Past Courses

OPEN DATA DAY

laura.po@unimore.it (Laura Po) — Tue, 16 Feb 2016 15:30:44 +0100

Sabato 5 Marzo 2016

ORE 9:30

Sala Eventi Tecnopolo

Via Vivarelli, 2 - Modena

L'EVENTO E' GRATUITO E APERTO A TUTTI

Gli Open Data sono dati pubblicati online che possono essere liberamente acceduti, rielaborati e ridistribuiti da chiunque senza costi di licenza. La Pubblica Amministrazione è uno dei distributori principali di Open Data, rendendo accessibili dati demografici, geografici, dati sull'occupazione, sui trasporti, sui servizi e molti altri.

Poter aver a disposizione un bacino di dati aperti, accessibili e utilizzabili in modo condiviso ci permette di “mescolarli” tra loro o con dati di nostra proprietà al fine di estrarre nuovi indicatori. L'integrazione di Open Data può quindi dare impulso allo sviluppo di nuovi e migliori prodotti e servizi.

L'evento è organizzato in occasione della giornata internazionale dedicata agli Open Data: in un unico giorno, in tutti i Paesi del mondo si esplora il fenomeno degli Open Data e si discutono le modalità per estrarre valore dai dati pubblici, fornendo a cittadini, amministrazioni pubbliche e imprese una valutazione concreta delle diverse opportunità che gli Open Data offrono.

L’evento Open Data Day modenese, organizzato dall’Ing. Laura Po per il DBGroup, con il patrocinio del Dipartimento di Ingegneria “Enzo Ferrari” di Modena, si terrà Sabato dalle ore 9.30 presso la Sala Eventi del Tecnopolo e riunirà allo stesso tavolo ricercatori e professori del Dipartimento, realtà imprenditoriali del territorio, i responsabili degli uffici Servizio Progetti Telematici, Comunicazione Città Intelligente, Assessorato alle Politiche Giovanili, Assessorato Sistemi informatici e Smart city del Comune di Modena e i responsabili del Assessorato alle Politiche Giovanili e del Piano Telematico della Regione Emilia Romagna, professori esperti in Open Data dell’Università di Firenze e dell’Università di Bologna.

LOCANDINA DELL'EVENTO

INTERNATIONAL OPEN DATA DAY

PROGRAMMA DELLA GIORNATA:

* 9:30-9:50 SALUTI ISTITUZIONALI

* 9:50-10:10 COSA SONO GLI OPEN DATA E COSA CI SI PUÒ FARE

Ing. Laura Po, Prof. Sonia Bergamaschi - DBGROUP – DIPARTIMENTO DI INGEGNERIA “ENZO FERRARI”

* 10:10-10:30 SMART CITY E OPEN DATA NEL COMUNE DI MODENA

Assessora Ludovica Carla Ferrari ASSESSORE SMART CITY DEL COMUNE DI MODENA

Dott. Luca Chiantore - DIRIGENTE SERVIZIO PROGETTI TELEMATICI, COMUNICAZIONE E CITTÀ INTELLIGENTE - COMUNE DI MODENA

* 10:30-10:50 LA REGIONE ER E I PROGETTI CON GLI OPEN DATA

Dott. Massimo Fustini – PROGETTO OPEN DATA EMILIA ROMAGNA - REGIONE EMILIA ROMAGNA

* 10:50-11:00 PAUSA CAFFÈ

* 11:00-11:30 PROGETTO OPEN LINKED DATA PER LE POLITICHE GIOVANILI

Ing. Laura Po, Prof. Sonia Bergamaschi - DBGROUP – DIPARTIMENTO DI INGEGNERIA “ENZO FERRARI”

Dott. Paola Francia - ASSESSORATO POLITICHE GIOVANILI COMUNE DI MODENA

Dott. Marina Mingozzi, Dott. Antonio Volpone - ASSESSORATO POLITICHE GIOVANILI REGIONE EMILIA ROMAGNA

* 11:30-11:50 CREARE VALORE DAGLI OPEN DATA

Ing. Mirko Orsini - DATARIVER S.R.L.

* 11:50-12:10 L’UNIVERSITÀ COME AGGREGATORE DI OPEN DATA DEL TERRITORIO: L’ESPERIENZA FIORENTINA

Prof. Paolo Nesi – DISIT LAB –UNIVERSITÀ DI FIRENZE

* 12:10-12:30 LA QUALITÀ DEI DATI APERTI

Prof. Monica Palmirani - DIPARTIMENTO DI SCIENZE GIURIDICHE – UNIVERSITÀ DI BOLOGNA

PRESENTAZIONI DEGLI INTERVENUTI:

Laura Po - Cosa sono gli open data e cosa ci si può fare

Luca Chiantore - Strategie Open Data nel Comune di Modena

Massimo Fustini - Progetto Open Data Regione Emilia Romagna

Laura Po, Antonio Volpone, Paola Francia - Progetto Open Data per le Politiche Giovanili

Mirko Orsini - Creare valore dagli Open Data

Paolo Nesi - L'università come aggregatore di Open Data: l'esperienza fiorentina

Monica Palmirani - La qualità dei dati aperti

RESOCONTO DELL'EVENTO:

articolo pubblicato su FORUM PA

reportage trasmesso su TRC

ALTRE CITAZIONI DELL'EVENTO:

sito nazionale Open Data Day

LaRepubblica-Sezione Tecnologia

Comune di Modena

DataRiver s.r.l.

Alessio Nisi (blogger)

Giulia Annovi (data journalist)

Open Data and Linked Open Data

laura.po@unimore.it (Laura Po) — Wed, 21 Oct 2015 10:43:41 +0200

OPEN DATA PROJECTS

The dbgroup is active in the re-use, integration, navigation, querying and publication of open data.

By using a suite of tools, we are able to

Manage your data (integration, curation)
Use and mix them with others' data (discovering, linking)
Make sense of data (query, analytics, visualization)
Publish your data in the Linked Open Data Cloud (publication, navigation, query)

Open data projects aims to enhance the private information by relating them with open data.

In 2015, we concluded a one-year project focused on the topics of population, education and work, funded by the municipality of Modena, Duringt the project, we were able to (1) identify interesting data sources both from the open data community and from the private repositories of local governments of Emilia Romagna region related to the Youth Policies; (2) to integrate them and, to show up the result of the integration by means of a useful navigator tool (3); in the end, (4) to publish new information as Linked Open Data. For more information click here.

LINKED OPEN DATA TOOL

We have developed a tool for navigation, querying and visualization of Linked Open Data sources.

By using LODeX, a user can visualize, browse and query a LOD source starting from the URL of its SPARQL endpoint.

LODeX provides:

a schema summary of a LOD source, with the capabilities of showing a view of the schema/instances of a LOD source
a visual query panel, so that the user can easily build and refine his/her query.

The LODeX tool can be used following this link (release compatible with Chrome and Opera)

If you want to use another browser, please go to the previus version at this link.

More information on the Linked Open Data and LODeX are available here

Activities on Open Data and Linked Open Data

October 2015
- Laura Po attended the Smart City Exhibition 2015 @Bologna, Italy (8-10 October).
- Fabio Benedetti presented the paper titled "LODeX: A tool for Visual Querying Linked Open Data" at 14th International Semantic Web Conference (October 11-15, 2015) @Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA
- Fabio Benedetti presented the paper titled "LODeX: A tool for Visual Querying Linked Open Data" at 14th International Semantic Web Conference (October 11-15, 2015) @Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA
July 2015
- Francesco Guerra e Sonia Bergamaschi are track organizers of the Second International Workshop " Big Data Principles, Architecture & Applicationds (BDAA) 2015" as part of the International Conference on High Performance Computing & Simulation (HPCS 2015) :http://hpcs2015.cisedu.info/2-conference/hpsc-2015-symposia/bdaa
- G. Simonini, S. Zhu: "Big data exploration with faceted browsing". In IEEE Proceedings of the International Conference on High Performance Computing & Simulation (HPCS 2015), Special Session on Big Data Principles, Architectures & Applications, Amsterdam, 20-24 July 2015.

Progetto Open linked data dell'Osservatorio Giovani della Regione Emilia-Romagna

luca.gagliardelli@unimore.it (Luca Gagliardelli) — Wed, 07 Oct 2015 12:18:24 +0200

This was a one-year project, funded by the city of Modena, in the research area of the Open Data and Open Government. The project goals were: to identify interesting data sources both from the open data community and from the private repositories of local governments of Emilia Romagna region related to the Youth Policies, in particular, to the topics of population, education and work; to integrate them and, to show up the result of the integration by means of a useful navigator tool; in the end, to publish new information as Linked Open Data.
The key partners in this project were the municipality of Modena, the Emilia Romagna region and the Dbgroup, under the scientific direction of Prof. Bergamaschi.

As you can see in the figure above the project has been developed in four phases:

The first phase was devoted to a deep and wide analysis of the available data sources (local, regional, national and international) in order to individuate the most relevant ones.
The second phase made use of the open source data integration system, MOMIS, to integrate the selected data sources in virtual global views.
The third phase provided an easy-to-use dashboard, i.e. MOMIS dashboard, to visualize the information emerging from aggregated data.
Finally, the fourth phase aimed to make the resulting valueadded information, public and searchable on the Web as Linked Open Data.

First phase: sources selection

In the first phase of the project, we focus on the selection of the most relevant data sources w.r.t the main dimensions of analysis of the project, i.e. municipalities and provinces of the Emilia Romagna Region. We have used and analyzed both proprietary and open data sources, the proprietary data sources was provided by the Emilia Romagna region, the sources were:

A database of current spending projects: it contains information about the fundings provided for projects on youth populations actuated in the different provinces of the region;
An excel file of capital spending projects: it contains information about funding provided for long period investments (e.g. build structures, equipments);
A database of social centers (SAG - "Spazi diAggregazione Giovanile"): it lists all the places where young people get together or places where recreational activities for youth are organized;
Three Excel files related to the youth information project ("Progetto Informagiovani"): The information centers provide data at local, national and international level on different topics of interest for young people aged 13 to 35 years. The main areas covered are relate to study, work, continuing education, travel and holidays, study and work abroad, leisure, social life and health. These files contain statistics about the number of visitors of the website, the number of points on the region and the number of editors;
An Excel file about the Young ER Card project: YoungERcard is the new card designed by the Emilia Romagna region for young people aged between 14 and 29 residents, students or workers in Emilia Romagna. The card is distributed for free and reserve holders a series of facilities for the enjoyment of cultural and sportive events and discounts at various shops. The file reports information related to the Young Emilia Romagna Card distribution and extensiveness in the region.

Regarding open data sources, several sites and portals that publish information regarding the youth population have been investigated. Not all sources have revealed to be of interest/usable for the project and thus have not been included in the data sources to be integrated. At the end we have seletected this sources:

Emilia Romagna Statistical Service: this website is divided into several thematic sites that report information on population, transport, sports, productive sectors, etc.. For our project, we focused on the "population" and "education" sites.
National Student Register - MIUR: this register, provided by the Italian Ministry of Education, University And Research, contains information on the number of students and graduates in the various degree courses of Italian universities.

For more information on sources, click here.

Some naming conflicts occur on the province names. The main problems were found on the provinces of Reggio Nell'Emilia and Forlì-Cesena that were written in different ways, for example "Reggio Emilia", "Reggio-Emilia", "Forlì e Cesena", "Forli-Cesena".
For solving this problem, we choose as golden standard the names used on the Regional Statistical Service, namely "Forlì-Cesena'' and "Reggio Nell'Emilia'', and we converted any other forms to the gold standard.

Second phase: data integration

At the end of the first phase of data extraction and transformation, we had the following data sources:

Current spending projects: information about funding provided for projects on youth populations actuated in the different provinces of the region;
Capital spending projects: information about funding provided for long period investments (e.g. build structures) organized for each province and year;
Number of youth residents: number of youth residents in each province of the region Emilia Romagna and for each year;
Number of Youth Information Centers: numbers of points of the Youth Information Centers located in each province and year.
Number of editors in the Youth Information Centers: number of member in the editorial staff operating in the Youth Information Centers for each province and year.
Number of web site visitors Informagiovanionline: information about the number of the visitors to the website Informagiovanionline for each province and year.
Young ER Card: data on the Young ER Card for each province and year.
Number of graduates supply by MIUR: information about the number of graduated for each province and year.
Number of matriculations at the university supply by MIUR: information about the number of matriculations for each province and year.

All these sources have two dimensions in common: the year and the province. We conducted two analysis for evaluating the data coverage over the two dimensions. We found no lack of data over the provinces, meaning that the data are spread in all the provinces. Instead, focusing on the entire interval of years (2006-2014), we found a relevant number of missing data, that is reported in the table below.

Source	Year
Source	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

The red cells represent a missing data, the green represent an available data.

To integrate our sources we used MOMIS a system able to aggregate data coming from heterogeneous data sources, you can find all the informations about MOMIS on DataRiVer.
Since MOMIS allows the creation of more virtual integrations, called Global Schemas, to avoid a proliferation of null values in the integration result, we created three different Global Schemas:

GS-Global: this GS contains the data from all the nine sources, on this GS we created a view that it is used in the MOMIS Dashboard (see next chapter for details) and includes only data of 2014;
GS-Projects-Informagiovani: this GS excludes the Young ER Card from the integration; On this integration, we were interested to show the correlations between the data of the Informagiovani project and the data of education and founded projects; thus we created a view on the period 2009 - 2013, where most of these sources have available data.
GS-Projects: this GS considers only sources 1, 2, 3, 8 and 9, in order to create charts on the entire period that show the correlation between founded projects, population and education.

Third phase: data visualization

To visualize the integrated data we used the MOMIS Dashboard, an interactive visualization tool developed by DataRiVer that offers several views on a set of data. It makes easier to compare data and capture useful information. It allows to filter the data and visualize the results through different charts. In particular, it is possible to display line charts (for showing trends), barcharts, pie charts, bubble charts on a Google Maps, or show the data in a tabular view.
Here are some of the charts that we have created to answer the politicians questions. Click on images to enlarge them.

A bar chart comparing fundings and youth population (in light green).	Fundings and youth population (in light green) trends in the province of Modena from 2009 to 2013.
A map comparing fundings and youth population (in light green).	Funded projects/areas in the province of Modena on 2009

Fourth phase: publishing Linked Open Data

In order to publish in the LOD cloud the project results, we needed a tool for mapping a relational source in RDF. The tools for automatic mapping generation define a set of mappings between RDB and RDF namely: an RDB record is a RDF node, the column name of an RDB table is a RDF predicate and an RDB table cell is a value. Among these tools, we selected D2RQ as it allows users to define customized mappings.
Using D2RQ we have connected our data with DBpedia and GeoNames.
You can explore the result of data conversion by clicking here.

Once a LOD dataset is available, a tool to navigate, explore and query it is necessary. We exploited LODeX, a tool able to provide a summary of a LOD source starting from scratch, thus supporting users in exploring and understanding the contents of a dataset. Moreover, LODEX provides a visual query interface to easily compose queries, that are automatically translated in Sparql and executed on a LOD source.
You can try LODeX on our dataset by clicking here.

Conclusion

In this page we have shown the results gained during the "Open linked data Osservatorio Giovani della Regione Emilia-Romagna" project . We consider our work can be helpful for future open government projects aiming to exploit and public open data.

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yuri.debbi@unimore.it (Yuri Debbi) — Mon, 13 Jul 2015 09:30:57 +0200

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Annotation and Mapping Discovery among Data Sources

fabio.benedetti@unimore.it (Fabio) — Mon, 02 Feb 2015 09:15:03 +0100

Schema matching is the task of finding the semantic correspondences (mappings) between elements of two schemata

Approach: starting from “hidden” meanings associated to schema labels (i.e. class and attribute names, also called terms), the MOMIS Data Integration system discovers lexical relationships among schema elements
Lexical Annotation of schema labels is the explicit assignment of meanings w.r.t. a reference lexical thesaurus (such as WordNet )
- Manual Annotation is a boring and not scalable task --> Automatic or Semi-automatic Annotation

WSD (Word Sense Disambiguation) is the ability of identifying the meanings of words in a context by a computational technique
The semi-automatic CWSD (Combined Word Sense Disambiguation) method:
1. associates to each label, one/more WordNet meanings
2. combines two WSD algorithms: SD (Structural Disambiguation) exploits the schema derived relationships & WND (WordNet domains Disambiguation) exploits WordNet Domains

Schema label normalization: is the reduction of each label to some standardized form that can be easily recognized
→ abbreviation expansion and CN (Compound Noun) annotation

For a detailed description, please see the Phd Thesis of Serena Sorrentino and the Phd Thesis of Laura Po
Techniques are implemented in NORMS, a tool of the MOMIS-Datariver Data Integrator, developed within the FIT STARTUP project.

Integration of Data and Multimedia Sources

fabio.benedetti@unimore.it (Fabio) — Mon, 02 Feb 2015 09:14:31 +0100

The MOMIS Data Integration system is extended to allow users to create and query an integrated view of data and multimedia sources.

The proposed solutions are two:

MOMIS & MILOS (developed within the NeP4B project)

A multimedia source is managed by the MILOS (Multimedia dIgital Library for On-line Search) system. Similarity predicates on multimedia attributes can be expressed in a global query and are managed by the WINDSURF Multimedia System. The fusion between traditional and multimedia data is based on a "ranked query fusion" method.

MOMIS & WINDSURF (developed within the FIT STARTUP project)

A multimedia source is managed by the WINDSURF system. Similarity predicates on multimedia attributes can be expressed in a global query and are managed by the WINDSURF Multimedia System. The fusion between traditional and multimedia data is based on classical data fusion methods (such as the full outer join), i.e., no multimedia processing capabilities is required at the integration level. The answer is complete for “range predicates” and in-complete for “top-k predicates”; to reduce the incompleteness, techniques based on the selectivity estimation are under investigation.

Offerta Stage HAVI Logistics IT

mariusoctavian.olaru@unimore.it (Marius Octavian Olaru) — Fri, 20 Jun 2014 08:51:43 +0200

HAVI Logistics, leader mondiale nella logistica alimentare è in ricerca di giovani laureandi/neo-laureati in Ingegneria Informatica o Gestionale che seguiranno l’implementazione di una piattaforma interna di Restaurant Order Proposol (ROP), sistema complesso che basandosi sullo studio delle vendite passate, crea e presenta una proposta d’acquisto ai vari clienti in modo da ottimizzare le necessità dei clienti, l’acquisto e la gestione dei prodotti.

Sono richieste una buona conoscenza della lingua inglese, buone conoscenze dei sistemi per la gestione dei dati (DBMS, Access, ecc.), buone capacità e competenze analitiche e ottime capacità comunicative.

Il tirocinio è finalizzato all’assunzione con contratto a tempo indeterminato, e prevede una formazione di circa 3 mesi all’estero (a Duisburg, Germania).

E’ previsto un rimborso spese di 700 euro/mese.

Contatti:
Ing. Marius Octavian Olaru (email)
Prof. Sonia Bergamaschi (email)

International Collaborations

fabio.benedetti@unimore.it (Fabio) — Wed, 30 Apr 2014 09:34:08 +0200

Professor	A	Location	Country	Typology
Sonia Bergamaschi		IBM Almaden research center	USA	Tutoraggio congiunto di laureandi master, dottorandi sul tema dei big data (prof. Jim Spohrer)
Sonia Bergamaschi		University of Michigan- Elec. Engineering and Computer Science Dept	USA	Tutoraggio congiunto di laureandi master, dottorandi sul tema dei big data
Sonia Bergamaschi		Potsdam University - Hasso Platner Institut	DE	Tutoraggio congiunto di laureandi master, dottorandi sui temi dei big data, keyword search, data integration, ERASMUS agreement (prof. Felix Naumann)
Sonia Bergamaschi		University of North Texas- College of Engineering	USA	Tutoraggio congiunto di laureandi master sul tema dell'annotazione automatica di sorgenti dati (prof. Rada Milhacea)
Sonia Bergamaschi		University of Los Angeles- Computer Science Dept	USA	Tutoraggio congiunto di dottorandi sul tema: Logical formalization of distributed architectures (prof. Carlo Zaniolo)
Domenico Beneventano		Fraunhofer IPK, Berlino: Institute Production Systems and Design Technology	DE	Co-partecipazione al progetto FP-7-SME: FACIT-SME (Facilitate IT-Providing SMEs).
Domenico Beneventano		CIT-Centre for Internet Technologies – University of Sunderland	UK	Co-partecipazione al progetto FP-7: Stasis: Software for Ambient Semantic nteroperable Services.
Domenico Beneventano		University of Oldenburg	DE	Co-partecipazione al progetto FP-7: Stasis: Software for Ambient Semantic nteroperable Services.
Domenico Beneventano		Tsinghua University, Pechino	CN	Co-partecipazione al progetto FP-7: Stasis: Software for Ambient Semantic nteroperable Services.
Francesco Guerra		University of Zaragoza	SP	Scambio Internazionale, Supervisione PhD, Ricerca Congiunta, Partecipazione a progetto COST, Scrittura di proposte in Bandi Europei (prof. Raquel Trillo Lado)
Francesco Guerra		Università di Trento	IT	Supervisione PhD, Ricerca Congiunta, Partecipazione a progetto COST, Scrittura di proposte in Bandi Europei (dott. Yannis Velegrakis)
Francesco Guerra		University of Coimbra	PT	Ricerca Congiunta, Partecipazione a progetto COST, Scrittura di proposte in Bandi Europei (prof. Jorge Cardoso)
Francesco Guerra		NewCastle University	UK	Ricerca Congiunta, Partecipazione a progetto COST (prof. Paolo Missier)
Francesco Guerra		Naturalis Biodiversity Center	NL	Partecipazione a progetto COST, Scrittura di proposte in Bandi Europei (dott. Peter SChalk)
Laura Po		Computer Science and Systems Engineering Department (DIIS), Università di Saragozza, Saragozza, Spagna	SP	Ricerca Congiunta (Sono state proposte una serie di tecniche per raggruppare i risultati forniti da un motore di ricerca tradizionale in categorie sulla base dei significati delle keyword, formalizzando il metodo di classificazione dei risultati forniti da motori di ricerca in base ai significati delle keyword in input.
Laura Po		KMI (Knowledge Media Institute), Milton Keynes	UK	Ricerca Congiunta (sono stati sperimentati algoritmi di annotazione lessicale in ambito ontology matching, è stata valutata l’applicazione degli algoritmi ai risultati forniti dall’ontology matcher, SCARLET (http://scarlet.open.ac.uk/) che implementa una tecnica per scoprire relazioni tra due concetti utilizzando ontologie disponibili on-line. )

Alliance

fabio.benedetti@unimore.it (Fabio) — Wed, 30 Apr 2014 09:34:08 +0200

IBM Academic Initiative

Grazie alla collaborazione con IBM, da Maggio 2017, è stata estesa l'IBM Academic Initiative a ttui gli studenti e personale di UNIMORE.

L'IBM Academic Initiative permette di ottenere un facile accesso agli strumenti IBM necessari per sviluppare software.

Tra i principali software a disposizione: Bluemix, Power Systems, z Systems e altro ancora.

Ammissibilità: studenti, docenti e personale tecnico.

Link al portale: https://unimore.onthehub.com/

Materiale:

Guidelines per accesso a IBM Academic Initiative: http://www.dbgroup.unimo.it/IBM/OnTheHub guidelines - UniMoRe.pdf
Link alla documentazione per education on-line su OTH: https://developer.ibm.com/academic/resources/big-data-bluemix-educator-guide/

Documento con lista dei SW disponibili ad oggi: http://www.dbgroup.unimo.it/IBM/IBM OTH webstore offers thru April 19 2017.pdf

Locandina per divulgazione del programma: http://www.dbgroup.unimo.it/IBM/IBM Print Flyer - UniMoRe.pdf

referente universitario: Laura Po

referente IBM: Silvia Peschiera

Linked Open Data

fabio.benedetti@unimore.it (Fabio) — Wed, 19 Mar 2014 15:47:56 +0100

What is Linked Data?

Here is a really easy introduction video:

In its most common usage, Linked Data refers to the use of RDF technologies to make data available on the web. More specifically, it is about linking together multiple distinct datasets using a common set of URIs, such that they can be easily integrated together using the same technology.

The primary advantage of making data available in this form is that it makes it much easier for programmatic queries to be executed over multiple datasets by a computer. This is because it does not require a human to first create special code to understand the syntax (e.g. file formats) of the data. By breaking down these syntactic barriers, the process of data integration becomes concentrated on the meaning or semantics of the data themselves, and these semantics are made explicit in the data. For this reason, RDF datasets on the web are sometimes collectively referred to as the Semantic Web.

Nowadays, there has been an increment of open data government initiatives promoting the idea that particular data produced by public administrations (such as public spending, health care, education etc.) should be freely published. However, the great majority of these resources is published in an unstructured format (such as spreadsheets or CSV) and is typically accessed only by closed communities.

Starting from these considerations, we propose a semi-automatic experimental methodology for facilitating resource providers in publishing public data into the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud, and for helping consumers (companies and citizens) in efficiently accessing and querying them. The methodology has been applied on a set of data provided by the Research Project on Youth Precariousness, of the Modena municipality, Italy.

LODeX

The Linked Open Data (LOD) Cloud has more than tripled its sources in just three years (from 295 sources in 2011 to 1014 in 2014). While the LOD data are being produced at a staggering rate, the development of tools that make these data accessible to users did not follow the same trend. In particular, LOD tools lack in producing a high level representation of a dataset, and in supporting users in the exploration and querying of a source (the majority provides a SPARQL query interface). To overcome the above problems and significantly increase the number of consumers of LOD data, we devised a new method and a tool, LODeX. LODeX is able to automatically provide a high level summarization of a LOD dataset, including its inferred schema, and a powerful visual query interface to support users in querying/analyzing the dataset. By means of the visual interface, the user can inspect the schema/instances of a LOD source, formulate a visual query, see the automatically generated SPARQL query (to be submitted to the SPARQL endpoint) and view the query result in different display modes. Moreover, he/she can easily refine the visual query on which he/she is working until the result is satisfactory.

Here is a video tutorial of the last release of LODeX:

In this video is presented LODeX 2.0, a tool for visualizing, browsing and querying a LOD source starting from the URL of its SPARQL endpoint. The 2.0 release enhances LODeX 1.0, which provided a schema summary of a LOD source, with the capabilities of showing a view of the schema/instances of a LOD source and composing a visual query by navigating through this view, so that the user can easily build and refine his/her query.

Here is the link.

This release is compatible just with Chrome and Opera.

If you want to use another browser, please go to the previus version at this link.

If you want to deepen here are some publications:

Online Index Extraction from Linked Open Data Sources.

A Visual Summary for Linked Open Data sources.

Visual Querying LOD sources with LODeX.

Ongoing Funded Projects

• Open linked data dell'Osservatorio Giovani della Regione Emilia-Romagna

Publications

Benedetti F, Beneventano D, Bergamaschi S. Context Semantic Analysis: a knowledge-based technique for computing inter-document similarity. SISAP 2016 (International Conference on Similarity Search and Applications) 164-178 Paper

Benedetti F, Bergamaschi S. A model for visual building SPARQL queries. SEBD 2016. Paper

F. Benedetti, S. Bergamaschi, and L. Po, Exposing the underlying schema of LOD sources. 2015, The 2015 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence, Singapore, December 6-9, 2015, WI 2015

D. Beneventano, S. Bergamaschi, L. Gagliardelli, L. Po, Open Data for Improving Youth Policies. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development (KEOD 2015), Lisbon, Portugal, November 9-11, 2015, SciTePress, vol.2, pp.118-129 ISBN: 978-989-758-158-8

F. Benedetti, S. Bergamaschi, L. Po, LODeX: A tool for Visual Querying Linked Open Data. 2015, International Semantic Web Conference (Posters & Demonstrations Track), ISWC 2015

F. Benedetti, S. Bergamaschi, L. Po, Visual Querying LOD sources with LODeX. K-CAP 2015

F. Benedetti, S. Bergamaschi, and L. Po, A visual summary for linked open data sources. 2014, International Semantic Web Conference (Posters & Demos). online

F. Benedetti, S. Bergamaschi, and L. Po, Online index extraction from linked open data sources. 2014, Linked Data for Information Extraction (LD4IE) Workshop held at International Semantic Web Conference. online

S. Sorrentino, S. Bergamaschi, E. Fusari, D. Beneventano, "Semantic Annotation and Publication of Linked Open Data". Computational Science and Its Applications - ICCSA 2013 - 13th International Conference, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, June 24-27, 2013, Lecture Notes in Computer Science - Volume 7975. Paper (electronic edition)

Domenico Beneventano, Sonia Bergamaschi, Serena Sorrentino, "Semantic Annotation of the CEREALAB Database by the AGROVOC Linked Dataset". Computational Science and Its Applications - ICCSA 2013 - 13th International Conference, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, June 24-27, 2013, Lecture Notes in Computer Science - Volume 7971. Paper (electronic edition)

S. Bergamaschi, F. Guerra, S. Rota, Y. Velegrakis, "Understanding Linked Open Data through Keyword Searching: the KEYRY approach", 1st international workshop on linked web data management (LWDM 2011) in conjunction with the 14th EDBT 2011, Upsala, Sweden - March 21-25, 2011.