Collaborative Project GeoKnow - Making the Web an Exploratory Place for Geospatial Knowledge Project Number: 318159 Start Date of Project: 2012/12/01 Duration: 36 months Deliverable 7.2.2 First Exploitation Plan Dissemination Level Public Due Date of Deliverable M20, 31/07/2014 Actual Submission Date M21, 05/08/2014 Work Package Task T7.2 Type Approval Status Version 1.0 Number of Pages Filename WP7 Dissemination, Community Building, Exploitation & Standards Report Approved 20 D7.2.2_First_exploitation_report.pdf Abstract: This report provides a description of exploitation activities and results during the first half of the GeoKnow project. The information in this document reflects only the author s views and the European Community is not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained therein. The information in this document is provided as is without guarantee or warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the fitness of the information for a particular purpose. The user thereof uses the information at his/ her sole risk and liability. Project funded by the European Commission within the Seventh Framework Programme (2007-2013)
History Version Date Reason Revised by 0.1 27/06/2014 Initial structure of this deliverable Christiane Lemke 0.2 14/07/2014 Added Content from Jens Lehmann s slides Christiane Lemke 0.3 20/07/2014 Enrichment and final content Christiane Lemke 0.4 21/07/2014 Virtuoso contribution Hugh Williams 0.8 22/07/2014 Addressing comments from internal peer review, first version Christiane Lemke 0.9 03/08/2014 Peer Review Daniel Hladky 1.0 04/08/2014 Addressing comments, final version Christiane Lemke Author List Organization Name Contact Information Unister Christiane Lemke christiane.lemke@unister.de Unister Andreas Both andreas.both@unister.de Page 1
Executive Summary This first exploitation report summarises achievements of the GeoKnow project and the promotion and valorisation of the knowledge, services, components and technologies developed. Focus lies on activities towards ensuring sustainability and impact of the results beyond the scope of the project and the description of GeoKnow s current and future contribution towards the competitive advantage of the consortium members. Page 2
Table of Contents 1 Introduction 4 2 GeoKnow Generator 5 3 Virtuoso Universal Server 6 4 Linked Data Life-Cycle and Stack 7 5 GeoKnow Business Cases 13 5.1 Supply Chain Infrastructure.................................. 13 5.2 Integrative Component Model................................. 14 5.3 Continental Automotive GmbH................................ 15 5.4 Ontos Linked Data Information Workbench......................... 16 6 Miscellaneous 17 6.1 Benchmarking......................................... 17 6.2 Dissemination and Publications................................ 17 6.3 Standardisation........................................ 17 7 Conclusion and Future Work 19 Page 3
1 Introduction This first exploitation report follows up on GeoKnow s exploitation plan which was outlined in deliverable D7.2.1 in M12. Many achievements in terms of exploitation have been made in the 8 months that have passed. Next to major improvements in the GeoKnow Generator and Virtuoso Universal Server, a number of tools dealing with various aspects of linked geospatial data have been created or improved within the scope of GeoKnow. Exploitation activities were carried out for every single one of them. The consortium members are particularly happy to present two commercial exploitation activities in addition the use cases of the partners Brox and Unister in this report. Considerable effort towards community building using the GeoKnow portal and its related website, blog and social networks has been made, and a substantial amount of feedback has been collected through scientific dissemination and outreach activities. The report will start with a more elaborate description of achievments within the GeoKnow Generator and Virtuoso in sections 2 and 3, respectively. Section 4 presents a selection of tools created in the scope of this project is presented which are available on a cross-project web portal. Four business use cases of GeoKnow are presented in section 5. Following a summary of miscellaneous other activities in section 6, section 7 concludes and outlines steps towards the second exploitation plan in M28. Page 4
2 GeoKnow Generator The GeoKnow Generator as common interface and integration point of geospatial linked data stack tools is a central outcome of the GeoKnow project and under constant development and improvement. In the last 6 months, issues tackled included a graph-based authentication, with authentication support scheduled to be integrated in the underlying tools. This was one of the key requirements for the Generator, because being able to protect proprietary data sets makes it more attractive to industry partners. A dashboard which is in technology evaluation stage will increase usability further. More tools of the Linked Data Stack (CubeViz, Facete2) have been integrated to extend the user base. In order to help new users to understand the capabilities of the framework, a number of tutorial videos were created and published on the website 1. The GeoKnow Generator has been presented to a wider audience on various occasions, for example at the Swiss Archive in Bern in January 2014, at a W3C Event on 22nd of May in Switzerland and during the Linked Data Europe Workshop at the European Data Forum in Athens, where participants could gather some hands-on experience with the Generator and its components. Since the GeoKnow Generator is hosted in a public git repository, latest features are immediately available to the public. However, during the regular telephone conferences and the plenary meeting in Belgrade, it became clear to the consortium that visibility and publicity could be improved upon. For this reason, a first official public major release ( GeoKnow Generator 1.0 ) is planned for September 2014, including press releases and messages in various channels, such as appropriate mailing lists. A better and more automatic packaging workflow using nightly builds will support a better distribution. Further exploitation plans for the immediate future are extending features in terms of workflow functionality, better promoting the tools included and finishing authentication integration in the tools. This will result in a better product and straighten the road for commercial exploitation of the partners, which will be mainly targeted in the last year of the project. Figure 1: Current screenshot of the GeoKnow Generator workbench 1 http://generator.geoknow.eu/videos.html Page 5
3 Virtuoso Universal Server OpenLink s Virtuoso as a high-performance data management solution is the central storage and querying component within GeoKnow. The main of objectives for Virtuoso has been to enhance its support, performance and scalability in performing SPARQL/RDF Geo Spatial queries. To date as part of the GeoKnow project, support for geospatial geometry types has been enhanced from initially just support for points to now also supporting MultiPoint, LineString, MultiLineString, BoxPolygon, MultiPolygon (Polygons with holes), GeometryCollection and associated geometry functions. The Geometries have been implemented to be both OGC and GeoSPARQL compliant, these being the two most dominate standards in the Linked Geo Data space. Live demonstrations of the Virtuoso geospatial enhancements have been created for the topics SPARQL Extensions for Geo Spatials & Geography 2 and SPARQL Geo Spatials and Geography PivotViewer Examples 3, a screenshot of the PivotViewer application can be found in the Figure 2. Query optimisation enhancements in the R-Tree index and Cluster plans for geometry types have been made improving the performance and scalability when performing such queries as demonstrated the in GeoBench results presented at the end of Year 1 with more to come in Year 2. During the recent Linked Geospatial Data Workshop 2014 in London 4 OpenLink attended, where the GeoKnow project and GeoKnow Generator were presented, there was much interest from both commercial, government and academic organisations which have presented a number of commercial and open source exploitable opportunities for Virtuoso product due the above improvements in geospatial support and performance. Following the recent discussions with the partners (Brox and Unister) in the supply chain and e-commerce use case WPs of the GeoKnow project, exploitable activities are also expected to be realised. Figure 2: Geo SPARQL Box Geometry Virtuoso PivotViewer Query Result 2 http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/tutorials/sparql/sparql_tutorials_part_10/sparql_tutorials_part_10.html 3 http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/tutorials/sparql/sparql_tutorials_part_11/sparql_tutorials_part_11.html 4 http://www.w3.org/2014/03/lgd Page 6
4 Linked Data Life-Cycle and Stack The linked data life-cycle as described on the Linked Data Stack website 5 and shown in Figure 3 consists of the following stages: Extraction and Loading Interlinking and Fusing Classification and Enrichment Quality Analysis Evolution and Repair Search, Browsing and Exploration Storage and Querying Manual revision and Authoring Interlinking / Fusing Manual revision/ Authoring Classification/ Enrichment Storage/ Querying Linked Data Lifecycle Quality Analysis Extraction Evolution / Repair Search/ Browsing/ Exploration Figure 3: Linked Data Life-Cycle While stage Storage and Querying is addressed by Virtuoso described in section 3, achievements and results of the GeoKnow work packages WP3 and WP4 targeting the other stages of the life-cycle are reflected in a multitude of software tools. While they are potentially integrated or scheduled for integration into the GeoKnow Generator Framework discussed in section 2, they are also self-sufficient standalone tools that are useful to a range of users on their own. 5 http://stack.linkeddata.org Page 7
For this reason, these tools are also available on the Linked Data Stack website, which provides a consolidated repository of open-source tools supporting one or more life-cycle states of Linked Data. This cross-project website and repository facilitates synergy effects between projects and will help sustaining exploitation of GeoKnow results beyond the scope of the project. A selection of the tools included and developed within GeoKnow and their latest advances will be listed in the tables below. Jassa JS Libraries Description Progress/Impact GitHub statistics LD life-cycle Screenshot The JAvascript Suite for Sparql Access (Jassa) is a JavaScript library providing a high-level API for RDF and SPARQL as well as for faceted browsing. It includes user interfaces for faceted search, result tables, map widget as well as a path planning service. Jassa provides the basis and useful functionality to several tools at the heart of the GeoKnow project, such as Facete, Linked Data Viewer and Mappify. It is in use on several websites such as the European Union Open Data Portal 6. An extra website 7 was set up to promote it. 13 watches, 15 stars Search, Browsing and Exploration 6 https://open-data.europa.eu 7 http://js.geoknow.eu Page 8
Sparqlify Description Progress/Impact GitHub statistics LD life-cycle Sparqlify 8 allows defining RDF views on relational databases in order to query them with SPARQL. All queries used by Facete now also work on Sparqlify. 9 watches, 25 stars Extraction and Loading GeoLift Description Progress/Impact GitHub statistics LD life-cycle GeoLift 9 enriches RDF datasets with spatial information using dereferencing, linking and NLP extraction. The development and integration of a novel approach for Named Entity Disambiguation AGDISTIS [4] in the scope of WP3 ensures competetiveness and scalability of the tool. 12 watches, 9 stars Extraction and Loading, Classification and Enrichment Datacat Description Datacat 10 is a dedicated RDF data registry containing download and SPARQL endpoint registration. Progress/Impact LD life-cycle This project was newly set up. The vision is to have bots register references to pre-computed data sets and relate it to the source, so that other applications and services can find and reuse the data. Extraction and Loading Screenshot 8 http://aksw.org/projects/sparqlify.html 9 http://aksw.org/projects/geolift.html 10 http://datacat.aksw.org/ Page 9
TripleGeo Description Progress/Impact GitHub statistics LD life-cycle TripleGeo [3] extracts geospatial features from various sources and transforms them into triples for subsequent loading into RDF stores. Supported input sources include ESRI shapefiles, Oracle Spatial, PostGIS, MySQL and IBM DB2, Output formats include GeoSPARQL WKT, WGS84, Virtuoso and several RDF serialisations. Support for EU INSPIRE directive has been added, in particular for INSPIRE-aligned Geography Markup Language data for seven Data Themes (Annex I): Addresses, Administrative Units, Cadastral Parcels, Geographical Names, Hydrography, Protected Sites and Transport Networks (Roads). This new capability is a step towards geospatial data interoperability and dissemination. One of the TripleGeo tools, the TripleGeo-CSW service, is already in use in the Greek portal for open governmental geospatial data. It transforms INSPIRE data into RDF and exposes it as a SPARQL endpoint 11. 2 watches, 2 stars Extraction and Loading CROCUS Description Progress/Impact LD life-cycle Screenshot CROCUS 12 is a semi-automatic approach to instance-based error detection. This project was newly developed in Task 3.5. and published at the WASABI workshop at ESWC 2014 conference[1], where it received the best workshop paper award. Manual revision and Authoring, Quality Analysis 11 http://geodata.gov.gr/sparql/#editor 12 https://github.com/aksw/crocus Page 10
FAGI-gis and FAGI-tr Description Progress/Impact GitHub statistics LD life-cycle Screenshot FAGI-gis and FAGI-tr are two tools developed within work package 3, their vision and functionality at the time has been described in deliverable D3.2.1 (M12). FAGI-tr is a tool for transforming different RDF representations of spatial features. FAGI-gis computes similarities between geometries and applies geometry fusion strategies. The FAGI tools were demonstrated at the ESWC 2014 conference [2]. It is planned to publish them within the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), which the principal developing partner, Athena, is involved in, after the runtime of GeoKnow. Lately, several optimizations allowing faster I/O to the Virtuoso RDF store have been implemented. The tools are scheduled for integration into the generator, and a web-interface is planned for increased user-friendliness. 24 watches, 0 stars Interlinking and Fusing Page 11
... Facete2 Description Several outcomes of work package 4 are implemented in a tool for visualisation and authoring of geospatial RDF data, Facete213. Progress/Impact Latest features include a vocabulary abstraction layer for support of arbitrary geospatial vocabularies such as GeoSPARQL and WGS, Keyword search and client side querying with support for about 100.000 spatial objects. GitHub statistics 10 watches, 2 stars LD life-cycle Search, Browsing and Exploration Screenshot 13 http://aksw.org/projects/facete.html... Page 12
5 GeoKnow Business Cases The two consortium partners Brox and Unister provide use cases for the project, their progress is described in this section. On top of these two examples, two more business cases will be presented that have directly resulted from GeoKnow. 5.1 Supply Chain Infrastructure The supply chain infrastructure is being developed in the scope of work package 5 and one of the GeoKnow use cases within the consortium. The supply chain dashboard is a web application on top of the infrastructure allowing the user to search, browse and explore supply chain data that was on-the-fly converted from EDI to RDF previously. Its features include a live visualisation of incoming messages and a supplier score card allows live analytics of the supply chain based on user-defined metrics. In order to demonstrate the infrastructure s performance and scalability with only limited real world data being available, a simulation environment has been been set up to generate any large number of messages for testing and demonstration purposes. Now with increasing maturity of many GeoKnow components in the Linked Data Stack as described in 4, useful components will be integrated as a next step. Experiences made with the supply chain infrastructure will generate business value for Brox at the late stages of the project. It is certain that some results will flow into Brox s Xybermotive offer 14. Figure 4: Current screenshot of the the supply chain dashboard. 14 http://www.xybermotive.com/ Page 13
5.2 Integrative Component Model Within work package 6, the e-commerce use case of GeoKnow, a component model has been developed which integrates tools developed in work packages 2 and 3 along with management, visualisation and custom processes with the goal to generate a final interlinked data set. This project was a win-win situation between several work packages: GeoKnow tools employed in this tasks were Virtuoso, TripleGeo, Limes and Fagi, while several experiences made could be fed back into work package one and the design and architecture of the GeoKnow Generator described in section 2. An example is the expertise gained in using Spring Batch 15 as a workflow management system. Parts of the generated data are used on one of Unister s travel portals. The data set and the process of its generation also provides the basis for subsequent tasks in work package 6: the design, infrastructure, implementation and evaluation of a motive-based search infrastructure to obtain unique selling points on, for example, the web portal ab-in-den-urlaub.de. Source Datasets Unister CRM Unister Flights Unister Hotel Reviews Other Datasets WikiMapia Natural Earth Integration (Tool: TripleGeo) RDF Data Store (Tool: Virtuoso) (Tools: Limes, Fagi) DBpedia Interlinking and Transformation Geonames Hotels Combined Application Usage 27.01.14 http://geoknow.eu 1 Figure 5: Overview of the workflow in the integrative component model. 15 http://projects.spring.io/spring-batch/ Page 14
5.3 Continental Automotive GmbH Continental Automotive GmbH is one of the first commercial users of the authoring and visualisation software Facete, which they employ for data investigation for Continental products DropYa and TruckYa. DropYa 16 is a geosocial network, where users can send and receive location-based messages sharing their experience and recommendations. TruckYa 17 is a community-based tool for finding adequate parking spaces aimed at truck drivers bound by legal requirements regarding their resting periods. As a basis for these tools, geospatial data is needed, for example motorway service areas including restaurants, showers, hostels. Of future interest are further touristic information such as museums and playgrounds which is readily contained in publicly available data sets like DBpedia, Geonames and Freebase. Continental is currently looking into how this Linked Open Data can be used to extend their existing proprietary data sets. In this investigation process, Facete provides the functionality to browse data on a map, view attributes of interest, export relevant graph-parts and support the editorial process including enrichment and transformation. This project is still ongoing. Figure 6: Facete within the data generation process at Continental 16 https://dropya.net/ 17 http://www.continental-corporation.com/www/pressportal_com_en/themes/press_releases/3_automotive_group/cvam/press_releases/pr_2013_11_28_vdo_truckya_en.html Page 15
5.4 Ontos Linked Data Information Workbench The Ontos Linked Data Information Workbench (OntosLDIW) is a a generic, enterprise-ready workbench supporting the Linked Data life-cycle. It is easy to set up, maintain and straightforward to integrate into existing applications. The starting point for this project is the GeoKnow Generator, which was equipped with linked data tools developed both in the scope of GeoKnow (LIMES) and outside of it (OntoDix, D2RQ). The workbench was applied to a real world enterprise scenario, a customer relationship management system. The project was launched in February 2014 with the platform going live in April 2014. This short amount of setup and implementation time shows the flexibility and potential of the GeoKnow Generator and the usage of Linked Data technologies for enterprises in general. Results have been submitted and accepted as a publication for the International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web (KESW 2014) in September 2014. Next to exploiting results from the GeoKnow project, work on OntosLDIW is also partially funded by the Commission for Technology and Innovation in Switzerland. Figure 7: Linked Data life-cycle in the CRM use case Page 16
6 Miscellaneous This final section reports on the topics of benchmarking, dissemination, publication and standardisation, all of which are covered in more detail in the respective deliverables mentioned in the corresponding sections. 6.1 Benchmarking Benchmarking of GeoKnow achievement is a continuous and crucial task throughout the project. In the initial stages of the project, a state-of-the-art analysis of Triple Stores was performed, including in investigation of Virtuoso, useekm, Parliament, AllegroGraph, OWLIM-SE, Strabon and Oracle Spatial. With PostGIS as reference, fragments of OpenStreetMap and Ordnance Survey data were used for performance testing, revealing high deviation in performance and supported functionality between geospatial triple stores. Results were published in Deliverable D2.2.1. To facilitate transparency, comparability and reproducability of benchmarking results, a GitHub repository GeoBenchLab 18 has been set up. It contains a suite of benchmarks to track performance improvements or regression of several GeoKnow components, in particular components for geospatial querying and data integration, with every consortium member being encouraged to use them for the tools they maintain. Several benchmarking activities are planned, partially within GeoKnow, partially across other projects like LOD2 and LDBC. 6.2 Dissemination and Publications Details on publications and dissemination will be available in the second year dissemination report due in November 2014. However, this section already provides a few numbers to show activity within the GeoKnow project. The GeoKnow website had over 2500 unique visitors so far. The GeoKnow Blog features 16 posts. GeoKnow is well represented in the social networks, with 178 followers on Twitter, 33 followers and 57 likes on Google+, 83 members on LinkedIn, 83 likes of the facebook page and 54 participants in W3C. Networking efforts were made with a number of other projects during workshops, summits and meetings, for example with the projects SemaGrow, LinkedUp, LOD2, LEO, LDBC, SmartOpenData and Diachron. At the time of writing, there have been more than 20 publications with involvement of GeoKnow, among which several appeared in top journals and conferences such as the World Wide Web Conference (WWW), the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) and the Semantic Web Journal (SWJ). 6.3 Standardisation Three main contributions of GeoKnow have been made during the first half of the project: a suite of tools for transforming data and metadata of EU states available in the scope of the INSPIRE directive into spatial linked data and providing access via SPARQL (Task 2.7) 18 https://github.com/geoknow/geobenchlab Page 17
an RDF conversion of the Electronic Data Interchange document standard (EDI) in the scope of work package 5 progress with the Sparqlification Mapping Language (SML), and easy-to-use language for expressing mappings from relational databases to RDF knowledge bases The consortium engages in community work related to both the OGC and W3C communities by participation in events where both are present, for example the Linking Geospatial Data (LGD) workshop and the European Data Forum. The Geospatial Semantic W3C community group created in the scope of GeoKnow is another facility to bring together various groups of people interested in exploitation of linked geospatial data. The adoption of existing and partly recent related standards is advanced by the GeoKnow tools by providing implementations with increasing coverage. A more detailed description of the points mentioned can be found in deliverable D7.3.1, the first standardisation report. Page 18
7 Conclusion and Future Work This report describes achievements of the GeoKnow project and efforts made for their exploitation. In general, one can summarise that the number and maturity of tools has greatly increased, with their combined functionality providing a more complete coverage of the Linked Data life-cycle. Initial work on productive usage of GeoKnow tools in the business use cases WP5 and WP6 haas been started, and two more commercial scenarios have been found. In its first half of the project s runtime, the GeoKnow consortium has demonstrated the following exploitation capabilities: Scientific excellence by high-level publications Implementation expertise by turning research results into a number of functioning tools Use of synergy effects to other project by a joint software portal Linked Data Stack and joint organisation of workshops Community building competence with presence in social networks and running of an own Geospatial Semantic W3C community group Ability to commercialise project results with two new business cases and continuing successful work on WP5 and WP6 In the second part of the project, scalability of the tools is one of the focuses, supported by the GeoBenchLab initiative mentioned in the report. Tools will get more complete and mature, and there will be new tools to publish, for example the Mobile spatial-semantic visualization, exploration and authoring component developed in Task 4.5. One of the aspects the consortium needs to improve upon is publicity and regular release cycles for software in order to be more attractive to the end users, which is already targeted for some of the tools and the first major public release of the GeoKnow Generator targeted in September 2014. Page 19
References [1] Didier Cherix, Ricardo Usbeck, Andreas Both, and Jens Lehmann. CROCUS: Cluster-based ontology data cleansing. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Semantic Web Enterprise Adoption and Best Practice, 2014. [2] Giorgos Giannopoulos, Thomas Maroulis, Dimitrios Skoutas, Nikos Karagiannakis, and Spiros Athanasiou. FAGI-tr: A tool for aligning geospatial RDF vocabularies. European Semantic Web Conference, 2014. [3] Kostas Patroumpas, Michalis Alexakis, Giorgos Giannopoulos, and Spiros Athanasiou. TripleGeo: an ETL tool for transforming geospatial data into RDF triples. In EDBT/ICDT Workshops, pages 275 278, 2014. [4] Ricardo Usbeck, Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo, Michael Röder, Sören Auer, Daniel Gerber, and Andreas Both. AGDISTIS - agnostic disambiguation of named entities using linked open data. In International Semantic Web Conference, page 2. 2014. Page 20