Judie Attard

Malta Information Technology Agency · Strategy and Business Department

Data is central to modern decision making and value creation. Society creates, consumes and collects data at an increasing pace. Despite advances in processing power, data is expensive to maintain and curate. So, it is imperative to have methods and tools to distinguish between data based on its value. Yet, there is no consensus on what characteris...

While data value and value creation are highly relevant in today’s society, there is as yet no consensus data value models, dynamics, measurement techniques or even methods of categorising and comparing them. In this paper we analyse and categorise existing aspects of data that are used in literature to characterise and/or quantify data value. Base...

The Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud has been around since 2007. Throughout the years, this prominent depiction served as the epitome for Linked Data and acted as a starting point for many. In this article we perform a number of experiments on the dataset metadata provided by the LOD cloud, in order to understand better whether the current visualised d...

The collection of more and more data results in the rise of a data-driven government. Although traditional administrative and policy-making process are data intensive, only recently the ability to collect and process big and open linked data (BOLD) at a large scale has resulted in the possibility to create a data-driven government. Data-driven gove...

Data is quite popularly considered to be the new oil since it has become a valuable commodity. This has resulted in many entities and businesses that hoard data with the aim of exploiting it. Yet, the ‘simple’ exploitation of data results in entities who are not obtaining the highest benefits from the data, which as yet is not considered to be a fu...

Linked Data has become the current W3C recommended approach for publishing data on the World Wide Web as it is sharable, extensible, and easily re-usable. An ecosystem of linked data hubs in the Public Sector has the potential to offer significant benefits to its consumers (other public offices and ministries, as well as researchers, citizens and S...

Open data is increasingly permeating into all dimensions of our society and has become an indispensable commodity that serves as a basis for many products and services. Governments are generating a huge amount of data spanning different dimensions. This dataification shows the paramount need to identify the means and methods in which the value of d...

A major obstacle to the wider use of semantic technology is the perceived complexity of RDF data by stakeholders who are not familiar with the Linked Data paradigm, or are otherwise unaware of a dataset's underlying schema. In order to help overcome this barrier, we propose the ExConQuer Framework (Explore, Convert, and Query Framework) as a set of...

With the advent of the Internet and particularly Open Data, data literacy (the ability of non-specialists to make use of data) is rapidly becoming an essential life skill comparable to other types of literacy. However, it is still poorly defined and there is much to learn about how best to increase data literacy both amongst children and adults. Th...

Governments are one of the largest producers and collectors of data in many different domains and one major aim of open government data initiatives is the release of social and commercial value. Hence, we here explore existing processes of value creation on government data. We identify the dimensions that impact, or are impacted by value creation,...

A worldwide movement towards the publication of Open Government Data is taking place, and budget data is one of the key elements pushing this trend. Its importance is mostly related to transparency, but publishing budget data, combined with other actions, can also improve democratic participation, allow comparative analysis of governments and boost...

We conduct a systematic survey with the aim of assessing open government data initiatives, that is; any attempt, by a government or otherwise, to open data that is produced by a governmental entity. We describe the open government data life-cycle and we focus our discussion on publishing and consuming processes required within open government data...

A worldwide movement towards the publication of Open Government Data is taking place, and budget data is one of the key elements pushing this trend. Its importance is mostly related to transparency, but publishing budget data, combined with other actions, can also improve democratic participation, allow comparative analysis of governments and boost...

The di.me userware is a pervasive personal information management system that successfully adopted ontologies to provide various intelligent features. Supported by a suitable user interface, di.me provides ontology-driven support for the (i) integration of personal information from multiple personal sources, (ii) privacy-aware sharing of personal d...

The di.me userware is a pervasive personal information management system that successfully adopted ontologies to provide various intelligent fea-tures. Supported by a suitable user interface, di.me provides ontology-driven sup-port for the i) integration of personal information from multiple personal sources, ii) privacy-aware sharing of personal d...

Although a number of initiatives provide personalized context-aware guidance for niche use cases, a standard framework for context awareness remains lacking. This article explains how semantic technology has been exploited to generate a centralized repository of personal activity context. This data drives advanced features such as personal situatio...

Today's personal devices provide a stream of information which, if processed adequately, can provide a better insight into their owner's current activities, environment, location, etc. In treating these devices as part of a personal sensor network, we exploit raw and interpreted context information in order to enable the automatic recognition of pe...

The di.me userware is a decentralised personal information sharing system with a difference: extracted information and observed personal activities are exploited to automatically recognise personal situations, provide privacy-related warnings, and recommend and/or automate user actions. To enable reasoning, personal information from multiple device...

The goal of this study is to exploit the portability and availability of mobile phones to provide a means of guidance to the visually impaired while travelling. This system assists a visually impaired person while travelling through the city by implementing image recognition through a mobile phone and offering information of the immediate vicinity....

Efforts by the pervasive, context-aware system development community have over the years produced a wide variety of context-aware techniques and frameworks. However, a bulk of this technology tends to be strictly tied to a native system, thus largely limiting its external adoption. In addressing this limitation, we introduce an interoperable contex...