Tools and Resources

SemaPlorer -Making Sense of Collective Data

SemaPlorer is an easy to use application that allows end users to interactively explore and visualize a very large, mixed-quality and semantically heterogeneous distributed semantic data set in real-time. Its purpose is to acquaint oneself about a city, touristic area, or other area of interest. By visualizing the data using a map, media, and different context views, we clearly go beyond simple storage and retrieval of large numbers of triples.
http://btc.isweb.uni-koblenz.de/
 

A Model of Events based on a Foundational Ontology

The lack of a formal event model hinders interoperability in
distributed event-based systems. Consequently, we developed a formal
model of events, called F. The model bases on an upper-level ontology
and provides comprehensive support for all aspects of events such as
time and space, objects and persons involved, as well as the structural
aspects, namely mereological, causal, and correlational relationships.
The event model ßrovides a flexible means for event composition,
modeling of event causality and correlation, and allows for
representing different interpretations of the same event. The
foundational event model F is developed in a pattern-oriented approach,
modularized in different ontologies, and can be easily extended by
domain specific ontologies.

http://isweb.uni-koblenz.de/eventmodel/

Visual Retrieval and Localization Tool

With the WeKnowIt Visual Retrieval and Localization web-based tool
(ViRaL) you can make queries with city photos, find similar ones and
identify them on the map. Using a large database of geo-tagged images
from Flickr™, ViRaL can match a given query and return a ranked list of
images according to visual similarity. The geo-tags of the returned
images are used to provide an estimate of the location of the query
photo and display it using Google Maps™. The most common tags of these
images are also shown, giving a hint of e.g. what landmark might be
depicted in the query.

The tool is available online at:
http://www.image.ntua.gr/iva/tools/viral

csxPOI - Collaborative Creation of Semantic Points of Interest as Linked Data on the Mobile Phone

The novel mobile application csxPOI (short for: collaborative, semantic, and context-aware points-of-interest) enables its users to collaboratively create, share, and modify semantic points of interest (POI). Semantic POIs describe geographic places with explicit semantic properties of a collaboratively created ontology. As the ontology includes multiple subclassifications and instantiations and as it links to DBpedia, the richness of annotation goes far beyond mere textual annotations such as text. With the intuitive interface of csxPOI, users can easily create, delete, and modify their POIs and those shared by others. Thereby, the users adapt the structure of the ontology underlying the semantic annotations of the POIs. Data mining techniques are employed to cluster and thus improve the quality of the collaboratively created POIs. The semantic POIs and collaborative POI ontology are published as Linked Open Data.

The tool is available online at:
http://isweb.uni-koblenz.de/Research/systeme/csxPOI

Multimedia Metadata Ontology (M3O)

Existing metadata models and metadata standards are not sufficient to describe the semantics of rich, structured multimedia content in formats such as SMIL, SVG, and Flash. They are either conceptually too narrow, focus on a specific media type only, cannot be used and combined together, or are not practically applicable. This hampers the retrieval of such presentations by search engines today and makes their archival and management a difficult task. Existing W3C standards for rich multimedia presentations like SMIL and SVG foresee the use of the Resource Description Framework to describe the semantics of the multimedia content. However, until today there is no appropriate metadata model or best practice available that explains how to describe and annotate rich, structured multimedia content. To fill this gap, we have developed the Multimedia Metadata Ontology (M3O) for annotating rich, structured multimedia presentations. The M3O provides a generic modeling framework for representing sophisticated multimedia metadata. It allows for integrating the features provided by the existing metadata models and metadata standards. With the M3O, we make the semantics of rich multimedia presentations machine-readable and machine-understandable. The M3O is used with our SemanticMM4U framework for the multi-channel generation of semantically-rich multimedia presentations.

http://www.uni-koblenz-landau.de/koblenz/fb4/AGStaab/Research/ontologies...

City Exploration by Use of Hybrid Clustering (ClustTour)

ClustTour is an online city exploration application that helps users identify interesting spots in a city by use of photo clusters corresponding to landmarks and events. ClustTour is based on an efficient landmark and event detection scheme for tagged photo collections. The proposed scheme relies on the combination of a graph-based photo clustering algorithm, making use of both visual and tag information of photos, with a cluster classiffication and merging module. ClustTour creates a map-based visualization of the identified photo clusters that are classified in prominent categories and are filterable by time and tag. Such an application can greatly facilitate the task of knowing a city through its landmarks and events. So far, the demo has been based on a large photo dataset focused on Barcelona, and we are in the process of expanding it to 20 major cities of Europe. Furthermore, we intend to provide an Android application that complements the current web-based version of ClustTour. 
http://www.clusttour.gr

ER Log Merging and Management (WERL)

Managing and reviewing the log files that are created by the Emergency Response (ER) personnel in the course of an emergency incident is a critical task for understanding and improving the implemented ER actions. A major challenge arising in this task is the fact that multiple log files are created by different members of the ER personnel. As a result, extensive manual effort is necessary in order to merge and align the incoming log entries in order to make them suitable for review. In addition, critical information for the incident under study, such as person names and locations, is also manually extracted. The WeKnowIt ER Log (WERL) Manager is a web-based application that facilitates the task of ER log merging and management by automatically merging and aligning multiple log files and extracting ER-relevant semantic information from log entry text. WERL makes use of the representation patterns of Event Model F in order to facilitate information sharing and reuse. Furthermore, WERL enables interactive exploration of the collected log files by means of temporal, location and semantic filters.
http://mklab.iti.gr:8080/LogMergerDemo
 
 

Sparks 

Semantic Web technologies have been designed to enable computers to understand and process the information distributed on the Web. OWL/RDF representations are clearly targeting programs whereas HTML is designed for human beings. On the other hand, Microformats and more recently RDFa have been proposed for integrating ontological information into standard XHTML documents. This integration is currently used for third party systems such as screen scrappers and search engines. Ontological information of a document is not only useful for programs but can also be used for making the underlying knowledge explicit by augmenting visually its look and format. The Sparks 03 Browser is a pratical application of some of the concepts developed throughout the Sparks framework. Specifically, it uses the overlay concept for augmenting visually standard documents by adding new mecanisms of interaction with the underlining knowledge. Ozone Browser won the second prize at SFSW2009. 
http://oak.dcs.shef.ac.uk/sparks/
 

Attention-Streams 

Attention Streams (AS) can be described as a semantic realtime attention tracker. Contrary to usual interest extraction approaches, AS analyses your interests as you navigate between pages. This process is totally transparent to the user since the tracking engine runs as a page background process. Attention Streams provides a simple application that uses these tags for querying different online services in realtime given your most important attentions streams. The application enables the user to discover new information based on its interests. Contrary to the existing recommendation services, AS can discovers content that fits the full user context based on his location and attention. AS does not rely on generic interests for finding recommendation but on the evolving interests of the user. As a consequence, AS is providing highly contextual and ambient recommendations that can be used for supporting the user activity. The passive recommendations minimize the explicit user interaction with the system thus avoiding the user distraction: the user can just check the system if he needs specific information since it is always updated with his current activity. Attention Streams were awarded the 3rd Prize in the AI Mashup Challenge at ESWC 2010. 
http://nebula.dcs.shef.ac.uk/sparks/astreams
 

CURIO: Collaborative User Resource Interaction Ontology 

The CURIO Vocabulary is a general purpose ontology designed for managing the collaborative discussion of user generated resources in a unified and collaborative fashion. Despite being developed in the context of WeKnowIt, the vocabulary can be easily adapted for a particular need thanks to its flexible resource model. CURIO can be considered as an aggregative ontology since it aggregates and connect many concept from different standard ontology in a formalised way. This vocabulary reuse most of its concept from the SIOC vocabulary but incorporate many classes and properties from other ontology such as DCTerms, GeoOWL, CommonTag and OPO. The ontology is based around the concept of Resource. A Resource is a specific class that holds a user generated content. Currently different class exists. Particularly, the Document and Event  classes enables the combination of virtual events with a real one. 
http://purl.org/net/curio/ns
 

Veracity: Modeling and Proving Trustworthiness of Web Resources 

The World Wide Web has evolved into a distributed network of interactive web applications facilitating the publication of information on a large scale. Judging whether such information can be trusted is a difficult task for humans, often leading to blind trust. The veracity ontology allows trust to be placed in web content by web users and agents. Moreover the approach differs from current work by allowing the trustworthiness of web content to be asserted through the provision of machine readable proofs (i.e. by citing another piece of information, or stating the credentials of the user/agent). 
http://purl.org/net/veracity/ns