Experiencing Events through User-Generated Media

Large numbers of websites contain (human-readable) information about scheduled events, of which some may display media captured at these events. This information is, however, often incomplete and always locked into the sites. This prevents users from creating overviews of media associated with an event from multiple websites. We carried out exploratory user studies with potential end-users to guide the design of a web-based environment for supporting event-based services. Based on our results, our goal is to provide support for exploring and selecting events and associated media, and for discovering meaningful, surprising or entertaining connections between events, media and participants by consuming linked data. We assembled a large collection of event and associated media descriptions, which we interlinked with the Linked Open Data cloud. The dataset is obtained from three large public event directories (last.fm, eventful, upcoming) represented with the LODE ontology and from large media directories (flickr, youtube) represented with the Media Ontology. We present the results from the user studies, the conversion, interlinking and publication of the data following the best practices of the Semantic Web community, and our initial application design.