Let’s Downscale the Semantic Web !Christophe Guéret @cgueret

April 12-13 2014

Set of tools and best practices to publish and link semantically rich (self-explanatory), structured, data using W3C standards

Related keywords: Linked Data, Open Data, Linked Open Data, Ontologies, Description Logic, Reasoning, RDFa, SPARQL, RDF, …

Very nice fit for our DownScale goals

“Semantic Web” ?

Publish data as Web sites

Web of Documents Web of Data

href

href

http://dbpedia.org/resource/Amsterdam

dbpedia:Netherands

ex:locatedIn

“Amsterdam”@nl

ex:name

DownScaling ?

The opposite of UpScaling ;-)

Example data sharing scenario

Interesting open data

Users

We build this ...

Web hosted service

Interesting open data

Users

Data flow

whereas the situation is like that...

Web hosted service

Interesting open data

Users

Data flow

???

but this is what users actually need

Web hosted service

Interesting open data

Users

Data flow

Nowadays, everything scales-up

Information systems are designed to● Accomodate a target community of users

○ Least common denominator features

● Manage large amount data and users○ Big servers, Big data

● Work in connected ways (with offline caches)○ Cloud-based servers + connectivity

… or sometimes does not

● No stable high speed internet○ low bandwidth, sneaker nets, local mesh …

● Different languages or literacy levels○ local dialects, …

● Different conceptual models○ “big city” means something very different in China

and in Europe

A solution ? Downscale!

Research agenda around 4 elements

Infrastructures

Systems optimised for decentralised and “off-line by default” use

Entity Registry System (ERS)

General purpose Web-less Linked Open Data platform

Adds Semantic Web tooling to Sugar

Entity Registry System

● Nodes have 3 possible roles○ Contributor, Bridge, Aggregator

● Only contributors store data (statements)○ private, cache and public stores

Drawing from http://slides.com/cgueret/ers

Interfaces

Voice and visual centric interfaces that blend-in and are usable in several (local) languages

Listen to market prices Share news Plan community meetings

RadioMarché

● Farmers use basic phones to interact with the data

● Designed to blend-in (living labs approach)

Relevancy

Take local meanings into account, give priority to the most relevant data

SampLD

Find out what part of a dataset is most relevant to store

DataHives

Reasoner that derives facts based on local meaning

Data

Integrate development related datasets with other data published as Linked Open Data

API2LOD

Expose the content of any API as Linked Open Data

IATI2LOD

Expose the content of the IATI registry as Linked Open Data

+ participation to the Land Portal re-development

IATI2LOD

● Put IATI data in context of other data sets

Jump in!

● ICT4D course at the VU University Amsterdam + ICT4D event on May 16

● Discussion groups○ Development Linked Data W3C community group○ WorldWideSemanticWeb google group

● Upcoming Downscale2014 and LD4D 2014