Publishing Statistical Data following the Linked Open Data Principles

This chapter introduces the promotion of statistical data to the Linked Open Data initiative in the context of the Web Index project. A framework for the publication of raw statistics and a method to convert them to Linked Data are also presented following the W3C standards RDF, SKOS, and OWL. This case study is focused on the Web Index project; launched by the Web Foundation, the Index is the first multi-dimensional measure of the growth, utility, and impact of the Web on people and nations. Finally, an evaluation of the advantages of using Linked Data to publish statistics is also presented in conjunction with a discussion and future steps sections.

Semi-Automatic Knowledge Extraction to Enrich Open Linked Data

In this chapter we present the analysis of the Wikipedia collection by means of the ELiDa framework with the aim of enriching linked data. ELiDa is based on association rule mining, an exploratory technique to discover relevant correlations hidden in the analyzed data. To compactly store the large volume of extracted knowledge and efficiently retrieve it for further analysis, a persistent structure has been exploited. The domain expert is in charge of selecting the relevant knowledge by setting filtering parameters, assessing the quality of the extracted knowledge, and enriching the knowledge with the semantic expressiveness which cannot be automatically inferred. We consider, as representative document collections, seven datasets extracted from the Wikipedia collection. Each dataset has been analyzed from two point of views (i.e., transactions by documents, transactions by sentences) to highlight relevant knowledge at different levels of abstraction.

Enabling the Matchmaking of Organizations and Public Procurement Notices by Means of Linked Open Data

The aim of this chapter is to present a proposal and a case study to describe the information about organizations in a standard way using the Linked Data approach. Several models and ontologies have been provided in order to formalize the data, structure and behaviour of organizations. Nevertheless, these tries have not been fully accepted due to some factors: (1) missing pieces to define the status of the organization; (2) tangled parts to specify the structure (concepts and relations) between the elements of the organization; 3) lack of text properties, and other factors. These divergences imply a set of incomplete approaches to formalize data and information about organizations. Taking into account the current trends of applying semantic web technologies and linked data to formalize, aggregate, and share domain specific information, a new model for organizations taking advantage of these initiatives is required in order to overcome existing barriers and exploit the corporate information in a standard way. This work is especially relevant in some senses to: (1) unify existing models to provide a common specification; (2) apply semantic web technologies and the Linked Data approach; (3) provide access to the information via standard protocols, and (4) offer new services that can exploit this information to trace the evolution and behaviour of the organization over time. Finally, this work is interesting to improve the clarity and transparency of some scenarios in which organizations play a key role, like e-procurement, e-health, or financial transactions.

News Trends Processing Using Open Linked Data

In this chapter we describe a news trends detection system built with the aim of detecting daily trends in a big collection of news articles extracted from the web and expose the computed trends data as open linked data that can be consumed by other components of the IT infrastructure. Due to the sheer amount of data being processed, the system relies on big data technologies to process raw news data and compute the trends that will be later exposed as open linked data. Thanks to the open linked data interface, data can be easily consumed by other components of the application, like a JavaScript front-end, or re-used by different IT systems. The case is a good example of how open linked data can be used to provide a convenient interface to big data systems.

A Semantic Framework for Touristic Information Systems

The Web is a crucial means for the dissemination of touristic information. However, most touristic information resources are stored directly in Web pages or in relational databases that are accessible through ad-hoc Web applications, and the use of automated processes to search, extract and interpret information can hardly be implemented. The Semantic Web technologies, aiming at representing the background knowledge about Web resources in a computational way, can be an important contribution to the development of such automated processes. This chapter introduces the concept of touristic object, giving special attention to the representation of temporal, spatial, and thematic knowledge. It also proposes a three-layered architecture for the representation of touristic objects in the Web. The central part is the domain layer, defining a Semantic Model for Tourism (SeMoT) to describe concepts, relationships, and constraints using ontologies. The data layer supports the mapping of touristic information in relational databases into Resource Description Framework (RDF) virtual graphs following the SeMoT specification. The application layer deals with the integration of information from different data sources into a unified knowledge model, offering a common vocabulary to describe touristic information resources. Finally, we also show how to use this framework for planning touristic itineraries.

Providing Information from Brazilian Politicians Using Linked Data

Since its inception, the Web has undergone continuous evolution in order to improve itself as a means of global communication and information sharing. Open Government Data are increasingly being published on the Web, contributing to the transparency and the reusability of public data. At the same time, the use of Linked Data has been increasing in recent years, enabling the development of better and smarter applications. This chapter presents a case on the publication of Open Government Data using the Linked Data practices, by creating a data set of Brazilian politicians with information collected from different sources. This is the first dataset providing Brazilian linked data.

Enhancing the Access to Public Procurement Notices by Promoting Product Scheme Classifications to the Linked Open Data Initiative

This chapter introduces the promotion of existing product scheme classifications to the Linked Open Data initiative in the context of the European Union and other official organizations such as United Nations. A common data model and an enclosed conversion method based on Semantic Web vocabularies such as SKOS are also presented to encode data and information following the W3C standards RDF and OWL. This work is applied to the e-procurement sector, more specifically, to enhance the access to the public procurement notices published in the European Union. Finally, an evaluation of the gain, in terms of expressivity, is reported with the objective of demonstrating the advantages of applying Linked Data to retrieve information resources.

Extraction and Prediction of Biomedical Database Identifier Using Neural Networks towards Data Network Construction

In this work, we investigate to what extent an automated construction of an integrated data network is possible. We propose a method that predicts and extracts cross-references from multiple life science databases and possible referenced data targets. We study the retrieval quality of our method and report on first, promising results.

Variables Performance for E-Services Acceptance

This case study examines the Web Electronic Service framework for a University in Australia. The department is in the process of developing and implementing a Web-based e-service system. The user experience to use e-services requires insight into the attributes that shape the experience variable. The descriptive data about the attributes that form the experience variable is provided in this study.

Role of Vocabularies for Semantic Interoperability in Enabling the Linked Open Data Publishing

In the spite of explosive growth of the Internet, information relevant to users is often unavailable even when using the latest browsers. At the same time, there is an ever-increasing number of documents that vary widely in content, format, and quality. The documents often change in content and location because they do not belong to any kind of centralized control. On the other hand, there is a huge number of unknown users with extremely diverse needs, skills, education, and cultural and language backgrounds. One of the solutions to these problems might be to use standard terms with meaning; this can be termed as controlled vocabulary (CV). Though there is no specific notion of CV, we can define it as a set of concepts or preferred terms and existing relations among them. These vocabularies play very important roles classifying the information. In this chapter, we focus the role of CV for publishing the web of data on the Web.