Linked open piracy

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 adding RDF meta-data to spreadsheets and textual reports, strives to speed up the creation of geographical mashups and visual analytics applications. In this paper, we present a new Open Linked Data RDF dataset and a method for automatically adding such RDF metadata to semi-structured reports. We showcase our method on piracy attack reports issued on the web by the International Chamber of Commerce's International Maritime Bureau (ICC-CCS IMB). We create a Semantic Web representation with the Simple Event Model (SEM) from screen scrapes of the ICC-CCS website. We show how the event layer makes it possible to easily analyze and visualize the aggregated reports to answer domain questions. 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 through a ClioPatria web server that hosts the RDF.