Proposal 1: Ramallah Semantics

The vision of semantic web (Web 3.0) as proposed by the World Wide Consortium (W3C) is to "create a universal medium for the exchange of data". For this vision to realize, large amounts of structured datasets are being published forming a web of interlinked structured data. The W3C community project Linking Open Data is playing a lead role in this by bringing and linking massive amounts of structured data in the web. Examples of structured datasets being published and interlinked by the project include Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Geonames, MusicBainz, DBLP bibliography, Flickr, Freebase, Yago, CiteSeer, MySpace Wrapper, Crunch Base, and many more. This data is published in RDF; by September 2010, the published sets have grown to 25 billion RDF triples interlinked by around 395 million RDF links. On the other hand, the trend of geo-tagging objects is emerging rapidly. For example, applications such as Smugmug, Flickr, Locr, and Picasa, offer tools for geo-tagging photos and displaying them on maps. Other Web 3.0 initiatives such as Flickr Wrapper, provides RDF dataset of photos linked with Wikipedia objects and it supports geo-tagging as well.

This project aims at building a geo-tagged dataset of objects/buildings/towns in Ramallah including their GIS coordinates. This dataset is then linked to other data sets in the world especially those part of the Linking Open Data project, such as DBPedia, Yago, Flickr, etc. The students will also build a mobile/web application that exposes the power of map APIs (such as Google Maps) and the developed RDF dataset that is linked to the open data cloud of the data web.

Remarks:

For more detailed information about this project, please contact Dr. Mustafa Jarrar for a face-to-face discussion.
Technical Knowledge in Programming (in specific, JAVA/C#/Web programing) and Databases is expected.
By working on this project, you will be part of the research team at BZU. Thus, your commitment as a team member is anticipated. You are expected to work efficiently, respect deadlines and copyrights, and collaborate with other team members effectively, who will in turn provide you with help and support while working on your project.
You will be collaborating with high-profile researchers and professors from the University of Trento in Italy, thus you are expected to have an acceptable of level of English and good written and verbal communication skills.
Students who will achieve good results will be given a financial grant to participate and publish their work in International conferences.

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