Sean O'Riain

Linking building data in the cloud: Integrating cross-domain building data using linked data

Within the operational phase buildings are now producing more data than ever before, from energy usage, utility information, occupancy patterns, weather data, etc. In order to manage a building holistically it is important to use knowledge from across these information sources. However, many barriers exist to their interoperability and there is little interaction between these islands of information. As part of moving building data to the cloud there is a critical need to reflect on the design of cloud-based data services and how they are designed from an interoperability perspective. If new cloud data services are designed in the same manner as traditional building management systems they will suffer from the data interoperability problems. Linked data technology leverages the existing open protocols and W3C standards of the Web architecture for sharing structured data on the web. In this paper we propose the use of linked data as an enabling technology for cloud-based building data services. The objective of linking building data in the cloud is to create an integrated well-connected graph of relevant information for managing a building. This paper describes the fundamentals of the approach and demonstrates the concept within a Small Medium sized Enterprise (SME) with an owner-occupied office building.

XBRL and open data for global financial ecosystems: A linked data approach

Information professionals performing business activity related investigative analysis must routinely associate data from a diverse range of Web based general-interest business and financial information sources. XBRL has become an integral part of the financial data landscape. At the same time, Open Data initiatives have contributed relevant financial, economic, and business data to the pool of publicly available information on the Web but the use of XBRL in combination with Open Data remains at an early state of realisation. In this paper we argue that Linked Data technology, created for Web scale information integration, can accommodate XBRL data and make it easier to combine it with open datasets. This can provide the foundations for a global data ecosystem of interlinked and interoperable financial and business information with the potential to leverage XBRL beyond its current regulatory and disclosure role. We outline the uses of Linked Data technologies to facilitate XBRL consumption in conjunction with non-XBRL Open Data, report on current activities and highlight remaining challenges in terms of information consolidation faced by both XBRL and Web technologies.

Querying linked data using semantic relatedness: a vocabulary independent approach

Linked Data brings the promise of incorporating a new dimension to the Web where the availability of Web-scale data can determine a paradigmatic transformation of the Web and its applications. However, together with its opportunities, Linked Data brings inherent challenges in the way users and applications consume the available data. Users consuming Linked Data on the Web, or on corporate intranets, should be able to search and query data spread over potentially a large number of heterogeneous, complex and distributed datasets. Ideally, a query mechanism for Linked Data should abstract users from the representation of data. This work focuses on the investigation of a vocabulary independent natural language query mechanism for Linked Data, using an approach based on the combination of entity search, a Wikipediabased semantic relatedness measure and spreading activation. The combination of these three elements in a query mechanism for Linked Data is a new contribution in the space. Wikipedia-based relatedness measures address existing limitations of existing works which are based on similarity measures/term expansion based on WordNet. Experimental results using the query mechanism to answer 50 natural language queries over DBPedia achieved a mean reciprocal rank of 61.4%, an average precision of 48.7% and average recall of 57.2%, answering 70% of the queries.

Approximate semantic matching of heterogeneous events

Event-based systems have loose coupling within space, time and synchronization, providing a scalable infrastructure for information exchange and distributed workflows. However, event-based systems are tightly coupled, via event subscriptions and patterns, to the semantics of the underlying event schema and values. The high degree of semantic heterogeneity of events in large and open deployments such as smart cities and the sensor web makes it difficult to develop and maintain event-based systems. In order to address semantic coupling within event-based systems, we propose vocabulary free subscriptions together with the use of approximate semantic matching of events. This paper examines the requirement of event semantic decoupling and discusses approximate semantic event matching and the consequences it implies for event processing systems. We introduce a semantic event matcher and evaluate the suitability of an approximate hybrid matcher based on both thesauri-based and distributional semantics-based similarity and relatedness measures. The matcher is evaluated over a structured representation of Wikipedia and Freebase events. Initial evaluations show that the approach matches events with a maximal combined precision-recall F1 score of 75.89% on average in all experiments with a subscription set of 7 subscriptions. The evaluation shows how a hybrid approach to semantic event matching outperforms a single similarity measure approach.

The Role of Community-Driven Data Curation for Enterprises

With increased utilization of data within their operational and strategic processes, enterprises need to ensure data quality and accuracy. Data curation is a process that can ensure the quality of data and its fitness for use. Traditional approaches to curation are struggling with increased data volumes, and near real-time demands for curated data. In response, curation teams have turned to community crowd-sourcing and semi-automatedmetadata tools for assistance. This chapter provides an overview of data curation, discusses the business motivations for curating data and investigates the role of community-based data curation, focusing on internal communities and pre-competitive data collaborations. The chapter is supported by case studies from Wikipedia, The New York Times, Thomson Reuters, Protein Data Bank and ChemSpider upon which best practices for both social and technical aspects of community-driven data curation are described.

W3P: Building an OPM based provenance model for the Web

The Web is evolving into a complex information space where the unprecedented volume of documents and data will offer to the information consumer a level of information integration and aggregation that has up until now not been possible. Indiscriminate addition of information can, however, come with inherent problems such as the provision of poor quality or fraudulent information. Provenance represents the cornerstone element which will enable information consumers to assess information quality, which will play a fundamental role in the continued evolution of the Web. This paper investigates the characteristics and requirements of provenance on the Web, describing how the Open Provenance Model (OPM) can be used as a foundation for the creation of W3P, a provenance model and ontology designed to meet the core requirements for the Web.

Towards unified and native enrichment in event processing systems

Events are encapsulated pieces of information that flow from one event agent to another. In order to process an event, additional information that is external to the event is often needed. This is achieved using a process called event enrichment. Current approaches to event enrichment are external to event processing engines and are handled by specialized agents. Within large-scale environments with high heterogeneity among events, the enrichment process may become difficult to maintain. This paper examines event enrichment in terms of information completeness and presents a unified model for event enrichment that takes place natively within the event processing engine. The paper describes the requirements of event enrichment and highlights its challenges such as finding enrichment sources, retrieval of information items, finding complementary information and its fusion with events. It then details an instantiation of the model using Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies. Enrichment is realised by dynamically guiding a spreading activation algorithm in a Linked Data graph. Multiple spreading activation strategies have been evaluated on a set of Wikipedia events and experimentation shows the viability of the approach.

A DISTRIBUTIONAL STRUCTURED SEMANTIC SPACE FOR QUERYING RDF GRAPH DATA

The vision of creating a Linked Data Web brings together the challenge of allowing queries across highly heterogeneous and distributed datasets. In order to query Linked Data on the Web today, end users need to be aware of which datasets potentially contain the data and also which data model describes these datasets. The process of allowing users to expressively query relationships in RDF while abstracting them from the underlying data model represents a fundamental problem for Web-scale Linked Data consumption. This article introduces a distributional structured semantic space which enables data model independent natural language queries over RDF data. The center of the approach relies on the use of a distributional semantic model to address the level of semantic interpretation demanded to build the data model independent approach. The article analyzes the geometric aspects of the proposed space, providing its description as a distributional structured vector space, which is built upon the Generalized Vector Space Model (GVSM). The final semantic space proved to be flexible and precise under real-world query conditions achieving mean reciprocal rank = 0.516, avg. precision = 0.482 and avg. recall = 0.491.

Editorial: Querying linked data graphs using semantic relatedness: A vocabulary independent approach

Linked Data brings inherent challenges in the way users and applications consume the available data. Users consuming Linked Data on the Web, should be able to search and query data spread over potentially large numbers of heterogeneous, complex and distributed datasets. Ideally, a query mechanism for Linked Data should abstract users from the representation of data. This work focuses on the investigation of a vocabulary independent natural language query mechanism for Linked Data, using an approach based on the combination of entity search, a Wikipedia-based semantic relatedness measure and spreading activation. Wikipedia-based semantic relatedness measures address existing limitations of existing works which are based on similarity measures/term expansion based on WordNet. Experimental results using the query mechanism to answer 50 natural language queries over DBpedia achieved a mean reciprocal rank of 61.4%, an average precision of 48.7% and average recall of 57.2%.

Leveraging matching dependencies for guided user feedback in linked data applications

This paper presents a new approach for managing integration quality and user feedback, for entity consolidation, within applications consuming Linked Open Data. The quality of a dataspace containing multiple linked datasets is defined in term of a utility measure, based on domain specific matching dependencies. Furthermore, the user is involved in the consolidation process through soliciting feedback about identity resolution links, where each candidate link is ranked according to its benefit to the dataspace; calculated by approximating the improvement in the utility of dataspace utility. The approach evaluated on real world and synthetic datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of utility measure; through dataspace integration quality improvement that requires less overall user feedback iterations.