Web Alliance for

Regreening in Africa (W4RA)

Frank van Harmelen | Victor de Boer

With input from Christophe Guéret, Hans Akkermans, Anna Bon

Regreening

• Knowledge sharing issues

– Distances between rural communities in Sahel

– Infrastructure and access

• Commonly: no electricity, no computer, no internet

• But: mobile and radio

– Lack of relevant content

• Literacy and education

– Languages

Hans Akkermans e-Biz Innovation course, 22 Sep 2011 2

Aim: integrate Web with mobile

access & voice services

• service development toolbox, field deployment in Africa & make a sustainable business out of it

Hans Akkermans e-Biz Innovation course, 22 Sep 2011 3

Field pilots in Mali

Web-mobile-voice services • Field pilot use cases Mali (to start end 2011):

1. Web-based market info by mobile voice service to radio stations for broadcast

2. m-event field organizer facilities Web-mobile-voice

Hans Akkermans e-Biz Innovation course, 22 Sep 2011 4

Web in Society:

the big picture R&D questions

Hans Akkermans e-Biz Innovation course, 22 Sep 2011 5

• Q1 [immediate]: Can the Web (be made to) mean something for knowledge sharing even under very constraining conditions?

– No internet, no computer, no electricity

– Multitude of languages, levels of literacy

• Q2 [Web future]: Can we have a Web of Speech?

– After all, human communication: talking >> writing

Linked Data without the

Web

Not having the Web != Not sharing data

They would benefit from Linked Data

but they can not use it!

And we don't want a new divide, do we?

Market prices Educational content

1) think de-centralised

Instead: chunks of data served by different peers

2) think small, think micro-servers

Not designed for developing countries Designed for developing countries

433Mhz x86 CPU 256MB of RAM 1GB of flash storage

Can be solar powered Dust proof Affordable

Multi-core fast CPU Gigabytes of RAM Terabytes of disk

3) think vocal

Because not everyone can read and write

SemanticXO

Deploy Linked Data on the XO from OLPC

Voice-based access to Linked

Open Market Data in the Sahel

A Bit of Context:

RadioMarché

Digital Divide

Source: ITU Digital Access Index, World's First Global ICT Ranking

Voice-based services in a rural African context

• Integrate local community radios and mobile ICT for knowledge sharing

• Better support and integrate local languages in voice-based

services

– Development of appropriate speech elements (text-to-

speech and Speech recognition)

• Develop a free and open source toolbox for local developers.

• Investigate self-sustainability

– Develop appropriate business models

– In collaboration with local communities.

Use Case 1

Onno Wassenaar

Context: Web For Regreening in Africa (W4RA)

RadioMarche

Sahel Eco

aggregates

market info

Market info

Radio 1

Radio 2

Radio broadcast

French

Bambara

French

Bomu

Data management

RadioMarche.com

Audio communiqué

• Audio communiqué generated by concatenating prerecorded phrases – Each radio host uses own voice (!)

• Text-to-speech where possible

• Currently only for French

• Audio quality is an issue

Voice XML

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

<vxml version="2.0" lang="en">

<form>

<prompt bargein="false">

Welcome to RadioMarche!

<audio src=“audio/communique_1_bambara.wav"/>

</prompt>

<option dtmf="1" value=“1">Press one for X</option>

<option dtmf=“2" value=“2">Press two for Y</option>

...

</vxml>

Linked Data Prototype

An Outrageous Idea

ClioPatria Linked Data server

Linked Data Cloud

Linked market data

Market data

Voice browser

(Voxeo Evolution)

VoiceXML-to-SPARQL

Web access Voice access

http://purl.org/collections/w4ra/radiomarche/offering_68

@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> . @prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> . @prefix rm: <http://purl.org/collections/w4ra/radiomarche/> . rm:offering_68 a rm:Offering ; rm:com_number "6" ; rm:contact_address "" ; rm:currency "CFA" ; rm:has_communique rm:communique_4f2918bc6a7af ; rm:has_contact rm:Fidel_Kone ; rm:price "450.00" ; rm:prod_com_id "3" ; rm:prod_name rm:product-Graine_de_nere ; rm:quality "Graine propre" ; rm:quantity "120.00" ; rm:store_id "68" ; rm:ts_date_delivered "2012-02-01 10:54:57" ; rm:ts_date_entered "2012-02-01 10:18:27" ; rm:unit_measure "Kg" ; rm:user_id "6" .

Application Browser

+31208080855

+990009369996162208 (Skype VOIP)

<VoiceXML>

*

PHP to SPARQL

Linked market data

DBpedia

GeoNames

Agrovoc

Institute of

Development Studies LOD

Linked market data

Sahel Pluvial Data SemanticXO

Questions?

ICT4D course

w4ra.few.vu.nl

semweb4u.wordpress.com

worldwidesemanticweb.wordpress.com