This week I went to the UK Ontology Network meeting hosted at Keele University. There was an interesting array of talks in the programme showing the breadth of work going on in the UK.
Last week the Bioschemas Community hosted a workshop. The focus of the meeting was to get web resources describing biological samples to embed Schema.org mark up in their pages. The embedded mark up will enable the web resources to become more discoverable, and therefore the biological samples also.
I was not able to attend the event but Justin Clark-Casey has written this blog post summarising the event.
My involvement came from Liam Bruce’s honours project. Liam developed the RDB2RDF mappings that convert the existing relational content into an RDF representation. The mappings are executed using the Morph-RDB R2RML engine.
I have had two papers accepted within the events that make up ISWC2017.
My PhD student Qianru Zhou has been working on using RDF stream processing to detect anomalous events through telecommunication network messages. The particular scenario in our paper that will be presented at the Web Stream Processing workshop focuses on detecting a disaster such as the capsizing of the Eastern Star on the Yangtze River [1].
The second paper is a poster in the main conference that provides an overview of the Bioschemas project where we are identifying the Schema.org markup that is of primary importance for life science resources. Hopefully the paper title will pull the punters in for the session [2].
[1] Qianru Zhou, Stephen McLaughlin, Alasdair J. G. Gray, Shangbin Wu, and Chengxiang Wang. Lost Silence: An emergency response early detection service through continuous processing of telecommunication data streams. In Web Stream Processing 2017, Vienna, Austria, oct 2017. [Bibtex]
@InProceedings{ZhouEtal2017:LostSilence:WSP2017,
abstract = {Early detection of significant traumatic events, e.g. terrorist events, ship capsizes, is important to ensure that a prompt emergency response can occur. In the modern world telecommunication systems can and do play a key role in ensuring a successful emergency response by detecting such incidents through significant changes in calls and access to the networks. In this paper a methodology is illustrated to detect such incidents immediately (with the delay in the order of milliseconds), by processing semantically annotated streams of data in cellular telecommunication systems. In our methodology, live information of phones' positions and status are encoded as RDF streams. We propose an algorithm that processes streams of RDF annotated telecommunication data to detect abnormality. Our approach is exemplified in the context of capsize of a passenger cruise ship but is readily translatable to other incidents. Our evaluation results show that with properly chosen window size, such incidents can be detected effectively.},
author = {Qianru Zhou and Stephen McLaughlin and Alasdair J G Gray and Shangbin Wu and Chengxiang Wang},
title = {Lost Silence: An emergency response early detection service through continuous processing of telecommunication data streams},
OPTcrossref = {},
OPTkey = {},
booktitle = {Web Stream Processing 2017},
year = {2017},
OPTeditor = {},
OPTvolume = {},
OPTnumber = {},
OPTseries = {},
OPTpages = {},
month = oct,
address = {Vienna, Austria},
OPTorganization = {},
OPTpublisher = {},
OPTnote = {},
url = {http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1936/paper-03.pdf},
OPTannote = {}
}
[2] Unknown bibtex entry with key [grayetal2017:bioschemas:iswc2017] [Bibtex]
The day started off with a keynote from Lorna Hughes, Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Glasgow. She highlighted that there is not a single definition for digital humanities (weblink presents a random definition from a set collected at another event). However, at the core, digital humanities consists of:
Digital content
Digital methods
Tools
The purpose of digitial humanities is to enable better and/or faster outputs as well as conceptualising new research questions.
Lorna showcased several projects that she has been involved with highlighting the issues that were faced before identifying a set of lessons learned and challenges going forward (see her blog and slideshare). She highlighted that only about 10% of content has been transformed into a digital form, and of that only 3% is openly available. Additionally, some artefacts have been digitised in multiple ways at different time points, and the differences in these digital forms tells a story about the object.
Lorna highlighted the following challenges:
Enabling better understanding of digital content
Developing underlying digital infrastructure
Supporting the use of open content
Enabling the community
Working with born-digital content.
The second part of the day saw us brainstorming ideas in groups. Two potential apps were outlined to support the public get more out of the cultural heritage environment around us.
An interesting panel discussion was had, focused around what you would do with a mythical £350m. It also involved locking up 3D scanners, at least until appropriate methodology and metadata was made available.
The day finished off with an interesting keynote from Daniela Petrelli, Sheffield Hallam University. This was an interesting talk focussing on the outputs of the EU meSch project. A holistic design approach on the visitor experience was proposed that encompassed interaction design, product design, and content design. See the below embedded video for an idea.
Summary
There are lots of opportunities for collaboration between digital humanities and computing. From my perspective, there are lots of interesting challenges around capturing data metadata, linking between datasets, and capturing provenance of workflows.
Throughout the day, various participants were tweeting with the #dhfest hashtag.