Semantic Web applications: a framework for industry and business exploitation – What is needed for the adoption of the Semantic Web from the market and industry

In recent years, Semantic Web (SW) research has resulted in significant outcomes. Various industries have adopted SW technologies, while the ‘deep web’ is still pursuing the critical transformation point, in which the majority of data found on the deep web will be exploited through SW value layers. In this article we analyse the SW applications from a ‘market’ perspective. We are setting the key requirements for real-world information systems that are SW-enabled and we discuss the major difficulties for the SW uptake that has been delayed. This article contributes to the literature of SW and knowledge management providing a context for discourse towards best practices on SW-based information systems

Application of semantic web ontologies for the improvement of information exchange in existing buildings

Purpose: Facilitating the information exchange and interoperability between stakeholders during the life-cycle of an asset can be one of the fundamental necessities for developing an enhanced information exchange framework. Such a framework can also improve the successful accomplishment of building projects. This paper aims to use Semantic Web technologies for facilitating information exchange within existing building projects. Design/methodology/approach: In real-world building projects, the construction industry’s information supply chain may initiate from near scratch when new building projects are started resulting in diverse data structures represented in unstructured data sources, like Excel spreadsheets and documents. Large-scale data generated throughout a building's life-cycle requires exchanging and processing during an asset's Operation and Maintenance (O&M) phase. Building information modelling (BIM) processes and related technologies can address some of the challenges and limitations of information exchange and interoperability within new building projects. However, the use of BIM in existing and retrofit assets has been hampered by the challenges surrounding the limitations of existing technologies. Findings: The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it briefly outlines the framework previously developed for generating semantically enriched 3D retrofit models. Secondly, a framework is proposed focussing on facilitating the information exchange and interoperability for existing buildings. Semantic Web technologies and standards, such as Web Ontology Language and existing AEC domain ontologies are used to enhance and improve the proposed framework. Originality/value: The proposed framework is evaluated by implementing an example application and the Resource Description Framework data produced by the previously developed framework. The proposed approach makes a valuable contribution to the asset/facilities management (AM/FM) domain. It should be of interest to various FM practices for existing assets, such as the building information/knowledge management for design, construction and O&M stages of an asset’s life-cycle

EUCLID: EdUcational curriculum for the usage of LInked data

Linked Data has established itself as an emerging standard for the publication of structured data over the Web, enjoying amazing growth in terms of the number of organizations committing to use its best practices and technologies for ex- posing and interlinking data sets for seamless exchange, integration, and reuse. More and more ICT ventures offer innovative data management services on top of Linked (Open) Data, creating a demand for data practitioners with a back- ground in semantic technologies. Ensuring the availability of such expertise will prove crucial if European businesses are to reap the full benefits of the advanced data management technology, and the know-how accumulated over the past years by researchers, technology enthusiasts and early adopters in various European countries. EUCLID had a major contribution to this goal by providing a com- prehensive educational curriculum, supported by multi-modal training materials and state-of-the-art eLearning distribution channels, tailored to the real needs of data practitioners. Building upon experience reports from over twenty Linked Data projects with over forty companies and public offices in more than ten countries, complemented by feedback from hundreds of training events, and an in-depth analysis of the community discourse through mailing lists, discussion forums, Twitter, and the blogosphere, the curriculum focuses on techniques and software to integrate, query, and visualize Linked Data, as core areas in which practitioners state to require most assistance. It is realized as a combination of multi-modal learning resources, including an iBook published on iTunes U, and evaluated through webinars, f2f training, and continuous community feedback. By providing these key knowledge-transfer components, EUCLID will not only promote the industrial uptake of Linked Data best practices and technologies, but, most importantly, will contribute to their further development and consol- idation, and support the sustainability of the community, all essential aspects given the rapid pace at which the field has recently advanced

Using Linked Data in Learning Analytics

Learning Analytics has a lot to do with data, and the way to make sense of raw data in terms of the learner’s experience, behaviour and knowledge. In this article, we argue about the need for a closer relationship between the field of Learning Analytics and the one of Linked Data, which in our view constitutes an ideal data management layer for Learning Analytics. Based on our experience with organising the “Using Linked Data in Learning Analytics” tutorial at the Learning Analytics and Knowledge conference, we discuss the existing trends in the use of linked data and semantic web technologies, in general in education and in learning analytics specifically. We find that the emerging connections between the two fields are still, at the time of writing, much less prominent than one would expect considering the complementary nature of the considered technologies and practices. We therefore argue that specific efforts, somehow materialised through the tutorial and the work in the LinkedUp support action, are needed to ensure the realisation of the potential cross-benefits that combining Learning Analytics and Linked Data research could bring.LinkedU

Semantic Audio Analysis Utilities and Applications.

PhDExtraction, representation, organisation and application of metadata about audio recordings are in the concern of semantic audio analysis. Our broad interpretation, aligned with recent developments in the field, includes methodological aspects of semantic audio, such as those related to information management, knowledge representation and applications of the extracted information. In particular, we look at how Semantic Web technologies may be used to enhance information management practices in two audio related areas: music informatics and music production. In the first area, we are concerned with music information retrieval (MIR) and related research. We examine how structured data may be used to support reproducibility and provenance of extracted information, and aim to support multi-modality and context adaptation in the analysis. In creative music production, our goals can be summarised as follows: O↵-the-shelf sound editors do not hold appropriately structured information about the edited material, thus human-computer interaction is inefficient. We believe that recent developments in sound analysis and music understanding are capable of bringing about significant improvements in the music production workflow. Providing visual cues related to music structure can serve as an example of intelligent, context-dependent functionality. The central contributions of this work are a Semantic Web ontology for describing recording studios, including a model of technological artefacts used in music production, methodologies for collecting data about music production workflows and describing the work of audio engineers which facilitates capturing their contribution to music production, and finally a framework for creating Web-based applications for automated audio analysis. This has applications demonstrating how Semantic Web technologies and ontologies can facilitate interoperability between music research tools, and the creation of semantic audio software, for instance, for music recommendation, temperament estimation or multi-modal music tutorin

Semantic web learning technology design: addressing pedagogical challenges and precarious futures

Semantic web technologies have the potential to extend and transform teaching and learning, particularly in those educational settings in which learners are encouraged to engage with ‘authentic’ data from multiple sources. In the course of the ‘Ensemble’ project, teachers and learners in different disciplinary contexts in UK Higher Education worked with educational researchers and technologists to explore the potential of such technologies through participatory design and rapid prototyping. These activities exposed some of the barriers to the development and adoption of emergent learning technologies, but also highlighted the wide range of factors, not all of them technological or pedagogical, that might contribute to enthusiasm for and adoption of such technologies. This suggests that the scope and purpose of research and design activities may need to be broadened and the paper concludes with a discussion of how the tradition of operaismo or ‘workers’ enquiry’ may help to frame such activities. This is particularly relevant in a period when the both educational institutions and the working environments for which learners are being prepared are becoming increasingly fractured, and some measure of ‘precarity’ is increasingly the norm

Features for Killer Apps from a Semantic Web Perspective

There are certain features that that distinguish killer apps from other ordinary applications. This chapter examines those features in the context of the semantic web, in the hope that a better understanding of the characteristics of killer apps might encourage their consideration when developing semantic web applications. Killer apps are highly tranformative technologies that create new e-commerce venues and widespread patterns of behaviour. Information technology, generally, and the Web, in particular, have benefited from killer apps to create new networks of users and increase its value. The semantic web community on the other hand is still awaiting a killer app that proves the superiority of its technologies. The authors hope that this chapter will help to highlight some of the common ingredients of killer apps in e-commerce, and discuss how such applications might emerge in the semantic web

Addressing the tacit knowledge of a digital library system

Recent surveys, about the Linked Data initiatives in library organizations, report the experimental nature of related projects and the difficulty in re-using data to provide improvements of library services. This paper presents an approach for managing data and its "tacit" organizational knowledge, as the originating data context, improving the interpretation of data meaning. By analyzing a Digital Libray system, we prototyped a method for turning data management into a "semantic data management", where local system knowledge is managed as a data, and natively foreseen as a Linked Data. Semantic data management aims to curates the correct consumers' understanding of Linked Datasets, driving to a proper re-use

Expressing the tacit knowledge of a digital library system as linked data

Library organizations have enthusiastically undertaken semantic web initiatives and in particular the data publishing as linked data. Nevertheless, different surveys report the experimental nature of initiatives and the consumer difficulty in re-using data. These barriers are a hindrance for using linked datasets, as an infrastructure that enhances the library and related information services. This paper presents an approach for encoding, as a Linked Vocabulary, the "tacit" knowledge of the information system that manages the data source. The objective is the improvement of the interpretation process of the linked data meaning of published datasets. We analyzed a digital library system, as a case study, for prototyping the "semantic data management" method, where data and its knowledge are natively managed, taking into account the linked data pillars. The ultimate objective of the semantic data management is to curate the correct consumers' interpretation of data, and to facilitate the proper re-use. The prototype defines the ontological entities representing the knowledge, of the digital library system, that is not stored in the data source, nor in the existing ontologies related to the system's semantics. Thus we present the local ontology and its matching with existing ontologies, Preservation Metadata Implementation Strategies (PREMIS) and Metadata Objects Description Schema (MODS), and we discuss linked data triples prototyped from the legacy relational database, by using the local ontology. We show how the semantic data management, can deal with the inconsistency of system data, and we conclude that a specific change in the system developer mindset, it is necessary for extracting and "codifying" the tacit knowledge, which is necessary to improve the data interpretation process

Knowledge web: realising the semantic web... all the way to knowledge-enhanced multimedia documents

The semantic web and semantic web services are major efforts in order to spread and to integrate knowledge technology to the whole web. The Knowledge Web network of excellence aims at supporting their developments at the best and largest European level and supporting industry in adopting them. It especially investigates the solution of scalability, heterogeneity and dynamics obstacles to the full development of the semantic web. We explain how Knowledge Web results should benefit knowledge-enhanced multimedia applications