Investigating the use of semantic technologies in spatial mapping applications

Semantic Web Technologies are ideally suited to build context-aware information retrieval applications. However, the geospatial aspect of context awareness presents unique challenges such as the semantic modelling of geographical references for efficient handling of spatial queries, the reconciliation of the heterogeneity at the semantic and geo-representation levels, maintaining the quality of service and scalability of communicating, and the efficient rendering of the spatial queries' results. In this paper, we describe the modelling decisions taken to solve these challenges by analysing our implementation of an intelligent planning and recommendation tool that provides location-aware advice for a specific application domain. This paper contributes to the methodology of integrating heterogeneous geo-referenced data into semantic knowledgebases, and also proposes mechanisms for efficient spatial interrogation of the semantic knowledgebase and optimising the rendering of the dynamically retrieved context-relevant information on a web frontend

Symbiosis between the TRECVid benchmark and video libraries at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision

Audiovisual archives are investing in large-scale digitisation efforts of their analogue holdings and, in parallel, ingesting an ever-increasing amount of born- digital files in their digital storage facilities. Digitisation opens up new access paradigms and boosted re-use of audiovisual content. Query-log analyses show the shortcomings of manual annotation, therefore archives are complementing these annotations by developing novel search engines that automatically extract information from both audio and the visual tracks. Over the past few years, the TRECVid benchmark has developed a novel relationship with the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision (NISV) which goes beyond the NISV just providing data and use cases to TRECVid. Prototype and demonstrator systems developed as part of TRECVid are set to become a key driver in improving the quality of search engines at the NISV and will ultimately help other audiovisual archives to offer more efficient and more fine-grained access to their collections. This paper reports the experiences of NISV in leveraging the activities of the TRECVid benchmark

Development of Sustainable Tourism Destinations and Poverty Alleviation of Bangladesh

Tourism sector has been considered as the crucial sectors of many different countries of the world. And sustainable tourism brings enormous scope as a rapid growing economic sector on the basis of foreign exchange earnings and generation of employment opportunity and thereby elevating poverty from the country. The central aim of this study is to investigate the role of sustainable tourism in alleviating poverty from developing countries, especially the northern part of Bangladesh. For this purpose, the different tourism sites have been selected that are situated in Rajshahi region like Padma Garden, Varendra Museum and Shaheed Kamruzzaman Zoo. Rajshahi, the major tourist destination region in Bangladesh which is very beautiful and flourished that has a great chance to contribute country’s infrastructure and economic development. This study conducts a survey on 200 respondents in three different places of Rajshahi through the structured questionnaires, observation, interview and literature review. An exploratory research method was employed because the nature of the study was descriptive due to the fact that most of the respondents were illiterate or semi illiterate. Besides IBM SPSS Statistics 20 is being used to analyze the data. Through the factor analysis and other measurements tools this study expatiates the social, cultural, economic, environmental and other factors which touching the sustainability of Rajshahi and also provide recommendations about the required steps that needs to be taken into account to palliate and to manage the drawbacks of tourism to make Rajshahi as a sustainable tourism destination. Besides it reveals the relationship between tourism development and poverty alleviation in Bangladesh. The study also suggested few ways by which existing tourism can be promoted and well developed in Bangladesh thereby ensuring sustainable tourism development (STD) and economic growth

Software solutions for web information systems in digital humanities: review, analysis and comparative study

Research in the humanities increasingly depends on how information is structured and managed and how, on the basis of that information, new knowledge is produced. Additionally, participatory approaches, which often rely on web information systems as their supportive infrastructure, have made an impact on the most recent historiographical trends, in particular in the methodological framework of digital humanities. The aim of this paper was to produce, from an operational and implementation perspective, a review of software solutions frequently used to develop web information systems for research projects in humanities and cultural heritage, in order to provide an understanding of the various possibilities available and their positives and limitations, also based on different users’ requirements. An individual and comparative analysis of sixteen different application frameworks commonly used in these fields, either generic or developed for a specific research domain, has been carried out, considering their main functionalities, strengths, and weaknesses. The achieved results facilitate critical and reasoned decision-making among several available options, guiding the makers of those systems, both researcher(s) and developers(s), and providing them also with a common ground of terms and use cases to facilitate their necessary dialogue

Linked Data Construction and Utilization of Public Data for Tourist Information Service

Korea, as well as other developed countries in the field of information technology, is making various efforts to enhance the industrial competitiveness, not to mention the competitiveness of information services, by constructing and utilizing a data model through private use of public data and production, distribution and utilization of data. The purpose of this study is to design an ontology for tourist information service and construct linked data for 44 public data held by the City of Seoul to enhance the tourist information service. To do this, we analyzed the attributes of domestic public and tourist information and examined data linkage method. In other words, we added classes and properties to express tourist information based on schema ontology to link the information with external data, and proposed a method of providing tourist information using the linked data. The results of this study can reduce the time and costs for various private and public organizations, which use tourist information, in acquiring the tourist information, and help improve the industrial competitiveness through distribution and utilization of public data

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research