Web Science emerges

The relentless rise in Web pages and links is creating emergent properties, from social networks to virtual identity theft, that are transforming society. A new discipline, Web Science, aims to discover how Web traits arise and how they can be harnessed or held in check to benefit society. Important advances are beginning to be made; more work can solve major issues such as securing privacy and conveying trust

Linked Data - the story so far

The term “Linked Data” refers to a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the Web. These best practices have been adopted by an increasing number of data providers over the last three years, leading to the creation of a global data space containing billions of assertions— the Web of Data. In this article, the authors present the concept and technical principles of Linked Data, and situate these within the broader context of related technological developments. They describe progress to date in publishing Linked Data on the Web, review applications that have been developed to exploit the Web of Data, and map out a research agenda for the Linked Data community as it moves forward

The Semantic Web Revisited

The original Scientific American article on the Semantic Web appeared in 2001. It described the evolution of a Web that consisted largely of documents for humans to read to one that included data and information for computers to manipulate. The Semantic Web is a Web of actionable information--information derived from data through a semantic theory for interpreting the symbols.This simple idea, however, remains largely unrealized. Shopbots and auction bots abound on the Web, but these are essentially handcrafted for particular tasks; they have little ability to interact with heterogeneous data and information types. Because we haven't yet delivered large-scale, agent-based mediation, some commentators argue that the Semantic Web has failed to deliver. We argue that agents can only flourish when standards are well established and that the Web standards for expressing shared meaning have progressed steadily over the past five years. Furthermore, we see the use of ontologies in the e-science community presaging ultimate success for the Semantic Web--just as the use of HTTP within the CERN particle physics community led to the revolutionary success of the original Web. This article is part of a special issue on the Future of AI

Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration

The UK Research Funding Councils (RCUK) have proposed that all RCUK fundees should self-archive on the web, free for all, their own final drafts of all journal articles reporting their RCUK-funded research, in order to maximise their usage and impact. ALPSP (a learned publishers' association) now seeks to delay and block the RCUK proposal, arguing that it will ruin journals. All objective evidence from the past decade and a half of self-archiving, however, shows that self-archiving can and does co-exist peacefully with journals while greatly enhancing both author/article and journal impact, to the benefit of both. Journal publishers should not be trying to delay and block self-archiving policy; they should be collaborating with the research community on ways to share its vast benefits

Streamlining governmental processes by putting citizens in control of their personal data

Governments typically store large amounts of personal information on their citizens, such as a home address, marital status, and occupation, to offer public services. Because governments consist of various governmental agencies, multiple copies of this data often exist. This raises concerns regarding data consistency, privacy, and access control, especially under recent legal frameworks such as GDPR. To solve these problems, and to give citizens true control over their data, we explore an approach using the decentralised Solid ecosystem, which enables citizens to maintain their data in personal data pods. We have applied this approach to two high-impact use cases, where citizen information is stored in personal data pods, and both public and private organisations are selectively granted access. Our findings indicate that Solid allows reshaping the relationship between citizens, their personal data, and the applications they use in the public and private sector. We strongly believe that the insights from this Flemish Solid Pilot can speed up the process for public administrations and private organisations that want to put the users in control of their data

Linked open government data: lessons from Data.gov.uk

The movement to publish government data is an opportunity to populate the linked data Web with data of good provenance. The benefits range from transparency to public service improvement, citizen engagement to the creation of social and economic value. There are many challenges to be met before the vision is implemented, and this paper describes the efforts of the EnAKTing project to extract value from data.gov.uk, through the stages of locating data sources, integrating data into the linked data Web, and browsing and querying it

World-wide web: The information universe

The World-Wide Web (W 3) initiative is a practical project to bring a global information universe into existence using available technology. This article describes the aims, data model, and protocols needed to implement the “web”, and compares them with various contemporary systems. The Dream Pick up your pen, mouse or favorite pointing device and press it on a reference in this document- perhaps to the author’s name, or organization, or some related work. Suppose you are directly presented with the background material- other papers, the author’s coordinates, the organization’s address and its entire telephone directory. Suppose each of these documents has the same property of being linked to other original documents all over the world. You would have at your fingertips all you need to know about electronic publishing, high-energy physics or for that matter Asian culture. If you are reading this article on paper, you can only dream, but read on

Interactive, live mashup development through UI-oriented computing

This paper proposes to approach the problem of developing mashups by exclusively focusing on the SurfaceWeb, that is, the data and functionality accessible through common Web pages. Typically, mashups focus on the integration of resources accessible through the Deep Web, such as data feeds, Web services and Web APIs, that do not have own UIs – next to data extracted from Web pages. Yet, these resources can be wrapped with ad-doc UIs, suitably instrumented, and made accessible through the Surface Web. Doing so enables a UI-oriented computing paradigm that allows developers to implement mashups interactively and in a live fashion inside theirWeb browser, without having to program any line of code. The goal of this paper is to showcase UI-oriented computing in practice and to demonstrate its feasibility and potential