Exploration in Web Science: Instruments for Web

Observatories

Presented by:Kristine Gloria

Co-authors: Deborah McGuinness and Joanne Luciano

The Tetherless World Constellation

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY

With thanks to the extended RPI Tetherless World Team

Agenda

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I. Web Observatories at RPI’s Web Science Research Center

II. Web Observatory Themes

III. Science Data

IV. Health and Life Sciences,

V. Open Government

VI. Social Spaces

Web Observatories @ WSRC

At RPI WSRC, our observatories present both tools and methodologies that empower researchers to study the web and to make a difference in the world

Web Observatories Themes

Science Data Observatory

Health & Life Sciences ObservatoryOpen Government Observatory

Social Spaces Observatory

Web Observatory Theme

Open Government Observatory

Open Government DataTWC –Intl Open Government Data Sets

Web Observatories Themes

Science Data Observatory

SemantAqua

• Enable/Empower citizens & scientists to explore pollution sites, facilities, regulations, and health impacts along with provenance

• Demonstrates semantic monitoring possibilities

• Extend to endangered species and resource mgr issues

• Explanations and Provenance available

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2 3

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1. Map view of analyzed results2. Explanation of pollution 3. Possible health effect of contaminant (from EPA)4. Filtering by facet to select type of data5. Link for reporting problems6. Extended with input from USGS, with population counts for birds & fish

Example Workflow (SemantAqua)

ArchiveArchive

CSV2RDF4LODEnhance

CSV2RDF4LODEnhance

derive derive

integrate archive

PublishPublish

CSV2RDF4LODDirect

CSV2RDF4LODDirect visualizevisualize

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Semantic Methodology and Semantic Application Evolution

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Originally developed for Virtual Observatories (in solar terrestrial) , now in water quality, Sea ice, volcanology, mycology, oceans…. …

McGuinness, Fox, West, Garcia, Cinquini, Benedict, Middleton The Virtual Solar-Terrestrial Observatory: A Deployed Semantic Web Application Case Study for Scientific Research. Proc. 19 Conf. on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-07), http://www.vsto.org

SemantAqua -> SemantEco -> DataOne modularizing, broadening, provenance, interaction

VSTO -> SESDI -> SPCDIS - modularizing, provenance, broadening, interaction

Web Observatory Theme

Health & Life Sciences Observatory

Department of Health and Human Services'                  Developer Challenge

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In June 2012, HHS issued the first of its seven challenges calling for developers “to make high value health data more accessible to entrepreneurs, researchers, and policy makers in the hopes of better health outcomes for all.”

A group from RPI TWC won first place in the competition, by using semantic technologies and in-house developed software, such as csv2rdf4lod, LODSPeaKr, Farrah and DataFAQS.

HHS wanted Metadata

"... application of existing voluntary consensus standards for metadata common to all open government data"

RPI TWC submitted:•DCAT - W3C Data Catalog◦Version controlled on github.◦Extracted from their CKAN as input to converter.•VoID - W3C Vocabulary of Interlinked Data◦Organized datasets by source, dataset, version.◦Provided links to data dumps, Linksets to LOD.•PROV - W3C Provenance Interchange Model◦Captured during CKAN extraction, retrieval, conversion, and publishing.•Dublin Core Metadata Terms◦Annotated subjects based on descriptions.

HHS wanted Classification

"...classify datasets in our growing catalog, creating entities, attributes and relations that form the foundations for better discovery, integration..."

RPI TWC presented:•Bottom-up vocabulary and entity reuse◦Vocabulary created for each dataset◦Enhanced datasets shifted to reuse vocabulary and entities from other datasets.◦Three stub vocabularies for top-level reuse.•NCBO (Nat. Center for Biomedical Ont.) Annotations◦annotator/annotator.py SADI service◦data/source/bioontology-org/annotator-description-subject/version/retrieve.sh

HHS wanted Liquidity

"new designs ... that form the foundations for ... liquidity"

RPI TWC provided: 2B triples among 1M URIs•Dataset Linked Data◦Machine and Human views (via conneg)◦Faceted search of datasets•Dataset dumps (.ttl.gz)◦For each dataset, and for the whole thing.Dataset query (http://healthdata.tw.rpi.edu/sparql)

Text https://github.com/jimmccusker/twc-healthdata/wiki

Web Observatory Themes

Social Spaces Observatory

Twitter Network ObservatoryMakani, B. & Zhang, Q.

• Explores the relationships of people and semantics in the graph database

• Basic functions:• Users can visualize and

analyze different types of sub-graphs

• Preforms a set of basic analyses for other COSMIC Groups

How can we leverage Social Media sites…

to identify these communities, and

stakeholders within them?to gather requirements from these

communities?

First Responders, including Emergency Medical Personnel, Firefighters, and Police Officers, have active online communities on Social Media websites.

First Responders (with NIST)McGuinness, Erickson, Chastain, Fry, Yan, Zhu

 http://tw.rpi.edu/web/project/FirstResponders

Find Topics:

Find Users:How can we leverage

Social Media sites…to identify these communities, and

stakeholders within them?to gather requirements from these

communities?

Questions?

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