Several members of our team travelled to Italy at the end of October to present their work to academics in their fields.
Mathieu discusses data diversity
The International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) is an annual gathering of over 500 researchers and practitioners who work in the research areas of the Semantic Web and Linked Data. MK:Smart team members from the Knowledge Media Institute at The Open University, led by project director Prof. Enrico Motta, have significant expertise in these academic fields and it was therefore a perfect opportunity to introduce some of the early results from MK:Smart’s work to this community.
In particular, the workshop on “Semantics for Smarter Cities” (S4SC), co-organised by MK:Smart member John Davies from BT, started with a keynote speech from Mathieu d’Aquin. Mathieu’s talk, entitled “Dealing with Data Diversity in a Smart City Data Hub” discussed some of the challenges faced by the creation of the MK Data Hub from the point of view of data curation. Using examples based on the presence sensors developed for the project’s mobility map, Mathieu showed how issues arise not only due to the sheer volume and diversity of the data, but also through the range of the data sources and the characteristics of each dataset. These are all key considerations at play. He showed some of the approaches and tools that are currently being put in place in MK:Smart to deal with these challenges.
Other members of the MK:Smart team (Enrico Daga and Elisabeth Cano) also presented work which will contribute towards some of the project’s applications and the ongoing development of the MK Data Hub. Elisabeth’s presentation featured a method for analysing the topics which are discussed on Social Media, while Enrico presented a paper by Keerthi Thomas, a member of the MK:Smart team, which dealt with the crucial subject of data privacy.
Click here to view the slides from Mathieu d’Aquin’s presentation.