The paper gives an account of an infrastructure that will be integrated into a platform aimed at providing a multi-faceted experience to visitors of Northern Greece using mythology as a starting point. This infrastructure comprises a multi-lingual and multi-modal corpus (i.e., a corpus of textual data supplemented with images, and video) that belongs to the humanities domain along with a dedicated database (content management system) with advanced indexing, linking and search functionalities. We will present the corpus itself focusing on the content, the methodology adopted for its development, and the steps taken towards rendering it accessible via the database in a way that also facilitates useful visualizations. In this context, we tried to address three main challenges: (a) to add a novel annotation layer, namely geotagging, (b) to ensure the long-term maintenance of and accessibility to the highly heterogeneous primary data – even after the life cycle of the current project – by adopting a metadata schema that is compatible to existing standards; and (c) to render the corpus a useful resource to scholarly research in the digital humanities by adding a minimum set of linguistic annotations.

In-situ processing has received a great deal of attention in recent years. In in-situ scenarios, big raw data files which do not fit in main memory, must be efficiently handled on-the-fly using commodity hardware, without the overhead of a preprocessing phase or the loading of data into a database system. This paper presents RawVis, an open source data visualization system for in-situ visual exploration and analytics over big raw data. RawVis implements novel indexing schemes and adaptive processing techniques allowing users to perform efficient visual and analytics operations directly over the data files. RawVis provides real-time interaction, reporting low response time, over large data files, using commodity hardware.

A major challenge for social event organizers (e.g., event planning and marketing companies, venues) is attracting the maximum number of participants, since it has great impact on the success of the event, and, consequently, the expected gains (e.g., revenue, artist/brand publicity). In this paper, we introduce the Social Event Scheduling (SES) problem, which schedules a set of social events considering user preferences and behavior, events' spatiotemporal conflicts, and competing events, in order to maximize the overall number of attendees. We show that SES is strongly NP-hard, even in highly restricted instances. To cope with the hardness of the SES problem we design a greedy approximation algorithm. Finally, we evaluate our method experimentally using a dataset from the Meetup event-based social network.

We present a novel platform for the interactive visualization of very large graphs. The platform enables the user to interact with the visualized graph in a way that is very similar to the exploration of maps at multiple levels. Our approach involves an offline preprocessing phase that builds the layout of the graph by assigning coordinates to its nodes with respect to a Euclidean plane. The respective points are indexed with a spatial data structure, i.e., an R-tree, and stored in a database. Multiple abstraction layers of the graph based on various criteria are also created offline, and they are indexed similarly so that the user can explore the dataset at different levels of granularity, depending on her particular needs. Then, our system translates user operations into simple and very efficient spatial operations (i.e., window queries) in the backend. This technique allows for a fine-grained access to very large graphs with extremely low latency and memory requirements and without compromising the functionality of the tool. Our web-based prototype supports three main operations: (1) interactive navigation, (2) multi-level exploration, and (3) keyword search on the graph metadata.

The ubiquity of mobile location aware devices and the proliferation of social networks have given rise to Location-Aware Social Networks (LASN), where users form social connections and make geo-referenced posts. The goal of this paper is to identify users that can influence a large number of important other users, within a given spatial region. Returning a ranked list of regionally influential LASN users is useful in viral marketing and in other per-region analytical scenarios. We show that under a general influence propagation model, the problem is #P-hard, while it becomes solvable in polynomial time in a more restricted model. Under the more restrictive model, we then show that the problem can be translated to computing a variant of the so-called closeness centrality of users in the social network, and devise an evaluation method.

The Web of Data is an open environment consisting of very large, inter-linked RDF datasets from various domains (e.g., DBpedia, GeoNames, ACM, PubMed, etc.) accessed through SPARQL queries. Establishing interoperability in this environment has become a major research challenge. This paper presents Sparql--Rw (SPARQL--ReWriting), a framework which provides transparent query access over mapped RDF datasets. The Sparql--Rw provides a generic method for SPARQL query rewriting, with respect to a set of predefined mappings between ontology schemas. To this end, it supports a set of rich and flexible mapping types and it is proved to provide semantics preserving queries.