Andrea Volpini @cyberandy

@STI2 - STI-Innsbruck, Austria 17th February 2015

Digital travelling: interweaving web storytelling and open data publishing

This fine event is hosted by:

@sti2 - #sti-innsbruck

This workshop is about: #travel

#webstorytelling @wordliftit

#semanticweb

Hello, I am: @cyberandy

UNTITLED - MARK ROTHKO

“Stories are important cognitive events, for they encapsulate, into one compact package information, knowledge, context and emotions”

Don Norman

Tian Shu by Chinese artist Xu Bing

Stories are important cognitive events, for they encapsulate, into one compact package information, knowledge, context and emotions

Don Norman

https://flic.kr/p/4J8PR2

Travellers agree that they turn to the web early on in the travel process.

65% 69%Leisure Business

data: Google Travel Study, June 2014, Ipsos MediaCT

…reality is that the path to purchase is still extremely complex.

Yes. We have data.data; IDC I V I E W, 2012

• From 2005 to 2020, the digital universe will grow in size by a factor of 300, from 30 exabytes to 40 trillion gigabyte (40 ZB).

• From now until 2020, the digital universe will about double every two years.

• Volumes of data are projected to reach 5.247 GB per person.

• Only 0.5% of this data is used today for analysis.

• The amount of information individuals create themselves - writing documents, taking pictures, recording audio - is far less than the information being created about them in the digital universe.

Travel booking and shopping process in most cases begins with an online search.

57%Leisure

64%Business

Destinations. Price-related terms. Brands. Activity-related termsdata: Google Travel Study, June 2014, Ipsos MediaCT

First things we type in Google when planning a trip.

data: Google Travel Study, June 2014, Ipsos MediaCT

Why Stories are so

important?

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eastern_Story_Teller_%281878%29_-_TIMEA.jpg

Stories help us deliver information in a deep and meaningful way.

Science has proved that character-driven stories do consistently cause oxytocin synthesis.

Oxytocin motives cooperation with others.

Why your brain loves good storytelling - Paul J. Zak (Harvard Business Review)

It’s no surprise we haven’t changed much the way we craft our stories.

People are attracted to stories as we’re

social creatures and we relate to other people.

We’ve been communicating with stories in the last 20,000 years when

our flat screen was a cave wall!

BEGINNING CRISIS CLIMAX REVERSAL END

The Irresistible Power of Storytelling as a Strategic Business Tool - Harrison Monarth (Harvard Business Review)

How do we create engaging stories for

the Web?

Billy Meinke - https://www.flickr.com/photos/67338640@N04/15106864024/

New Brain

The new brain is where language is interpreted - it is the most recent layer and takes into account culture and tradition How do we communicate?

The mid brain is impulsive and it's where emotions are processed What drives us?

Susan Weinschenk - Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click?

The old brain is instinctual and

concerned with our survival

What is safe?

Old Brain

Mid Brain

Online experiences that “speak” to all three brains (old brain, mid brain and new brain) are

the most effective.

Most behaviour and decision-making isn’t conscious. When we engage all three brains users magically click!

When crafting a successful story for the web we shall always consider three layers:

CONTENTVISUAL

USER EXPERIENCESketches by Insideout.Today for Beats by Demand (5FM South Afica)

“Websites are digital game books”

Denise R. Jacobs

NON-LINEARITY is a FACT.

CONTENT COHERENCE means creating meaningful

connections between pieces of information.

To craft our digital game books we shall connect things and add a context.

WHO WHEN WHERE WHAT WHY

What will I remember three days from now?

Innsbruck

It is called PSE = Pictorial Superiority Effect Combining words with images = 6X better information retention!

Innsbruck

WORD PICTURE WORD + PICTURE

10% 35% 65%

A team of innovators led by @reinhardlanner (SalzburgerLand Tourismus - SLT) have decided to bring digital storytelling for

travellers a step forward by implementing a data driven content syndication platform to link premium contents with actionable

data (events, booking, facilities, …).

Let’s move now to one of the most affluent (and gorgeous) regions in Europe for

travellers around the World: Land Salzburg.

CONTENT ANALYSIS

LINKED DATA PUBLISHING

1

3

Linked Data Cloud

Technology Stack

Text

Legacy Data

Audio/Images (under development)

CONTENT DISCOVERY2

• Enterprise Linked Data

• Content Enhancement

• Semantic Search

Natural Language Processing

We use it everyday.

[J U RAFSKY & MARTIN, 2008]

a theoretically motivated range of computational techniques for analysing naturally occurring text/speech for the purpose of achieving human-like language processing.

Features extraction in text/speech.

Levels of knowledge encoding in language data.

INPUT

Morphologic

Syntactic

Semantic

FEATURES

NLP{ Parser

Lexical DB

Stemming

AnaphoraPos Tagging

NER

TEXT

NLP FEATURES

WISDOM

Making sense of unstructured data with Redlink.

STRUCTURED DATA

CONTEXT

Combining Semantic Web technologies with NLP technologies.

KNOWLEDGE{Semantic Lifting

A semantic plugin for

WordLift brings the power of Artificial Intelligence to Web Publishers, turning editorial

contents into actionable knowledge.

The Open Linked Data Strategy of SalzburgerLand Tourismus

•Liberating legacy data and combine it with external datasets (GeoNames, Foursquare, TripAdvisor, …)

•Building an Enterprise Knowledge Graph (EKG) and making it accessible to everyone as linked open data

• Implementing automatic interlinking and dynamic semantic publishing with WordLift

•Adding schema.org markup for events using JSON-LD

• Drive business by increasing online visibility and interlinking the booking system

The Enterprise Knowledge Graph (EKG) of SalzburgerLand

Tourismus

•More than 8.000 events constantly updated

•700 geographical places

•More than 7.000 local business (hundreds linked to Foursquare and TripAdvisor):

•1.700 restaurants

•5.000 accommodations

•More than 7.000 entries (events, accommodations, businesses) with geographic coordinates

•2.267.332 facts (triples)…growing

DATA.SALZBURGERLAND.COM

Pre-configured queries guide developers in getting the information they need.

i.e. “How many accommodations are in Saalfelden?”

http://data.salzburgerland.com/dataset/accomodations/resource/47d29ca8-ea29-491e-9c6f-b0a7341339bf

Data in the EKG can be consumed

from a SPARQL End-point

http://dev.redlink.io/api/1.0-BETA/#linked-data

How does Saalfelden look in the SLT EKG?

Visualise Saalfelden with LodLive

Using WordLift SLT can now organise their stories and premium contents using entities and relationships in the knowledge graph.

Editorial Content (storytelling)

Using dynamic semantic publishing to remix content and create business value.

Event

Restaurant

Booking

• Pages for events, restaurant and facilities are rendered dynamically by WordLift using data stored in the EKG.

• Interlinking is semi-automatic and uses the annotations provided via content analysis API (NLP) of Redlink.

• Dynamic widgets like the timeline keeps pages up-to-date with latest information from the EKG.

• Automatic interlinking creates meaningful connections (content coherence) and drives traffic to the booking system.

All dynamic pages include schema.org markup.

Events are marked up using JSON-LD to intercept conversational queries from Google and boost rankings.

(i.e. “what is going on today in Deisenberger?”)

Jukebox: a linked data mobile application.

A mobile web app prototype has been also developed on top of WordPress to keep travellers up to date with recents events in SalzburgerLand.

The app consumes events data coming from the SPARQL End-point.

As content and data can now be easily combined it is all about crafting stories!

Hartwig HKD - "Question vanishing" on Flickr

When presenting the SLT Knowledge Graph project I received all sort of different questions. Here are the ones I like the most (1/2).

• How can you measure the success of this project? We’re looking at the following targets (and metrics): reducing efforts (and costs) for content editing, creation and syndication, increase of direct bookings, increase engagement across all digital properties (+ time spent, + page views per session, …), qualified search visibility (search phrases, …), better in-destination services for mobile users.

• Who is currently using SLT data? The data is a key asset for SLT’s digital strategy for the next 5 years: we expect SLT to re-use its data in the first place. Concrete interest has been shown by different startups in the travel industry at both local and global level. Data is also being used in research projects.

• Can a schema.org annotation service be comparable with running an enterprise knowledge graph?

No. As seen in the Saalfelden example the data in the KG has been interlinked with other datasets and this enables us to make complex queries over all kind of information. The result of these queries can help us create meaningful connections among our websites and it is transferred to search engines using the schema.org vocabulary.

Hartwig HKD - "Question vanishing" on Flickr

When presenting the SLT Knowledge Graph project I received all sort of different questions. Here are the ones I like the most (2/2).

• How is Redlink/WordLift unique in this sector? Redlink is at the same time the linked data warehouse for the enterprise knowledge graph and the content analysis API (NLP) that re-uses the information in the graph for named entity extraction. WordLift enables read/write access to the graph, annotates contents and links premium editorial content with business processes such as bookings, event listing and more using dynamic widgets.

• Why in the tourist industry share data as open data is important? When looking at what data is flowing between an organisation and other groups in tourism the potentials are enormous (just think of the growing business of online flight booking that became possible when real-time, worldwide flight status was finally made available). Open data supports different business models that can be used for generating economical value (open doesn’t necessarily mean free). More info from ODI.

• Can a single operator (an Hotel for example) share its own data as linked data?

Creating an enterprise knowledge graph only makes sense when we begin integrating different data silos as the integration costs lower and the possibilities increase. A single operator shall work with organisations like SLT to becomes an ‘entity’ in the Linked Data cloud. Much like we’ve been creating our own web pages on social networks we shall now curate our data in data hubs like data.salzburgerland.com.

JOIN.WORDLIFT.IT

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