Linked Open Piracy: A story about e-Science, Linked Data, and statistics

There is an abundance of semi-structured reports on events being written and made available on the World Wide Web on a daily basis. These reports are primarily meant for human use. A recent movement is the addition of RDF metadata to make automatic processing by computers easier. A fine example of this movement is the open government data initiative which, by representing data from spreadsheets and textual reports in RDF, strives to speed up the creation of geographical mashups and visual analytic applications. In this paper, we present a newly linked dataset and the method we used to automatically translate semi-structured reports on the Web to an RDF event model. We demonstrate how the semantic representation layer makes it possible to easily analyze and visualize the aggregated reports to answer domain questions through a SPARQL client for the R statistical programming language. We showcase our method on piracy attack reports issued by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC-CCS). Our pipeline includes conversion of the reports to RDF, linking their parts to external resources from the linked open data cloud and exposing them to the Web.