A Linked Data Based Personal Service Data Collection and Semantics Unification Method

Abstract

The flourish of services on the Internet results in the flourish of personal service data. The volume of the data produced by various services around a person is fairly large. However, in the service-centric paradigm, these data are distributed in the clouds of different service providers and these clouds are mutually isolated, but there lacks of a global view of the service data related to a specific person, limiting the collaboration between various services. To overcome this deficiency, we propose a user-centric paradigm for personal data management, called "Personal Data Cloud" (PDC), which is a SaaS application storing a user's data from different services in a centralized way. A key issue in PDC is how to collect personal data from distributed services and store them in a unified form. In this paper we present three ways of collecting personal data, namely open API based, web crawler based, and manual importation based ways. To deal with the semantics unification among the collected data, we adopt Linked Data and ontology techniques for semantic annotation. Some open APIs are designed for the PDC to facilitate the access and usage of the personal data from a portal or apps on mobile terminals.