A driving force behind the development of novel services tailored to the needs of citizens is the increasing flexibility of social time. Even though city residents may possess valuable information for other citizens visiting their home area, it is hardly usable with today’s information systems because of the inevitably scattered information resources. Considering the explosive growth of information, knowledge sharing can ensure valuable interdisciplinary applications and services development. While many organizations propose relevant data sets, they are hardly accessed, analyzed and reused in an integrated way –despite of the enormous added value such integration would have– because of the heterogeneity of formats, the lack of interoperability, and the inappropriate support for information browsing and visualization. The City-Stories, City-Zen and City-Eye are the current projects that are being developed in the data semantics lab, and will be presented in the talk with a focus on the  aspects of linked data and data visualization in two domains of application: Government and Tourism.

Maria Sokhn is a professor at the HES-SO Valais – Wallis. She holds a PhD from Telecom Paris Tech in 2011. She graduated from the Engineering Faculty of Saint Joseph University, with a Computer and Communication Engineering diploma. Her research interests focus on eGovernement, information retrieval and knowledge management. She is member of the Data Semantics Lab, which has been at forefront of Semantic Web and Data Integration research since 2003. The Data Semantics Lab focuses on scientific research and practical applications of Semantic Computing, Linked Data, Information Extraction and Data Visualization.