LODE: Linking Digital Humanities Content to the Web of Data

Numerous digital humanities projects maintain their data collections in the form of text, images, and metadata. While data may be stored in many formats, from plain text to XML to relational databases, the use of the resource description framework (RDF) as a standardized representation has gained considerable traction during the last five years. Almost every digital humanities meeting has at least one session concerned with the topic of digital humanities, RDF, and linked data. While most existing work in linked data has focused on improving algorithms for entity matching, the aim of the LinkedHumanities project is to build digital humanities tools that work "out of the box," enabling their use by humanities scholars, computer scientists, librarians, and information scientists alike. With this paper, we report on the Linked Open Data Enhancer (LODE) framework developed as part of the LinkedHumanities project. With LODE we support non-technical users to enrich a local RDF repository with high-quality data from the Linked Open Data cloud. LODE links and enhances the local RDF repository without compromising the quality of the data. In particular, LODE supports the user in the enhancement and linking process by providing intuitive user-interfaces and by suggesting high-quality linking candidates using tailored matching algorithms. We hope that the LODE framework will be useful to digital humanities scholars complementing other digital humanities tools

Automatic validation of learning object compositions

Course construction using reusable learning objects is becoming ever more popular due to its’ efficiency. The course creator who uses this methodology may face problems due to the fact that he or she is not as intimately involved in the creation of every element of the course. In this paper we discuss one such problem faced by course creator known as “the competency gap”. Here, we define the competency gap, explain how it can be identified and suggest ways of correcting the problem

Aberdeen University Ontology Reuse Stack

Postprin

Ontology engineering for simulation component reuse

Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) simulation packages (CSPs) are widely used in industry, although they have yet to operate across organizational boundaries. Reuse across organizations is restricted by the same semantic issues that restrict the inter-organizational use of web services. The current representations of web components are predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinning required to support discovery on the emerging semantic web. Semantic models, in the form of ontology, utilized by web service discovery and deployment architectures provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved through the use of simulation component ontologies to identify required components at varying levels of granularity (including both abstract and specialized components). Selected simulation components are loaded into a CSP, modified according to the requirements of the new model and executed. The paper presents the development of an ontology, connector software and web service discovery architecture. The ontology is extracted from simulation scenarios involving airport, restaurant and kitchen service suppliers. The ontology engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter-organizational simulation, adopting a less intrusive interface between participants. Although specific to CSPs the work has wider implications for the simulation community