The Ithaca project is an effort to publish public sector data as Linked Open Data (LOD). Ithaca reads open datasets that exist in the web in various forms (e.g. XML, CSV, Excel, PDF, etc.) and converts their data to RDF triples exploiting 'IthacaOntology', an ontology that we have designed for describing concepts related to the underlying data. The produced RDF triples are loaded in a Virtuoso warehouse, offering thereby an API (specifically a SPARQL Endpoint) for accessing the data.
Currently, Ithaca reads and integrates information coming from 21 Greek public sector datasets, describing information of several points of interests in Crete island, like museums, ancient places and buildings, beaches, gorges, organizations, shelters, caves, wineries, ports, E4 routes, and more.
Ithaca was awarded three prices in Hack4Med, the HOMER project Hackathon, held in the University of Crete - Department of Computer Science (16-17 May 2014, Voutes Campus, Heraklion, Greece). Specifically, Ithaca was awarded the 1st prize for the "Best Homer Federation Open Data reuse app", the 2nd prize for the "Most useful application for a public sector administration", and the 1st prize for the "Best Solution for Crete".
Ithaca has been implemented by Michalis Mountantonakis ([email protected]) and Pavlos Fafalios ([email protected]).