Open accessibility data interlinking

This paper presents the research of using Linked Open Data to enhance accessibility data for accessible travelling. Open accessibility data is the data related to the accessibility issues associated with geographical data, which could benefit people with disabilities and their special needs. With the aim of addressing the gap between users’ special needs and data, this paper presents the results of a survey of open accessibility data retrieved from four different sources in the UK. An ontology based data integration approach is proposed to interlink these datasets together to generate a linked open accessibility repository, which also links to other resources on the Linked Data Cloud. As a result, this research would not only enrich the open accessibility data, but also contribute to a novel framework to address accessibility information barriers by establishing a linked data repository for publishing, linking and consuming the open accessibility data

WhatTheySaid: enriching UK Parliament debates with Semantic Web

To improve the transparency of politics, the UK Parliament Debate archives have been published online for a long time. However there is still a lack of efficient way to deeply analysis the debate data. WhatTheySaid is an initiative to solve this problem by applying natural language processing and semantic Web technologies to enrich UK Parliament Debate archives and publish them as linked data. It also provides various data visualisations for users to compare debates over years

Travelling for all

Travelling is listed as the top difficulty for people with limitations, impairments or disabilities in their day-to-day activities. This paper demonstrates the barriers people face then they are travelling and reviews the current approaches or projects that are trying to enhance travelling for people with special needs. After exposing the limitation of these approaches, such as the lack of universal standards and methodologies, various isolated data and barriers of data achievement, this paper demonstrates the advantages of a linked data approach, namely dramatic data growth, domain specified data integration and automatic linking and reasoning to other resources. Therefore, it proposes a possible solution to build an accessible travelling service application to benefit travelling for all people

Linked data for accessibility: from techniques to users

The advanced characteristics of Linked Data drive the dramatic growth of accessible public data. With very few accessibility research projects applying Linked Data , this paper reviews the challenges of accessibility and proposes the approach to use Linked Data to link the user preference and real-time environment data to address issues like user focus, data integration and isolated systems. Further research on Linked Data for accessibility would not only benefit people with disabilities but also contribute to the development of smart citie

Using open accessibility data for accessible travelling

This paper summarizes the research of using open accessibility data for accessible travelling. With the aim of addressing the gap between users’ special needs and complex accessibility barriers in real world, we proposed a personalized accessible travelling framework based on open accessibility data for people with mobility impairments. This research mainly investigates the use of Linked Open Data to establish a public linked open accessibility repository integrated from het-erogeneous data types, such as sensor data, transport data, building data as well as geographic data. Based on this repository and user preference data, we proposed accessible travelling frame-work to address the travelling problems faced for people with mobility impairment

A survey of open accessibility data

This paper presents the research of using Linked Data for enhancing accessibility data, especially for accessible travelling. With the aim of addressing the gap between users’ special needs and accessibility data, this research initially explores the current situation of open accessibility data. Open accessibility data is the data related to the accessibility issues and associated with geographical data, which could benefit people with disabilities or special needs. This paper proposed a survey of open accessibility data in UK based on the datasets retrieved from five different resources. After examining the features of each dataset, a mapping approach using Semantic Web technologies is proposed to interlink these datasets together to generate a linked open accessibility repository and link this repository to other resources on the Linked Open Data Cloud (LODC). As a result, this research would not only benefit people with disabilities, but also contribute to a novel method to address accessibility information barriers by establishing a linked open accessibility data repository for publishing, integrating and consuming the accessibility data

Apply the linked data principles to a decision support system for accessible travelling

The development of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) empowers digital inclusion, which can bring benefits to all people. However, according to the literature review of current research related to accessible travelling, most projects are focused on improving assistive technologies, devices, services, and user interfaces regardless of whether they deliver useful or optimised content to satisfy users’ special needs. Limitations and challenges are exposed from these projects which are aiming to address the accessible travelling problems faced by people with disabilities, namely the lack of accessibility metadata, data isolation, urgent needs of methods for data integration, and better algorithms for decision making. Therefore, the conceptual model of Linked Data-driven decision support system (DSS) for accessible travelling is proposed in this research to address these problems. Using a Linked Data driven approach, this research explores the areas of open accessibility data, accessibility data integration and interlinking. Moreover, there are three the ontologies proposed to address the needs of standard vocabularies to publish open accessibility data. Furthermore, the research also discusses and demonstrates strategies to apply the decision support methods to Linked Data. As a result, this research would not only benefit people with disabilities or special needs but also contribute to the research of a novel model to address accessibility information barriers and accessible travel planning issues by applying the Linked Data principles to DSSs to provide decision support

Introduction to workshop: overcoming accessibility gaps on the social web

WebSci’21 workshop on AI and Inclusion aims to invite both academic and industry experts in the area of digital accessibility and AI to offer research and their individual views as to a range of digital accessibility issues they perceive as causing barriers to access, alongside possible solutions and strategies powered by AI technologies to provide an inclusive social web