WalkOnWeb: An Electronic and Collaborative Publishing Platform for Recreational Routes

Even though there is nothing new about the idea, ontologies are a hot topic. Built for many reasons and appliances, the use of ontologies in real-life applications remains limited. The WalkOnWeb project has developed ontologies in the area of recreational routing and applied them in a real application. This paper will explain these applications and how they use ontologies. With the „Walk Planner” hikers can plan their trip by looking for trails, creating new routes and getting detailed information in print, web or mobile format. The „Mobile Hiking Assistant” guides the walker in the field by displaying rich, location-based information. Authors can create and describe routes using the „Authoring Tool”. By creating ontologies and using them in these applications the WalkOnWeb project has developed a system to publish electronic routes in a flexible and personalized way.status: publishe

Abstract Ontologies at Work: Publishing Multilingual Recreational Routes Using Ontologies

Even though there is nothing new about the idea, ontologies are a hot topic. Built for many reasons and appliances, the use of ontologies in real-life applications remains limited. The WalkOnWeb project has developed ontologies in the area of recreational routing and applied them in a real application. This demonstration will show these applications and explain how they use ontologies. With the “Walk Planner” hikers can plan their trip by looking for trails, creating new routes and getting detailed information in print, web or mobile format. Authors can create and describe routes using the “Authoring Tool”. By creating ontologies and using them in these applications the WalkOnWeb project has developed a system to publish electronic routes in a flexible and personalized way

SMART SEARCH IN NEWSPAPER ARCHIVES USING TOPIC MAPS

The OmniPaper project has implemented three information retrieval prototypes in the area of electronic news publishing. One prototype uses SOAP as communication protocol between the central system and a number of distributed news archives. The second prototype uses an RDF metadata database, enabling direct metadata queries to the central system. Finally the Topic Map prototype uses query expansion and semantic linking for smart metadata search. The Topic Map prototype enhances the search experience by implementing a knowledge layer that combines the semantic content of a lexical database, consisting of concepts and keywords, with a metadata-set of newspaper articles. The linking between both is currently implemented at the level of keywords but will be developed at the level of concepts in the final prototype. The knowledge layer has been designed from a Topic Map point of view, although the XTM syntax has not been used to avoid performance issues. The consortium’s adopted view on information publishing and retrieval considers querying and navigation as two very related actions that can both be captured under the name “search for relevant information”. Navigation forces the user to follow predefined paths whereas querying enables the user to look freely for a suitable starting point. The query and navigation functionality is provided through a web engine and is build on top of the information structure of the knowledge layer

Abstract “Braillekrant ” and “DiGiKrant”: a Daily Newspaper for Visually Disabled Readers

At present Belgium is one of the rare countries that have a daily newspaper accessible to visually impaired readers. Both an electronic version (DiGiKrant) and a Braille paper version (BrailleKrant) are published on a day-to-day basis. This paper shows what challenges exist for visually impaired readers to read a paper and how these challenges can be overcome. It further explains how the accessible newspapers are being created. In the publication process the XML standard is extensively used, not only as an exchange format between content providers and the publishers, but also as a format enabling a usable access to the electronic newspaper by the visually impaired reader. The paper shows which information formats are used and how the process of conversion between them works.