Ontology for Representing Human Needs

Need satisfaction plays a fundamental role in human well-being. Hence understanding citizens' needs is crucial for developing a successful social and economic policy. This notwithstanding, the concept of need has not yet found its place in information systems and online tools. Furthermore, assessing needs itself remains a labor-intensive, mostly offline activity, where only a limited support by computational tools is available. In this paper, we make the first step towards employing need management in the design of information systems supporting participation and participatory innovation by proposing OpeNeeD, a family of ontologies for representing human needs data. As a proof of concept, OpeNeeD has been used to represent, enrich and query the results of a needs assessment study in a local citizen community in one of the Vienna districts. The proposed ontology will facilitate such studies and enable the representation of citizens' needs as Linked Data, fostering its co-creation and incentivizing the use of Open Data and services based on it

Using Ontologies for the Design of Data Warehouses

Obtaining an implementation of a data warehouse is a complex task that forces designers to acquire wide knowledge of the domain, thus requiring a high level of expertise and becoming it a prone-to-fail task. Based on our experience, we have detected a set of situations we have faced up with in real-world projects in which we believe that the use of ontologies will improve several aspects of the design of data warehouses. The aim of this article is to describe several shortcomings of current data warehouse design approaches and discuss the benefit of using ontologies to overcome them. This work is a starting point for discussing the convenience of using ontologies in data warehouse design.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figure

Exploring manuscripts: sharing ancient wisdoms across the semantic web

Recent work in digital humanities has seen researchers in-creasingly producing online editions of texts and manuscripts, particularly in adoption of the TEI XML format for online publishing. The benefits of semantic web techniques are un-derexplored in such research, however, with a lack of sharing and communication of research information. The Sharing Ancient Wisdoms (SAWS) project applies linked data prac-tices to enhance and expand on what is possible with these digital text editions. Focussing on Greek and Arabic col-lections of ancient wise sayings, which are often related to each other, we use RDF to annotate and extract seman-tic information from the TEI documents as RDF triples. This allows researchers to explore the conceptual networks that arise from these interconnected sayings. The SAWS project advocates a semantic-web-based methodology, en-hancing rather than replacing current workflow processes, for digital humanities researchers to share their findings and collectively benefit from each other’s work