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

Developing a service endpoint to integrate semantic collection data from botanical databases and other information systems

The digitization of botanical collections has increasingly brought biodiversity research activities online. In order to make these data usable in the most efficient way, various obstacles have to be overcome. One such obstacle is a lack of ability to integrate information from other sources. While agreed upon, machine-understandable data standards such as ABCD have resulted in concepts that can already be described semantically, yet they are often transmitted as free-text information. The utilization of identifers for collectors has created opportunities for the integration of data from external information systems. However, since the identifers used are not standardized and vary from institution to institution, this work aims to develop a web service demonstrating that this problem can be overcome by applying appropriate Linked Data methods on centralized knowledge bases such as Wikidata. After eliciting requirements from participating CETAF institutions, an API was designed and implemented on this basis that can integrate biographic, bibliographic, and collection data into a single semantic file format by leveraging multiple endpoints. Thus, the work shows that diverse identifers used in collection databases do not have to be a problem. Moreover, missing IDs for important information sources such as Wikidata can be found and used. Heterogeneous data from different sources can be merged using previously defined mappings, although such data may not be available in semantic formats. Further sources of information could thus be added in the future. Furthermore, a future focus on annotated geographic identifers is also conceivable to additionally integrate semantic data on collection object found locations

Enhancing Usability in Linked Data Editing in Web Applications

Editing Linked Data documents represents an enormous challenge to users with limited technical expertise. These users struggle with language rules, relationships between entities, and interconnected concepts. These issues can result in frustration and low data quality. In order to respond to this challenge, we introduce a new editor, designed to facilitate effortless editing of JSON-LD documents, catering to both newcomers and advanced users. It is made for easy and seamless integration into other web-based applications and can be used similar to an HTML tag. The complexity of Linked Data arises from its graph-like structure, where entities are connected through relationships, forming a complex web of semantic connections. While this is advantageous for data integration and cross-platform compatibility, this effort presents significant barriers for those not well-versed in technical aspects. Even with the rise of user-friendly interfaces, manually modifying JSON-LD documents can lead to mistakes in structure and unintended disruptions to valuable linkages. Our proposed solution is a reusable web component based on modern browser technologies. It offers a view on the data which is easier to perceive than typical graph visualizations. This view shows the data as a list of named entities and their properties to simplify the visual complexity, without giving up on the conceptual graph structure. The list view brings the conceptual entities to the front, but still supports more technical structure elements like blank nodes, as they still exist as properties. Using schema.org’s machine-readable definitions, the editor understands how entities may or may not be connected. This is used to offer autocomplete functionality and avoid the invalid use of the schema.org vocabulary. This functionality can be extended using the integrated schema loader concept. From a technical point of view, the web component is an HTML Element which takes a (possibly empty) JSON-LD document. It then provides the modified document as a callback as soon as the user saves the document from within the editor. It is therefore easily integrable into existing projects based on arbitrary web frameworks and does not require any special interface implementations. The component is based on StencilJS, which allows generating wrappers for popular frameworks, for tighter integration. In conclusion, our web component empowers both new and experienced users to edit Linked Data seamlessly, overcoming the inherent challenges associated with manual JSON-LD modification. By simplifying the view on the graph structure and providing an intuitive and supporting interface, the component enhances the ease of use and accessibility of Linked Data editing. This holds significant potential for expediting data curation, collaboration, and integration, thus fostering a more inclusive and dynamic Linked Data ecosystem. This research has been supported by the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration (HMC) Platform, the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) and the German Research Foundation (DFG)

Conceptual Model of Resolution

In this document, we look at three aspects of the resolution of identifiers to a URI representing the resource: dynamic data citation, content negotiation, and machine-enabled licence information

Evaluation of Application Possibilities for Packaging Technologies in Canonical Workflows

In Canonical Workflow Framework for Research (CWFR) “packages” are relevant in two different directions. In data science, workflows are in general being executed on a set of files which have been aggregated for specific purposes, such as for training a model in deep learning. We call this type of “package” a data collection and its aggregation and metadata description is motivated by research interests. The other type of “packages” relevant for CWFR are supposed to represent workflows in a self-describing and self-contained way for later execution. In this paper, we will review different packaging technologies and investigate their usability in the context of CWFR. For this purpose, we draw on an exemplary use case and show how packaging technologies can support its realization. We conclude that packaging technologies of different flavors help on providing inputs and outputs for workflow steps in a machine-readable way, as well as on representing a workflow and all its artifacts in a self-describing and self-contained way