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The economic impact of open data in Europe has an estimated value of € 140 billions a year between direct and indirect effects. The social impact is also known to be high, as the use of more transparent open data have been enhancing public services and creating new opportunities for citizens and organizations. We are assisting at a staggering growth in the production and consumption of Linked Data (LD). Exploring, visualizing and analyzing LD is a core task for a variety of users in numerous scenarios. This paper deeply analyzes the state of the art of tools for LD visualization. Linked Data visualization aims to provide graphical representations of datasets or of some information of interest selected by a user, with the aim to facilitate their analysis. A complete list of 77 LD visualization tools has been created starting from tools listed in previous surveys or research papers and integrating newer tools recently published online. The visualization tools have been described and compared based on their usability, and their features. A set of goals that LD tools should implement in order to provide clear and convincing visualizations has been defined and 14 tools have been tested on a big LD dataset. The results of this comparison and test led us to define some suggestions for LD consumers in order for them to be able to select the most appropriate tools based on the type of analysis they wish to perform.

Virtual Research Environments (VREs), also known as science gateways or virtual laboratories, assist researchers in data science by integrating tools for data discovery, data retrieval, workflow management and researcher collaboration, often coupled with a specific computing infrastructure. Recently, the push for better open data science has led to the creation of a variety of dedicated research infrastructures (RIs) that gather data and provide services to different research communities, all of which can be used independently of any specific VRE. There is therefore a need for generic VREs that can be coupled with the resources of many different RIs simultaneously, easily customised to the needs of specific communities. The resource metadata produced by these RIs rarely all adhere to any one standard or vocabulary however, making it difficult to search and discover resources independently of their providers without some translation into a common framework. Cross-RI search can be expedited by using mapping services that harvest RI-published metadata to build unified resource catalogues, but the development and operation of such services pose a number of challenges. In this paper, we discuss some of these challenges and look specifically at the VRE4EIC Metadata Portal, which uses X3ML mappings to build a single catalogue for describing data products and other resources provided by multiple RIs. The Metadata Portal was built in accordance to the e-VRE Reference Architecture, a microservice-based architecture for generic modular VREs, and uses the CERIF standard to structure its catalogued metadata. We consider the extent to which it addresses the challenges of cross-RI search, particularly in the environmental and earth science domain, and how it can be further augmented, for example to take advantage of linked vocabularies to provide more intelligent semantic search across multiple domains of discourse.

The proliferation of disconnected information systems accumulating increasing volumes of heterogeneous data is a formidable challenge in the healthcare domain. It is necessary to address this challenge as the entire domain gradually transitions into e-healthcare and patient-centered healthcare delivery models. The lack of data integration at systems level prohibits clinicians from building a comprehensive understanding of the patient condition and further deprives patients of developing a holistic awareness of their medical conditions. In this paper, we propose an open data integration platform for patient, clinical, medical and historical data siloed across multiple health information systems. As an open platform, it can accommodate and integrate further heterogeneous data sources such as data streams generated by wearable IoT devices. As an integration platform, it facilitates the centralization of data assets. This centralization empowers every stakeholder in a patient-centered care setting to actively participate in decision-making. A range of analytics and reporting solutions, such as data warehouse, interactive dashboards, and predictive analytics tools, can be deployed upon this open data integration platform. The proposed platform is currently being adapted and implemented to address patient-centered healthcare and clinical decision support requirements in a sports injury clinic at a not-for-profit private hospital in Melbourne, Australia. Use Case based demonstration of the platform’s suitability for holistic information management, decision support, and predictive analytics justify its role in the advancement of e-healthcare.

With the growing availability of public open data, the protection of citizens’ privacy has become a vital issue for governmental data publishing. However, there are a large number of operational risks in the current government cloud platforms. When the cloud platform is attacked, most existing privacy protection models for data publishing cannot resist the attacks if the attacker has prior background knowledge. Potential attackers may gain access to the published statistical data, and identify specific individual’s background information, which may cause the disclosure of citizens’ private information. To address this problem, we propose a fog-computing-based differential privacy approach for privacy-preserving data publishing in this paper. We discuss the risk of citizens’ privacy disclosure related to governmental data publishing, and present a differential privacy framework for publishing governmental statistical data based on fog computing. Based on the framework, a data publishing algorithm using a MaxDiff histogram is developed, which can be used to realize the function of preserving user privacy based on fog computing. Applying the differential method, Laplace noises are added to the original data set, which prevents citizens’ privacy from disclosure even if attackers get strong background knowledge. According to the maximum frequency difference, the adjacent data bins are grouped, then the differential privacy histogram with minimum average error can be constructed. We evaluate the proposed approach by computational experiments based on the real data set of Philippine families’ income and expenditures provided by Kaggle. It shows that the proposed data publishing approach can not only effectively protect citizens’ privacy, but also reduce the query sensitivity and improve the utility of the data published.