Wolfgang Halb

Linked Data and multimedia: the state of affairs

Linked Data is a way of exposing and sharing data as resources on the Web and interlinking them with semantically related resources. In the last three years significant amounts of data have been generated, increasingly forming a globally connected, distributed data space. For multimedia content, metadata are a key factor for efficient management, organization, and retrieval. However, the relationship between multimedia and Linked Data has been rarely studied, leading to a lack of mutual awareness and, as a consequence thereof, technological deficiencies. This article introduces the basic concepts of Linked Data in the context of multimedia metadata, and discusses techniques to generate, expose, discover, and consume Linked Data. It shows that a large amount of data sources exist, which are ready to be exploited by multimedia applications. The benefit of Linked Data in two multimedia-related applications is discussed and open research issues are outlined with the goal of bringing the research fields of multimedia and Linked Data closer together in order to facilitate mutual benefit.

Towards a commercial adoption of linked open data for online content providers

Descriptive case studies for a successful commercial adoption of Linked Data are still rare. Little has been said by the Linked Data community concerning the business potential of Linked Data and the challenges lying ahead for all enterprises, intending to use Linked Data in their professional production environments. Motivated from this lack of research and driven by the requirements of commercial content providers, we present a first version of our prototype, aiming to support professional online editors in producing valuable online content, enriched with (multimedia) information from Linked Data sources. We also include a preliminary evaluation of our prototype and a comparison of the prototype against other systems for semantic content enrichement. Though presenting ongoing research, this paper contributes to the current discussion on business aspects related to the provision or consumption of Linked Data.

Design of a Computer-assisted Assessment System for classroom formative assessment

We describe a number of high-level design decisions that we found essential for a Computer-assisted Assessment System that is to be deployed in school classrooms for supporting formative assessment by teachers and self-assessment by students. In addition, the system needs to provide information to parents. Our design decisions comprise the use of the Open Learner Model approach to make diagnostic information available to the various stakeholders, the use of a modelling methodology to describe assessment methods declaratively (glass-box), and the decision to embed assessment in a flexible manner into current and emerging learning environments. Implications for system architecture are also described.

Statement-Based Semantic Annotation of Media Resources

Currently the media production domain lacks efficient ways to organize and search for media assets. Ontology-based applications have been identified as a viable solution to this problem, however, sometimes being too complex for non-experienced users. We present a fast and easy to use approach to create semantic annotations and relationships of media resources. The approach is implemented in the SALERO Intelligent Media Annotation & Search system. It combines the simplicity of free text tagging and the power of semantic technologies and by that makes a compromise in the complexity of full semantic annotations. We present the implementation of the approach in the system and an evaluation of different user interface techniques for creating annotations.

Multimodal Semantic Analysis of Public Transport Movements

We present a system for multimodal, semantic analysis of person movements that incorporates data from surveillance cameras, weather sensors, and third-party information providers. The interactive demonstration will show the automated creation of a survey of passenger transfer behavior at a public transport hub. Such information is vital for public transportation planning and the presented approach increases the cost-effectiveness and data accuracy as compared to traditional methods.

Making business processes adaptive through semantically enhanced workflow descriptions

The research presented in this paper describes a methodology for making business processes described in BPEL adaptive by using semantically enhanced workflow descriptions. Based on widely used technologies for business process management in service oriented architectures new methods are introduced. They enable flexible process execution and service selection while maintaining the required level of resilience and security in such sensitive settings. An evaluation of the systems performance shows that the overhead introduced by the dynamic service selection is minor, given that the impact of adaptability on the entire process execution is extremely positive.

Agile Service Oriented Architecture with Adaptive Processes Using Semantically Annotated Workflow Templates

Although WS-BPEL is a widely used language for modeling executable business processes in service oriented architectures it is almost impossible to dynamically bind services at runtime taking complex constraints and optimisation goals into account. The approach presented in this paper uses semantically annotated workflow templates and extensions to introduce adaptability which enables agile service oriented architectures. The technological solution will be validated in a critical infrastructure environment where resilience and security play an important role.

Harnessing semantic web technologies for solving the dilemma of content providers

The current business model of online newspapers is to create content and publish it on the Web. Content in turn attracts users to the online presence of a newspaper. This attention of users is monetized by presenting advertisements to them. The revenue of online content providers is mainly generated by advertisement and strongly depends on the number of users consuming their content. Therefore - in general - content providers aim to attract as many users as possible with their content. However, to a large extent content providers make their content only available on one individual site in an unstructured form and consequently limit the accessibility and reusability of their content. Several reasons for this exist, among them are the way news have been published in the past, intellectual property rights and the way advertisements are currently sold. In this paper we inspect the current situation of online newspapers and propose solutions for the current dilemma of content providers. We illustrate how Semantic Web technologies can help content providers to open their content, i.e. making their content reusable and integrable for third parties, without loss in revenue.