A survey of open accessibility data

Abstract

This paper presents the research of using Linked Data for enhancing accessibility data, especially for accessible travelling. With the aim of addressing the gap between users' special needs and accessibility data, this research initially explores the current situation of open accessibility data. Open accessibility data is the data related to the accessibility issues and associated with geographical data, which could benefit people with disabilities or special needs. This paper proposed a survey of open accessibility data in UK based on the datasets retrieved from five different resources. After examining the features of each dataset, a mapping approach using Semantic Web technologies is proposed to interlink these datasets together to generate a linked open accessibility repository and link this repository to other resources on the Linked Open Data Cloud (LODC). As a result, this research would not only benefit people with disabilities, but also contribute to a novel method to address accessibility information barriers by establishing a linked open accessibility data repository for publishing, integrating and consuming the accessibility data.