John Samuel

Representation and visualization of urban fabric through historical documents

Documents serve an important role in understanding change in urban fabric. The available multidimensional (spatial, temporal and thematic) information in these documents narrate not only the various features of the elements of the urban fabric but also notifies their changes during time. CityGML standard is used to spatially and temporally represent the city objects. But it misses features to represent city lifecycle and its linked documents. The first part has been addressed recently. In this article, we propose an extension to CityGML standard to integrate city objects and relevant associated documents. Proposing a solution based on standards permits data interoperability. We also briefly describe how these documents are visualized in our current 3D urban environment prototype built over CityGML.

Collaborative Approach to Developing a Multilingual Ontology: A Case Study of Wikidata

Last several years have seen the growing shift towards collaborative development of ontologies. Collaborative ontology development has become important particularly for large-scale projects involving multilingual contributors from different countries. Collaborators propose, discuss, create and modify ontologies and this whole process must be understood. In this article, Wikidata has been taken as an example to understand how community-driven approach is used to develop a multilingual ontology and in the subsequent building of a knowledge base.

Generic Web Service Wrapper for Mediation based Data Warehousing

The growing availability of specialized web services targeting only a particular niche has resulted in the use of multiple web services by enterprises for their daily activities. It is significantly difficult for resource-crunched small enterprises to write applications to integrate with each and every dependent web service. Overcoming the missing wide scale adoption of machine readable standards (WSDL, WADL, SAWSDL), we explore the capability to integrate with numerous web services using only the basic web standards (HTTP, JSON, XML, XSD, XSLT) and declarative languages (SQL, datalog queries). In this paper, we specifically focus on the role of a generic web service wrapper to support this declarative approach to describe, query and extract enterprise data from web services.

Analyzing and Visualizing Translation Patterns of Wikidata Properties.

From multi-domain multilingual Wikipedia websites to a single-domain multilingual Wikidata site, online collaboration has taken a major stride. However, achieving a multilingual experience is a rather challenging task for a highly evolving site like Wikidata built with the collaboration of contributors from around the world. It is important to let the contributors analyse and discover how properties are translated and also detect potential problems. This article focuses on developing a tool for understanding and visualizing the translation patterns of Wikidata.

A Declarative Approach to Information Extraction Using Web Service API

The number of diverse web services that we use regularly is significantly increasing. Most of these services are managed by autonomous service providers. However it has become very difficult to get a unified view of this widespread data, which in all likelihood is substantially important to enterprises. A classical approach followed by the enterprises is to write applications using imperative languages making use of the web service API. Such an approach is not scalable and is difficult to maintain considering the ever-evolving web services landscape. This tutorial explores a semi-automated declarative approach to information extraction from the web services using a classical virtual data integration approach, namely mediation, that relies on a well-known query rewriting algorithm, namely the inverse-rules algorithm. It is targeted to audience from both industry as well as academia and requires a basic understanding of database principles and web technologies.

Challenges in integrating multiple heterogeneous and autonomous web services using mediation approach

The use of diverse web services has simplified routine tasks but it has resulted in loss of direct control over the data. This shift from traditional self-controlled databases to heterogeneous, autonomous web services can be increasingly seen among small and medium scale enterprises. Enterprises dependent on web services require a generic approach to integrate with multiple web services. The classical mediation approach from the data integration field provides a uniform query interface to diverse data sources hiding the underlying heterogeneity, but its utilization with current generation web services API has several research and industrial challenges which will be described in this article.

Integration of Multiple Heterogeneous and Autonomous Web Services using Mediation Approach: Open Challenges

Regular users and enterprises are now increasingly dependent on web services. This growing dependence on one hand has simplified routine tasks, but on the other hand it has resulted in loss of direct control over the data. Nevertheless, both users and enterprises require simplified and generic solutions to access their data. The classical mediation approach from the data integration field provides a uniform query interface to diverse data sources hiding the underlying heterogeneity. But using this approach over multiple heterogeneous and autonomous web services has several open challenges. In this article, we will take a look at some of these challenges that need to be addressed for achieving a fully automated solution.