Title : Semantic Web modeling of an Indigenous kinship and property rights system ($2500 scholarship provided)

  • Appropriate Courses: COMP8740 (AI), COMP8750 (CSys), COMP8760 (CSci), COMP8770 (eSci), COMP8780 (HCC), COMP8790 (SE); COMP3006 (*), COMP3750 (CSys), COMP3760 (IS)
  • Orientation: research and implementation
  • Status:  proposition
  • Student: suitable for PhD and MPhil or Honours ($2500 scholarship provided)
  • Supervisor(s)/Client: Dr Elisa Baniassad (CS), Dr Aaron Corn (RSHA), Doug Moncur (DoI)
  • Research Area(s): Semantic Web, Digital Repositories, Information Systems, Indigenous Knowledges
  • Technical Difficulty Level: low, moderate, high
  • Conceptual Difficulty Level: low, moderate, high

Description

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor the World Wide Web, was the first to envision a Semantic Web ‘capable of analysing all the data on the Web—the content, links, and transactions between people and computers—[through which] the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines’(Berners-Lee with Fischetti 1999: §12). This project will the explore the application of Semantic Web techniques to modeling an Indigenous kinship and property rights system from Arnhem Land, Australia, for enhancing the discoverability of resources via the World Wide Web, and enabling the creation the novel search interfaces that can respond to real-time user requests. Findings will contribute directly into the development of two digital archiving projects of international significance: the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC), and the National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia. The National Library of Australia, and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies also hold strong interests in this application of Semantic Web technologies, and this project may lead to further collaborations with such organisations.

Links and References

Barwick, L 2005 ‘Issues for participating in the Semantic Web for digital data archives in the Humanities’ <http://apan.net/meetings/bangkok2005/presentation/Linda.zip> (Bangkok, Asia–Pacific Advanced Network).

Berners-Lee, T with M Fischetti 1999Weaving the Web (San Francisco, Harper).

Bizer, C, R Cyganiak & T Heath 2008 ‘How to publish linked data on the Web’ <http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/pub/LinkedDataTutorial/20070727> (Berlin, Freie U Berlin).

Corn, ed. 2007 The National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia<http://www.aboriginalartists.com.au/NRP.htm>.

Corn, A & J Gumbula 2006 ‘Rom and the academy repositioned’, in L Russell (ed.),Boundary Writing (Honolulu, U Hawai’i Press) pp. 170–97.

Fensel, D et al. (eds) 2005 Spinning the Semantic Web (Cambridge MA, The MIT Press).

Kemps-Snijders, M et al. 2008 ‘A revised data model for the ISO data category registry’, in B Madsen & H Thomsen (eds),Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Terminology and Knowledge Engineering (Copenhagen,GTW).

PARADISEC 2005 Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures <http://www.paradisec.org.au>.

Sauernann, L, R Cyganiak & M Völkel 2007 ‘Cool URIs for the Semantic Web’ <www.dfki.uni-kl.de/~sauermann/2006/ 11/cooluris> (Kaiserslautern, Deutsche Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz) viewed 17 November 2008.

 


-Elisa