BeAware project alpha-version has been launched

Several months ago when searching for information about a conference I visited a lot of “events catalogue” sites but none of them appealed to me. Lack of convenient search engine (in case of large events quantity it turns the site into a trashcan), poor geodata integration and other drawbacks urged me to create a new events storing platform. Besides, the key motivation was the potential of applying the technologies from Semantic Web stack (I was looking for such a project for some time). Together with Alexander Efimov, we started working on BeAware project.

In this post I am going to shortly describe BeAware places of interest without plunging into technical details.

Let’s keep the index page for dessert and begin with the event creation page:
On the left side you can see the events tree, which is based on ontology (the ontology is poorly worked out at the moment but it still reflects the general idea). Each event type has it own properties set (which is extended with moving down the hierarchy).
After selecting the event type, we can start filling event properties: basic properties and properties which are specific for the selected event type:
The most interesting part here is the event location choosing. Location is a combination of city (GeoNames) and concrete obect inside it (LinkedGeoData). City is the one mandatory part of the place.

You can either choose the previously labeled place or add a new one. Before object choosing you should choose object type to filter objects (here inference is used, for example, for choosing all types of buildings):
Now you know what is meant by “event” at BeAware. Let’s go to the main page and review the advanced search:
First let’s choose an event type (current dropdown event tree implementation is not very convenient… but we are working on it). As a result, additional optional filtering criteria properties will be loaded (for example, for a scientific conference “free/not free” and “science field” properties will be loaded). Either events hierarchy or hierarchies of properties’ values are processed by inference engine. That’s why if a user requests entertaining events, he will get not only “entertaining event” instances but also instances of all its descendants (festivals, carnivals, etc.). Same for the situation in which the user is interested in scientific conferences on all social sciences – no problem.

Then let’s look into the geo filter. At the moment you can filter events either by city or country. In fact, it is the smallest part of functionality we could implement by using the means which our service is based on (GeoNames, LinkedGeoData, inference engine (part of Virtuoso)). I'm not going to go into details about geofiltering now, because the next post will cover this topic in full.

So we have set the search criteria – we just need to press “Find events” button and get our results… although current database state (to be precise, its emptiness) discredits the magic that occurs during search query execution.

We have looked through BeAware project core and now let’s talk about the things that will be improved or implemented in the nearest future.

First of all event ontology will be supplemented. It’s a very difficult and responsible task. It is difficult because we need to overview a huge number of events occurring all over the world and generalize them into convenient form for to the end user. It is responsible because as soon as ontology is stabilized, backward compatibility restriction will be introduced (it means that we won’t be able to significantly change the ontology: there will be events of all the types and we will have to maintain them without semantics change).

Secondly geofiltering is due to be improved. It’s just absurd to wield GeoNames+LinkedGeoData+Inference_Engine and get only filtering by cities and countries out of it. We will try to significantly improve this component.

Thirdly we will implement subscriptions. Subscriptions’ interface will be similar to the advanced search interface. Subscriptions will deprive our users of the “pleasure” of daily searching and give them opportunity to get notifications using email, RSS, etc.

Fourhtly RDFa markup will be added.

Fifthly we will integrate MusicBrainz for musical concerts.

Sixthly you may suggest your ideas – we won’t leave them without proper attention :)

P. S. BeAware is looking for grant/investments. Please contact me for any information