Web science: The digital-heritage case

and the human behaviour it induces at the micro, meso and macro level

Knowledge acquisition and the web

Knowledge-acquisition research started in the eighties as a small research community focusing on knowledge-intensive problems in relatively small domains. In this paper we look at the influence the Web has had on knowledge acquisition and vice versa. To this end we discuss in some depth four topics, namely the ontology language OWL, the vocabulary language SKOS, the notion of ontology alignment and the potential of semantic search. Even from this limited selection of research issues related to Web knowledge it is safe to conclude that the Web has had a large impact on knowledge acquisition, but also the other way around. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd

The Space package: Tight Integration Between Space and Semantics

Interpretation of spatial features often requires combined reasoning over geometry and semantics. We introduce the Space package, an open source SWI-Prolog extension that provides spatial indexing capabilities. Together with the existing semantic web reasoning capabilities of SWI-Prolog, this allows efficient integration of spatial and semantic queries and provides an infrastructure for declarative programming with space and semantics. There are few systems that provide indexing and reasoning facilities for both spatial and semantic data. A common solution is to combine separate semantic reasoning and geospatial services. Such loose coupling has the disadvantage that each service cannot make use of the statistics of the other. This makes optimization of such a service-oriented architecture hard. The SWI-Prolog Space and Semantic web packages provide a native Prolog interface to both spatial and semantic indexing and reasoning, which makes it easy to write combined query optimizers. Another advantage of the Space package is that it allows declarative logic programming, which means in practice that you say what you want to compute instead of how to compute it. The actual indexing machinery is encapsulated inside Prolog predicates. In this article we describe the interface of the Space package, compare its functionality to alternative software libraries, and show how to work with it using three example applications. These example illustrations include reasoning over movement patterns, dynamically loading geospatial linked data off the semantic web, and setting up a simple KML server. © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Combining vocabulary alignment techniques

Identifying alignments between vocabularies has become a central knowledge engineering activity. A plethora of alignment techniques has been developed over the past years. In this paper we present a case study in which we examine and evaluate the practical use of three typical alignment techniques. The study involves the alignment of two vocabularies used in a semantic-search engine for cultural-heritage objects. We show th

Linking historical ship records to a newspaper archive

Linking historical datasets and making them available on the Web has increasingly become a subject of research in the field of digital humanities. In this paper, we focus on discovering links between ships from a dataset of Dutch maritime events and a historical archive of newspaper articles. We apply a heuristic-based method for finding and filtering links between ship instances; subsequently, we use machine learning for article classification to be used for enhanced filtering in combination with domain features. We evaluate the resulting links, using manually annotated samples as gold standard. The resulting links are made available as Linked Open Data, thus enriching the original data