A Service-Oriented Architecture for Assisting the Authoring of Semantic Crowd Maps

摘要

Although there are increasingly more initiatives for the generation ofsemantic knowledge based on user participation, there is still a shortage ofplatforms for regular users to create applications on which semantic data canbe exploited and generated automatically. We propose an architecture, calledSemantic Maps (SeMaps), for assisting the authoring and hosting of applicationsin which the maps combine the aggregation of a Geographic Information Systemand crowd-generated content (called here crowd maps). In these systems, thedigital map works as a blackboard for accommodating stories told by peopleabout events they want to share with others typically participating in theirsocial networks. SeMaps offers an environment for the creation and maintenanceof sites based on crowd maps with the possibility for the user to characterizesemantically that which s/he intends to mark on the map. The designer of acrowd map, by informing a linguistic expression that designates what has to bemarked on the maps, is guided in a process that aims to associate a conceptfrom a common-sense base to this linguistic expression. Thus, the crowd mapsstart to have dominion over common-sense inferential relations that define themeaning of the marker, and are able to make inferences about the network oflinked data. This makes it possible to generate maps that have the power toperform inferences and access external sources (such as DBpedia) thatconstitute information that is useful and appropriate to the context of themap. In this paper we describe the architecture of SeMaps and how it wasapplied in a crowd map authoring tool.