Linked Open Data

Public science is critical to the economy and to society. However, much of the beneficial impact of scientific research only occurs when scientific knowledge is disseminated broadly and is used by others. This thesis examines the emerging policy, law, and practice of facilitating open access to scientific research data. One particular focus is to examine the open data policies recently introduced by research funders and publishers, and the potential in these for driving the practice of open scientific data into the future. This thesis identifies five major stumbling blocks to sustainable open scientific data. Firstly, the prevailing ‘mindset’ that facilitating open access to data is analogous to facilitating open access to publications and, therefore, research data can easily be shared, with research funders and librarians effectively leading the process. Secondly, the unclear meaning of the term ‘data’, which causes confusion among stakeholders. Thirdly, ‘misunderstood incentives’ for data sharing and the additional inputs required from researchers. Fourthly, ‘data privacy’—an issue that only applies to selected research datasets, and yet appears to dominate the discussion about open research data. Finally, there is ‘copyright law’, which poses challenges at different stages of data release and reuse. In this thesis, I argue that the above problems can be addressed using a staged model for open scientific data. I draw specifically on the practice with open scientific data at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) and the practice of sharing clinical trial data to argue that open data can be shared at various stages of processing and diversification. This model is supplemented by recommendations proposing changes to existing open data mandates and the introduction of a text and data mining exemption into Australian copyright law.

Linked open data in authoring virtual exhibitions

The web of Linked Open Data (LOD) has a prominent and rapid evolution recently. Over the last few years, LOD had developed to involve a wide range of various domains. Due to these facts, and the great interconnections among linked open datasets, linked data integration task had gained a huge attention and became a focal point of research. LOD applications aim to incorporate data from different LOD sources. Unfortunately, these sources of data are heterogeneous in schema and/or in vocabularies. Due to this heterogeneity, numerous challenges are emerging that have to be overcome. In this paper, a LOD integration framework is proposed, which aims to tackle these challenges. It works on integrating academic LOD datasets that reside in different LOD repositories with intrinsic schema and vocabularies heterogeneity. An automatic mapping technique in the integration processes is proposed in this paper. Consequently, an obvious decrease in execution time for the entire integration process, as well as, a great progress in the integrated data quality assessment metrics has been achieved.

Open data is becoming increasingly popular in a wide range of service domains; however, most open datasets in Taiwan remain separate. The lack of linked open data (LOD) makes it difficult to locate and combine open datasets for the creation of innovative applications. In this study, we sought to facilitate the spread of open data in Taiwan using a novel approach referred to as define–produce–invoke (DPI). The proposed scheme employs a newly defined data query language, called LODQL (LOD query language), to allow the definition of rules for the generation of LOD by data experts. We also developed an LOD engine, which is able to produce linked open datasets and allow application developers to access LOD by invoking RESTful services. This scheme also allows data visualizations indicating the relevance of open datasets and the associations among open data items. Experiments demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed DPI approach.

While the biomedical community has published several “open data” sources in the last decade, most researchers still endure severe logistical and technical challenges to discover, query, and integrate heterogeneous data and knowledge from multiple sources. To tackle these challenges, the community has experimented with Semantic Web and linked data technologies to create the Life Sciences Linked Open Data (LSLOD) cloud. In this paper, we extract schemas from more than 80 biomedical linked open data sources into an LSLOD schema graph and conduct an empirical meta-analysis to evaluate the extent of semantic heterogeneity across the LSLOD cloud. We observe that several LSLOD sources exist as stand-alone data sources that are not inter-linked with other sources, use unpublished schemas with minimal reuse or mappings, and have elements that are not useful for data integration from a biomedical perspective. We envision that the LSLOD schema graph and the findings from this research will aid researchers who wish to query and integrate data and knowledge from multiple biomedical sources simultaneously on the Web.

Linked Open Data (LOD) is a huge effort in the direction of making the Web of Data a reality. The LOD cloud consists of about 200 datasets contributed by several independent data providers from various domains such as Publications, Geography, Government, Media, Biology and Drugs etc. The data is represented in RDF and SPARQL is the query language. Due to the open nature of the data and its heterogeneous origin, it is often the case that a real-world entity appears in different datasets and with different names. When such entities are to be reported in the query results, a mechanism of rank ordering them becomes essential. In this paper, we propose a new framework for calculating the importance scores of datasets and also resources inside the datasets. As consensus is a key element that adds value to the data in the Web of Data, we base our ranking framework on constructs that are used to express sameness or equivalence among the entities in RDF data. We also make use of the underlying graph structure of LOD in the framework. The framework is experimentally verified on the Billion Triple Challenge (BTC-2010) dataset. The results indicate that the framework is successful in giving entities from the most relevant dataset a higher score compared to other datasets.

Linked Open Data (LOD) has gained widespread adoption by large industries as well as non-profit organizations and governmental organizations. One of the early adopters of LOD technologies are libraries. Since the “early years”, libraries have been key use case and innovation driver for LOD and significantly contributed to the adoption of semantic technologies. The first part of this paper presents selected success stories of current activities in the Linked Data Library community. In a nutshell, these studies include (1) a conceptualization of the Linked Data Value chain, (2) a case study for consumption of Linked Data in a digital journal environment, and (3) an approach to publish metadata on the Semantic Web from an Open Access repository. These stories reveal a strong relationship between LOD in libraries and research topics addressed in traditional fields of computer science such as artificial intelligence, databases, and knowledge discovery. Thus, in the second part of this paper we systematically review the relation of LOD in digital libraries from a computer science perspective. We discuss current LOD research topics such as data integration and schema integration, distributed data management, and others. These challenges have been discussed with computer scientists at a German national database meetup as well as with librarians from ZBW—Leibniz Information Center for Economics and at international librarians meetup.

Companies and institutions now realize the potential of Linked Open Data (LOD) and they start publishing their own data as LOD. However, publishing LOD is still a challenging task. One of the main reasons is a lack of user friendly tooling which would properly support the whole LOD publishing process. The process typically consists of source data extraction, transformation to RDF, alignment with commonly used vocabularies, linking to other datasets, computing metadata, publishing on the web as a dump, loading into a triplestore and recording the dataset in a data catalog such as CKAN. In this paper we present LinkedPipes ETL, a tool for ETL-like LOD publishing, which mainly focuses on supporting such LOD publishing workflows in a user friendly way. In addition, the tool also eases consumption of already existing LOD data sources as it addresses some of the practical issues associated with it. Finally, the tool itself uses Linked Data technologies for representation of the ETL processes. We describe LinkedPipes ETL and its main distinguishing features in context of the use cases in which the tool has already been deployed. They include an institution of public administration, a municipality, a university, a software company and an open data initiative.

Interoperability is the main challenge on the way to efficiently find and access spatial data on the web. Significant contributions regarding interoperability have been made by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), where web service standards to publish and download spatial data have been established. The OGCs GeoSPARQL specification targets spatial data on the Web as Linked Open Data (LOD) by providing a comprehensive vocabulary for annotation and querying. While OGC web service standards are widely implemented in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and offer a seamless service infrastructure, the LOD approach offers structured techniques to interlink and semantically describe spatial information. It is currently not possible to use LOD as a data source for OGC web services. In this chapter we make a suggestion for technically linking OGC web services and LOD as a data source, and we explore and discuss its benefits. We describe and test an adapter that enables access to geographic LOD datasets from within OGC Web Feature Service (WFS), enabling most current GIS to access the Web of Data. We discuss performance tests by comparing the proposed adapter to a reference WFS implementation.

Solace in Social Media: Women Unite Under COVID-19

The Health Care Network (HCN ) related information of a country is one of the most influential fields of data sharing and integrating with disparate data sources of physical world and compatible health care organizations on the exponentially growing World Wide Web (WWW ) for improving and maintaining health related services of mass people. Although these accessible HCN related unstructured or semi-structured data in multiple heterogeneous repositories on the web originate challenges to develop a smarter method in finding specific information using traditional keyword-based search engines. Moreover, it is also a formidable task to harmonize spatial data with our HCN for exploring implicit knowledge that assist people in making their decisions regarding of health services and it is getting researchers' attention at a rapid pace. In this regard, we applied the Physical-Cyber-Social (PCS) computing approach on HCN that demonstrates the feasibility of semantic web technologies to represent domain information in the machine understandable format and we also integrate data from accessible Cyber Space Data Sources (CSDSs) to address these challenges. We published our HCN related data using Resource Description Framework (RDF ) to build a knowledge-base. We call this repository as HCN - BD, which is HCN related machine understandable data source of Bangladesh. This yields a huge knowledge graph with 0.25 million nodes, i.e. RDF triples to facilitate reasoning important information pattern by a graph based query language, SPARQL. Furthermore, we integrate this semantic repository with our generic spatial knowledge-base, Geo - Bangladesh, a machine understandable geographic data source related to the administrative structure of Bangladesh, to examine health care locations using SPARQL and therefore, we achieved the semantic interoperability in our Linked Open Data (LOD) application. Moreover, our research effectively addresses nearest health care centers using real time spatial data from Global Positioning System (GPS) and maps these locality to increase searching ability by mass people.

This article intends to review the underlying concepts and technologies of the Semantic Web and the potential they provide for metadata management covering bibliographic resources. To get closer to a semantic web data space, different libraries are adhering to the initiatives making their traditional Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) operational on the web through SKOS techniques, as well as releasing bibliographic data under open licenses (open bibliographic data) and publishing it with Linked Data (LD) mechanisms. LD meaningful semantic connections create the Web of Data, a global database representing the first practical step to the Semantic Web. Here interoperable data can be processed independently of application, platform or domain, providing rich retrieval results produced by powerful query languages. From a library perspective, a problem statement is a global promotion within the Library community of understanding and of adoption of Linked Open Data (LOD), of LODe-BD recommendations, as well as releasing bibliographic data as Linked Library Data (LLD). In this way, different bibliographic datasets could become full members of the Semantic Web making interoperable different knowledge datasets of heterogeneous web communities.

In this article, we describe a hybrid recommender system (RS) in the artistic and cultural heritage area, which takes into account the activities on social media performed by the target user and her friends, and takes advantage of linked open data (LOD) sources. Concretely, the proposed RS (1) extracts information from Facebook by analyzing content generated by users and their friends; (2) performs disambiguation tasks through LOD tools; (3) profiles the active user as a social graph; (4) provides her with personalized suggestions of artistic and cultural resources in the surroundings of the user’s current location. The last point is performed by integrating collaborative filtering algorithms with semantic technologies in order to leverage LOD sources such as DBpedia and Europeana. Based on the recommended points of cultural interest, the proposed system is also able to suggest to the active user itineraries among them, which meet her preferences and needs and are sensitive to her physical and social contexts as well. Experimental results on real users showed the effectiveness of the different modules of the proposed recommender.

IntroductionDrug utilization is currently assessed through traditional data sources such as big electronic medical records (EMRs) databases, surveys, and medication sales. Social media and internet data have been reported to provide more accessible and more timely access to medications' utilization.ObjectiveThis review aims at providing evidence comparing web data on drug utilization to other sources before the COVID-19 pandemic.MethodsWe searched Medline, EMBASE, Web of Science, and Scopus until November 25th, 2019, using a predefined search strategy. Two independent reviewers conducted screening and data extraction.ResultsOf 6,563 (64%) deduplicated publications retrieved, 14 (0.2%) were included. All studies showed positive associations between drug utilization information from web and comparison data using very different methods. A total of nine (64%) studies found positive linear correlations in drug utilization between web and comparison data. Five studies reported association using other methods: One study reported similar drug popularity rankings using both data sources. Two studies developed prediction models for future drug consumption, including both web and comparison data, and two studies conducted ecological analyses but did not quantitatively compare data sources. According to the STROBE, RECORD, and RECORD-PE checklists, overall reporting quality was mediocre. Many items were left blank as they were out of scope for the type of study investigated.ConclusionOur results demonstrate the potential of web data for assessing drug utilization, although the field is still in a nascent period of investigation. Ultimately, social media and internet search data could be used to get a quick preliminary quantification of drug use in real time. Additional studies on the topic should use more standardized methodologies on different sets of drugs in order to confirm these findings. In addition, currently available checklists for study quality of reporting would need to be adapted to these new sources of scientific information.

Publication and Usage of Official Czech Pension Statistics Linked Open Data