The Time Traveler's Guide to Semantic Web Research: Analyzing Fictitious Research Themes in the ESWC "Next 20 Years" Track

What will Semantic Web research focus on in 20 years from now? We asked this question to the community and collected their visions in the "Next 20 years" track of ESWC 2023. We challenged the participants to submit "future" research papers, as if they were submitting to the 2043 edition of the conference. The submissions - entirely fictitious - were expected to be full scientific papers, with research questions, state of the art references, experimental results and future work, with the goal to get an idea of the research agenda for the late 2040s and early 2050s. We received ten submissions, eight of which were accepted for presentation at the conference, that mixed serious ideas of potential future research themes and discussion topics with some fun and irony. In this paper, we intend to provide a survey of those "science fiction" papers, considering the emerging research themes and topics, analysing the research methods applied by the authors in these very special submissions, and investigating also the most fictitious parts (e.g., neologisms, fabricated references). Our goal is twofold: on the one hand, we investigate what this special track tells us about the Semantic Web community and, on the other hand, we aim at getting some insights on future research practices and directions.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, 2 table

Land cover validation game

Land cover data constitutes highly useful information to monitor the extension and status of land resources, hence it has been realized how important it is to have accurate land cover data. Here, an interactive WebGIS is built in order to validate GlobeLand30 global land cover data. The Game with a Purpose (GWAP) human-based computation technique is adopted. The system is based on crowdsourcing, i.e. multiple users play the game to validate land cover classifications, thus increasing the confidence level of the validation

Urban IoT ontologies for sharing and electric mobility

Cities worldwide are facing the challenge of digital information governance: different and competing service providers operating Internet of Things (IoT) devices often produce and maintain large amounts of data related to the urban environment. As a consequence, the need for interoperability arises between heterogeneous and distributed information, to enable city councils to make data-driven decisions and to provide new and effective added value services to their citizens. In this paper, we present the Urban IoT suite of ontologies, a common conceptual model to harmonise the data exchanges between municipalities and service providers, with specific focus on the sharing mobility and electric mobility domains

Ontologies, rules and linked data to support Crisis Managers Training

In a catastrophic event, human behaviour determines the efficacy of crisis management. Timeliness of reactions and exactness of decisions are the most relevant factors. In this context, training plays an important role to prepare Crisis Managers. To re-create crisis scenarios, PANDORA employs a Crisis Planner based on Timeline-based Planning and Scheduling technologies. This Planner creates training storyboards of "events" for the trainees (e.g. news videos, phone calls or e-mails) and "reacts" to trainees\u27 strategic decisions, triggering consequent events to continue the training session. To simulate the scenario, a great effort is required to understand the problem specificity and to model the relevant aspects. Within the PANDORA project, we are building the Crisis Knowledge Base (CKB) collecting and maintaining the "knowledge" about crisis scenarios and training sessions

Semi-automatic generation of quizzes and learning artifacts from Linked Data

In this position paper, we illustrate how Linked Data can be effectively used in a Technology-enhanced Learning scenario. Specifically, we aim at using structured data to semi-automatically generate artifacts to support learning delivery and assessment: natural language facts, Q&A systems and quizzes, also used with a gaming favour, can be creatively generated to help teachers and learners to support and improve the learning path. Moreover, those artifacts can in turn be published on the Web as Linked Data, thus directly contributing to make the Web a global data space also for learning purposes

3cixty: Building comprehensive knowledge bases for city exploration

International audiencePlanning a visit to Expo Milano 2015 or simply touring in Milan are activities that require a certain amount of a priori knowledge of the city. In this paper, we present the process of building such comprehensive knowledge bases that contain descriptions of events and activities, places and sights, transportation facilities as well as social activities, collected from numerous static, near-and real-time local and global data providers, including hyper local sources such as the Expo Milano 2015 official services and several social media platforms. Entities in the 3cixty KB are deduplicated, interlinked and enriched using semantic technologies. The 3cixty KB is empowering the ExplorMI 360 multi-device application, which has been officially endorsed by the E015 Technical Management Board and has gained the patronage of Expo Milano in 2015, thus has offered a unique testing scenario for the 20 million visitors along the 6 months of the exhibit. In 2016-2017, new knowledge bases have been created for the cities of London, Madeira and Singapore, as well as for the entire French Cote d'Azur area. The 3cixty KB is accessible at https: //kb.3cixty.com/sparql while ExplorMI 360 at https://www.3cixty.com and in the Google Play Store and Apple App Store

3cixty@Expo Milano 2015: Enabling Visitors to Explore a Smart City

-Planning a visit to Expo Milano 2015 or simply touring in Milan are activities that require a certain amount of a priori knowledge of the city. In this paper, we present the process of building such a comprehensive knowledge base, the 3cixty KB, that contains descriptions of events, places, transportation facilities and social activities, collected from numerous static, near-and real-time local and global data providers, including Expo Milano 2015 official services and several social media platforms. Entities in the 3cixty KB are deduplicated, interlinked and enriched using semantic technologies. The 3cixty KB is empowering the Ex-plorMI 360 multi-device application, which has been officially endorsed by the E015 Technical Management Board and has gained the patronage of Expo Milano 2015, thus offering a unique testing scenario for the 20 million expected visitors along the 6 months of the exhibit. As of Septem-ber 7th, 2015 the 3cixty KB contains unique descriptions of 18, 665 events, 758 artists, 225, 552 places, 9, 342 transportation facilities, 95, 570 illustrating photos and 94, 789 reviews contributed by 81, 944 users. The 3cixty KB is accessible at http://3cixty.eurecom.fr/sparql while Ex-plorMI 360 at https://www.3cixty.com

Knowledge Graphs Evolution and Preservation -- A Technical Report from ISWS 2019

One of the grand challenges discussed during the Dagstuhl Seminar "Knowledge Graphs: New Directions for Knowledge Representation on the Semantic Web" and described in its report is that of a: "Public FAIR Knowledge Graph of Everything: We increasingly see the creation of knowledge graphs that capture information about the entirety of a class of entities. [...] This grand challenge extends this further by asking if we can create a knowledge graph of "everything" ranging from common sense concepts to location based entities. This knowledge graph should be "open to the public" in a FAIR manner democratizing this mass amount of knowledge." Although linked open data (LOD) is one knowledge graph, it is the closest realisation (and probably the only one) to a public FAIR Knowledge Graph (KG) of everything. Surely, LOD provides a unique testbed for experimenting and evaluating research hypotheses on open and FAIR KG. One of the most neglected FAIR issues about KGs is their ongoing evolution and long term preservation. We want to investigate this problem, that is to understand what preserving and supporting the evolution of KGs means and how these problems can be addressed. Clearly, the problem can be approached from different perspectives and may require the development of different approaches, including new theories, ontologies, metrics, strategies, procedures, etc. This document reports a collaborative effort performed by 9 teams of students, each guided by a senior researcher as their mentor, attending the International Semantic Web Research School (ISWS 2019). Each team provides a different perspective to the problem of knowledge graph evolution substantiated by a set of research questions as the main subject of their investigation. In addition, they provide their working definition for KG preservation and evolution