It goes without saying that one of the key pillars of any project is the code behind the abstract definitions and architectures, and SALTED is no exception. One of our contributions is the release of open source code intended to facilitate future development, both for ourselves and for any interested third party.

The SALTED GitHub repository is our chosen place for hosting the code developed within the project, and although the bulk of it will be released a few months from now, we are happy to announce that the repository is already full steam ahead.

Currently, the repository includes some forks related to our Smart Data Models contributions (such as the extensions and updates to DataServiceDCAT-AP and AgriParcel data models; or the creation of the new Organization and Data Quality Smart Data Models), a compendium of NGSI-LD wrapped contexts that enable automation of M2M information exchange with an NGSI-LD Context Broker. Besides, it also hosts two Python packages that streamline communication among the modules that compose SALTED's architecture.

Stay tuned!

Dr. Gürkan Solmaz from CEF SALTED has been invited as a keynote speaker by the AI Educational Initiative (AIEI) in Heidelberg, Germany on July 8,2023.  AIEI is a recently formed community to educate broader society on the AI. The keynote lecture was in general about the AI and its applications to the smart cities. Specifically, the lecture focused on the data enrichment through machine learning for the development of the concept “City Liveability Index (CLI)” in CEF SALTED to make cities smarter and more livable.

The public lecture started with a brief AI overview and followed by the smart city projects and specifically the AI for data enrichment for the smart city data and the SALTED smart city application CLI. The lecture ended with the open challenges of application of AI in smart cities or in general public spaces in the near future.

The keynote talk is followed by a panel discussion with lively exchanges between the audience and Dr. Gürkan Solmaz, joined by Dr. Ana Victoria Ponce Bobadilla, Dr. Jude Alsabah, and Dr. Magdalena Szczygiel.

About the AI Educational Initiative (from https://www.linkedin.com/company/ai-educational-initiative/) :

AI Educational Initiative was launched in 2023 to educate broader society about the chances but also risks associated with implementing AI into many areas of our lives. We hope to "de-hype" AI, preach online hygiene, calm down those afraid of mass job losses but alert those believing that AI will solve all our problems.

FIWARE Global Summit 2023, the grand annual event organised by the FIWARE Foundation, took place on June 12 and 13 in Vienna. Some of the SALTED team partners attended the event and had the opportunity to promote the project.

SALTED was present in the "Strategic FIWARE programs, Services and Products" session. A 10 minute slot allowed for a presentation of the project and its relation to the Smart Data Models initiative. As we have covered in previous articles, SALTED has a close relationship with the FIWARE ecosystem and Smart Data Models in particular, as the project adopts several models and has contributed to the initiative with five extensions and additions.

The attendees were able to learn about the philosophy and goals of the SALTED project, with an emphasis on the harmonisation of heterogeneous data sources. Additionally, the speaker explained our contributions to the initiative and linked them to the use cases of the project, which will derive in the applications that are currently in development.

You can see the slides below:

Aligned with the Agenda Analytics use case of the SALTED Project, the development and employment of data services is practically a must when talking about the collection and processing of data stored on the Internet.

Services such as web crawlers or data linkers can be represented by the DataServiceDCAT-AP Smart Data Model, following the principles of linked data, in addition to being fully compliant with the DCAT-AP specification. However, in the project context, certain attributes have been identified for describing these services that were not included in this data model, and thus not included in the DCAT-AP specification.

On the other hand, due to the traceability requirement described in SALTED, it has become essential to describe the different instances of execution of these data services, in order to specify their inputs, configuration parameters and final outputs, among other properties. This evolves into a new data model called DataServiceRun.

Putting these two needs together, our partner Kybeidos has taken these opportunities to extend the DataServiceDCAT-AP data model with these new properties and to contribute to the initiative with the new DataServiceRun model. Both actions will allow the use of the subject that contains them to be more widespread. Moreover, aligned with the agile standardization philosophy of the initiative, they will have higher chances to be submitted to the original standardization group (DCAT-AP) for their adoption.

Both the new data model for DataServiceRun and the extension for the DataServiceDCAT-AP data model can be found in the official Smart Data Models repository: DCAT-AP.

One of the SALTED use cases is Smart Agriculture, which aims to analyse the CO2 levels at several kinds of parcels with different types of soil and/or crops. The parcels used for this assessment are located near the city of Madrid.

Taking advantage of the Smart Data Models initiative, several data models have been chosen for their suitability to the specifics of the Smart Agriculture use case. These are: AgriParcel, to describe the parcels of land; AgriCrop, to describe the crops; and finally, AirQualityObserved, to characterise the levels of CO2 above the parcels assessed. Nevertheless, no relationship between the AgriParcel and AirQualityObserved models existed until now, making the full characterisation of the use case unfeasible.

To address this shortcoming, partners Grupo Amper and Universidad de Cantabria have contributed to the initiative by adding a new relationship (named hasAirQualityObserved) to the AgriParcel data model, linking it to the air quality observations gathered above this parcel, modelled as AirQualityObserved entities. Thanks to the relation between these two models, the main goal of SALTED can be fulfilled: the generation of enriched data which encourage the development of innovative value-added services.

The extension of the data model AgriParcel can be found in the official Smart Data Models repository.

One of the key goals of SALTED is the publication of the NGSI-LD high-value data generated within the project in the European Data Portal (EDP). This document describes the required connectors that interconnect the SALTED architecture to the EDP, by leveraging a Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) public instance deployed in between.
The document details the implementation and deployment of the concerned connectors, their internal components, and the data models they use. The resulting platform, which includes the Scorpio Broker, the CKAN instance, and the connectors, is aligned with the main output expected from Work Package 3 in general, and Task 3.1 in particular.

The deliverable can be found in the publications section.

This document represents the D2.2 deliverable of the data modelling and linking. The focus of this document is the thorough definition of the architecture implementation and deployment, including details about how security is handled. Furthermore, D2.2 includes an update on the data modelling introduced in D1 and D2.1, and a review of the linking modules currently implemented.

The deliverable can be found in the publications section of the webpage.

Partner Institut Mines-Télécom hosted the third face-to-face General Assembly meeting of the SALTED project on March 22 and 23 in Évry.

The whole consortium participated in the meeting, in which technical aspects regarding all of the active Work Packages were thoroughly discussed. Moreover, the applications envisioned for the project were fruitfully analysed in order to fully align with the SALTED goals. Some of them have already made the leap to the implementation and deployment stage, and partners were even able to test a brief demo.

Stay tuned if you are curious about these applications (you should!). Here is a sneak peek of two examples: Agenda Analytics will check the compliance of organisations with their own promises, while CLIFF will calculate a liveability index of european cities based on Open Data.

SALTED aims to provide datasets and data-streams enriched with new properties and relationships, facing the need of harmonization of these data. One of the most relevant initiatives pursuing the standardization of data modelling is the Smart Data Models initiative, with more than 800 data models available to use.

Within the SALTED project, our partner Universidad de Cantabria has contributed to the improvement of the Smart Data Models initiative by releasing a new Smart Data Model for the Data Quality Assessment. The main goal of this new Smart Data Model is to characterize the quality properties of several entities or measurements.

The new data model for DataQualityAssessment can be found in the official Smart Data Models repository: DataQuality.

This document represents the D1.1 deliverable of the semantic features extraction for heterogeneous data sources contextualization. The focus of this document is to give an introduction to different data sources used in SALTED as well as smart data models for converting into the NGSI-LD architecture. Furthermore, D1.1 defines the injection chains of different sources and their contributions to the SALTED architecture with a few possible use cases.

This document has a twofold goal: on one side, it is intended for internal use in order to drive the design and implementation of subsequent phases of the DET (i.e. data linking and enrichment toolchain) or application use cases for the project or internally to the partner organizations; on the other hand, it is publicly available in order to increase the awareness of the SALTED activities, its relation with the FIWARE ecosystem and it points to the important issue of the data treatment and consolidation for interoperable applications and domains.

The deliverable can be found in the publications and resources section of the webpage.