Lora Aroyo

The Semantic Web - ISWC 2011 - 10th International Semantic Web Conference, Bonn, Germany, October 23-27, 2011, Proceedings, Part I

The Semantic Web - ISWC 2011 - 10th International Semantic Web Conference, Bonn, Germany, October 23-27, 2011, Proceedings, Part I

Crowdsourcing in the cultural heritage domain: opportunities and challenges

Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (short: GLAMs) around the globe are beginning to explore the potential of crowdsourcing, i. e. outsourcing specific activities to a community though an open call. In this paper, we propose a typology of these activities, based on an empirical study of a substantial amount of projects initiated by relevant cultural heritage institutions. We use the Digital Content Life Cycle model to study the relation between the different types of crowdsourcing and the core activities of heritage organizations. Finally, we focus on two critical challenges that will define the success of these collaborations between amateurs and professionals: (1) finding sufficient knowledgeable, and loyal users; (2) maintaining a reasonable level of quality. We thus show the path towards a more open, connected and smart cultural heritage: open (the data is open, shared and accessible), connected (the use of linked data allows for interoperable infrastructures, with users and providers getting more and more connected), and smart (the use of knowledge and web technologies allows us to provide interesting data to the right users, in the right context, anytime, anywhere -- both with involved users/consumers and providers). It leads to a future cultural heritage that is open, has intelligent infrastructures and has involved users, consumers and providers.

The Semantic Web - ISWC 2013

As collaborative, or network science spreads into more science, engineering and medical fields, both the participants and their funders have expressed a very strong desire for highly functional data and information capabilities that are a) easy to use, b) integrated in a variety of ways, c) leverage prior investments and keep pace with rapid technical change, and d) are not expensive or timeconsuming to build or maintain. In response, and based on our accummulated experience over the last decade and a maturing of several key semantic web approaches, we have adapted, extended, and integrated several open source applications and frameworks that handle major portions of functionality for these platforms. At minimum, these functions include: an object-type repository, collaboration tools, an ability to identify and manage all key entities in the platform, and an integrated portal to manage diverse content and applications, with varied access levels and privacy options. At the same time, there is increasing attention to how researchers present and explain results based on interpretation of increasingly diverse and heterogeneous data and information sources. With the renewed emphasis on good data practices, informatics practitioners have responded to this challenge with maturing informatics-based approaches. These approaches include, but are not limited to, use case development; information modeling and architectures; elaborating vocabularies; mediating interfaces to data and related services on the Web; and traceable provenance. The current era of data-intensive research presents numerous challenges to both individuals and research teams. In environmental science especially, sub-fields that were data-poor are becoming data-rich (volume, type and mode), while some that were largely model/ simulation driven are now dramatically shifting to data-driven or least to data-model assimilation approaches. These paradigm shifts make it very hard for researchers used to one mode to shift to another, let alone produce products of their work that are usable or understandable by non-specialists. However, it is exactly at these frontiers where much of the exciting environmental science needs to be performed and appreciated.

Semantic annotation and search of cultural-heritage collections: The MultimediaN E-Culture demonstrator

In this article we describe a Semantic Web application for semantic annotation and search in large virtual collections of cultural-heritage objects, indexed with multiple vocabularies. During the annotation phase we harvest, enrich and align collection metadata and vocabularies. The semantic-search facilities support keyword-based queries of the graph (currently 20M triples), resulting in semantically grouped result clusters, all representing potential semantic matches of the original query. We show two sample search scenarios. The annotation and search software is open source and is already being used by third parties. All software is based on established Web standards, in particular HTML/XML, CSS, RDF/OWL, SPARQL and JavaScript.

Recommendations based on semantically enriched museum collections

This article presents the CHIP demonstrator for providing personalized access to digital museum collections. It consists of three main components: Art Recommender, Tour Wizard, and Mobile Tour Guide. Based on the semantically enriched Rijksmuseum Amsterdam collection, we show how Semantic Web technologies can be deployed to (partially) solve three important challenges for recommender systems applied in an open Web context: (1) to deal with the complexity of various types of relationships for recommendation inferencing, where we take a content-based approach to recommend both artworks and art-history topics; (2) to cope with the typical user modeling problems, such as cold-start for first-time users, sparsity in terms of user ratings, and the efficiency of user feedback collection; and (3) to support the presentation of recommendations by combining different views like a historical timeline, museum map and faceted browser. Following a user-centered design cycle, we have performed two evaluations with users to test the effectiveness of the recommendation strategy and to compare the different ways for building an optimal user profile for efficient recommendations. The CHIP demonstrator received the Semantic Web Challenge Award (third prize) in 2007, Busan, Korea.

Adaptive web-based educational hypermedia

This chapter describes recent and ongoing research to automatically personalize a learning experience through adaptive educational hypermedia. The Web has made it possible to give a very large audience access to the same learning material. Rather than offering several versions of learning material about a certain subject, for different types of learners, adaptive educational hypermedia offers personalized learning material without the need to know a detailed classification of users before starting the learning process. We describe different approaches to making a learning experience personalized, all using adaptive hypermedia technology. We include research on authoring for adaptive learning material (the AIMS and MOT projects) and research on modeling adaptive educational applications (the LAOS project). We also cover some of our ongoing work on the AHA! system, which has been used mostly for educational hypermedia but has the potential to be used in very different application areas as well.

Ontological Support for Web Courseware Authoring

In this paper we present an ontology-oriented authoring support system for Web-based courseware. This is an elaboration of our approach to knowledge classification and indexing in the previously developed system AIMS (Agent-based Information Management System) aimed at supporting students while completing learning tasks in a Web-based learning/training environment. By introducing ontology-based layers in the courseware authoring architecture we aim at using subject domain ontology as a basis for formal semantics and reasoning support in performing generic authoring tasks. We also focus on cooperative authoring, which allows re-usage and sets the basis for authoring collaboration. To exemplify our method we define a set of generic tasks related to concept-based courseware authoring and present their ontological support by the newly added operational and assistant layers in the AIMS architecture.

CHIP demonstrator: semantics-driven recommendations and museum tour generation

The main objective of the CHIP project is to demonstrate how Semantic Web technologies can be deployed to provide personalized access to digital museum collections. We illustrate our approach with the digital database ARIA of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. For the semantic enrichment of the Rijksmuseum ARIA database we collaborated with the CATCH STITCH project to produce mappings to Iconclass, and with the MultimediaN E-culture project to produce the RDF/OWL of the ARIA and Adlib databases. The main focus of CHIP is on exploring the potential of applying adaptation techniques to provide personalized experience for the museum visitors both on the Web site and in the museum.

Integrating open user modeling and learning content management for the semantic web

The paper describes an ontology-based approach for integrating interactive user modeling and learning content management to deal with typical adaptation problems, such as cold start and dynamics of the users knowledge, in the context of the Semantic Web. An integrated OntoAIMS system is presented and its viability discussed based on user studies. The work demonstrates some novel aspects, such as (a) ontological approach for integration of methods for eliciting and utilizing of user models; (b) improved adaptation functionality resulted from that integration, validated with real users; (c) support of interoperability and reusability of adaptive components.

AIMS: learning and teaching support for WWW-based education

This paper addresses an innovative approach to learning and teaching support in respect of information handling and knowledge management within web-based learning environments, where learners perform open learning tasks. The approach involves integrated domain-oriented informational support for both learners and instructors. It has three significant aspects: 1, building a domain ontology (represented as a concept map) and using it for defining course structures; 2, powerful visualisation and graphical navigation of the subject domain and the information search results; and 3, adaptation to the individual information needs and preferences of the learners. A system prototype called AIMS exemplifies the main ideas of this approach. It represents a task-based information and performance support system with an underlying agent-oriented architecture. Several pilot experiments are being performed within web-based courses in Dutch and Belgian universities to evaluate the system.