributed holistic approaches to linkmany data sources based on a clustering of entities that represent the samereal-world object. The implementation is realized on Apache Flink. In contrastto previous approaches, we utilize efficiency-enhancing optimizations for bothdistributed static and dynamic clustering. An extensive comparative evaluationof the proposed approaches with various distributed clustering strategies showshigh effectiveness for datasets from multiple domains as well as scalability on amulti-machine Apache Flink cluster

Deliverable D9.3 Final Project Report

This document comprises the final report of LinkedTV. It includes a publishable summary, a plan for use and dissemination of foreground and a report covering the wider societal implications of the project in the form of a questionnaire

Practice and Prestige

Practice and Prestige: An Exploration of Neolithic Warfare, Bell Beaker Archery, and Social Stratification from an Anthropological Perspective investigates the appearance of the ‘archer’s package’ in select Bell Beaker burials raising questions of daily life, warfare, and social stratification during the Neolithic period. It draws on a recent study by the author that applied an anthropological methodology to assess the bone morphology of these skeletons for signs of specialised archery activity. These analyses revealed results at both a population as well as an individual level. In order to contextualise these osteological findings, the book explores the evidence for warfare and archery throughout the Neolithic period in general and the Bell Beaker period in particular. This perspective considers warfare to be a primary function of archery, thereby associating ‘archer’ burials with concepts of warfare and the warrior. A second perspective delves into prehistoric concepts of specialisation and social hierarchy in order to situate archers, archery, and warfare within potentially stratified populations. These two perspectives allow for the contextualisation of the anthropological results within a broad archaeological framework in which archers and archery were prominent parts of a complex Bell Beaker society

A survey of large-scale reasoning on the Web of data

As more and more data is being generated by sensor networks, social media and organizations, the Webinterlinking this wealth of information becomes more complex. This is particularly true for the so-calledWeb of Data, in which data is semantically enriched and interlinked using ontologies. In this large anduncoordinated environment, reasoning can be used to check the consistency of the data and of asso-ciated ontologies, or to infer logical consequences which, in turn, can be used to obtain new insightsfrom the data. However, reasoning approaches need to be scalable in order to enable reasoning over theentire Web of Data. To address this problem, several high-performance reasoning systems, whichmainly implement distributed or parallel algorithms, have been proposed in the last few years. Thesesystems differ significantly; for instance in terms of reasoning expressivity, computational propertiessuch as completeness, or reasoning objectives. In order to provide afirst complete overview of thefield,this paper reports a systematic review of such scalable reasoning approaches over various ontologicallanguages, reporting details about the methods and over the conducted experiments. We highlight theshortcomings of these approaches and discuss some of the open problems related to performing scalablereasoning