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A Dialogue with Linked Data: Voice-Based Access to Market Data in the Sahel

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A Dialogue with Linked Data: Voice-Based Access to Market Data in the Sahel Undefined 0 (0) 1 1 IOS Press A Dialogue with Linked Data: Voice-based Access to Market Data in the Sahel Victor de Boer a;∗ Nana Baah Gyan a Anna Bon b Wendelien Tuyp b Chris van Aart a Hans Akkermans a a Department of Computer Science, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands Email: {v.de.boer, n.b.gyan, c.j.vanaart, j.m.akkermans}@vu.nl b Center for International Cooperation, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands Email: {a.bon, w.tuyp}@vu.nl Abstract. The Linked Data movement has facilitated efficient data sharing in many domains. However, people in rural developing areas are mostly left out. Lack of relevant content and suitable interfaces prohibit potential users in rural communities to produce and consume Linked Data. In this paper, we present a case study exposing locally produced market data as Linked Data, which shows that Linked Data can be meaningful in a rural, development context. We present a way of enriching the market data with voice labels, allowing for the development of applications that (re-)use the data in voice-based applications. Finally, we present a prototype demonstrator that provides access to this linked market data through a voice interface, accessible to first generation mobile phones. Keywords: Voice Interface, Linked Data for Africa, Linked Market Data 1. Introduction ate3. Furthermore, there is a need for knowledge shar- ing systems to deal with specific use cases and content Development and use of the Web of Data has un- relevant to people in the target communities. Locally til now mainly focused on developed countries, as was relevant content can be an incentive for people to ac- the case with the Web of Documents before it. 4.5 cess and use the knowledge sharing systems [1]. billion people -mainly in developing countries- cur- Currently, a number of efforts are being undertaken rently can not access the World Wide Web. The rea- to bridge this so-called ’digital divide’ in the World sons for this include infrastructural ones such as a Wide Web, including the recent forming of the Web Foundation. As was argued in [2], while the Web of lack of high bandwidth Internet connections and reli- Documents has been around for 20 years, as engineers able power supplies as well as socio-economic issues of the much newer Web of Data, we have the oppor- such as the high cost of buying Personal Computers, tunity to not let the “digital Linked Data divide” grow language mismatches and lack of reading and writing too large. To avoid a seemingly unbridgeable gap, we abilities [1]. For our case study in Mali, only 1.8% of should consider the underprivileged majority and these the population has Internet access1, only 10% has ac- 2 barriers as we design Linked Data architecture, de- cess to the electricity network , and only 26.2% is liter- scribe use cases and provide access to that Linked Data. *Corresponding Author 1http://www.internetworldstats.com/ Internet 061129\%20RECIPES\%20country\%20info\%20Mali. World Statistics, Miniwatts Marketing Group. pdf 2http://www.developingrenewables.org/ 3http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/ energyrecipes/reports/genericData/Africa/ indicators/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS Index Mundi 2011 0000-0000/0-1900/$00.00 c 0 – IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved 2 V. de Boer et al. / 1.1. Mobile technologies 1.3. Contributions One way of overcoming the infrastructural and liter- The contributions of this paper are the following. acy barriers is to turn to simple mobile phones, GSM architecture and voice technologies to build knowledge – We describe a knowledge sharing use case in sharing services. In Africa, mobile telephony has be- Mali, Africa and a Market Information System come the primary mode of telecommunication [3]. In (MIS) adapted to the local context, RadioMarché 2006, an estimated 45 percent of Sub-Saharan African (RM). Regarding the above mentioned chal- villages were covered by a mobile signal[4]. And in lenges, RM is not dependent on Internet infras- 2009, Africa showed the fastest rate of subscriber tructure, and has voice-based and sms-based in- growth, introducing 96 million new mobile subscribers terfaces. We describe the current status of deploy- in a period of only twelve months [5]. The widespread ment of this system.. availability of mobile phones and increasing level of – The market data gathered using RadioMarché coverage creates great opportunities for new services. have been converted to and exposed as Linked Open Data. In Section 4.1, we discuss the data, 1.2. Linked Data for knowledge sharing in rural its model and opportunities for re-use. We show areas in developing countries how our design choices offers opportunities to Linked Data as a paradigm is very much suitable link aggregated market information to datasets for knowledge sharing in developing countries. Linked from other domains. The resulting data provides Data approaches provide a particularly light-weight an open innovation platform to develop services way to share, re-use and integrate various data sets us- with augmented reasoning capabilities for local ing Web standards such as URIs and RDF. It does not entrepeneurs, NGOs, governments, policy mak- require the definition of a specific database schema for ers, traders and scientists. a dataset [6]. We assume that the majority of the use – We propose a method of adding voice information of the locally produced data will also be consumed lo- to the linked data produced in this way through cally. Although the specifics of the locally produced the use of pre-recorded audio files, accessible data will differ from use case to use case and from re- through the Web, thus allowing for re-use of this gion to region, Linked Data provides us with a standard data in voice-based applications, relevant in the way of integrating the common elements of the data. low-literate, low-infrastructure context. We also Also, because we do not impose a single overarching describe a partial implementation of this voice schema on the data, data reuse for new services is eas- data for the RadioMarché Linked Data case. ier, both within a region and across regions. In Section – We have developed a prototype voice application 4.2, we present an example of a prototype application that uses this data. This proof-of-concept demon- reusing linked market data. strator provides voice-based access to the Ra- An additional advantage is that Linked Data is well- dioMarché linked data. This demonstrator is de- suited for localization efforts. Linked Data is very scribed in Section 4.4. much suited for dealing with multilinguality as its core concepts are resources rather than textual terms. Where the Web of Documents, by design, is language- 2. Related Work specified, Linked Data is designed to be “language ag- nostic”, which suits our purpose of multilingual and We can find many efforts towards the usage of mo- voice-based access well. In Section 4.3, we elaborate bile technologies in an ICT for Development (ICT4D) on our efforts to attach ’voice labels’ to the data. context. In 2013 the International Telecommunication The combination of Linked Data, mobile services Union (ITU) organized a forum discussing how mo- and voice technology allows us to integrate and share bile and broadband connectivity can be a tool in global locally relevant information, while at the same time economic development 4. There are many international allowing local stakeholders to access the data using research initiatives and practitioners turning to mo- available hardware and voice interfaces. In this paper, bile services for information sharing in rural develop- we describe a prototype solution based on Linked Data for a specific use case in the rural Sahel region that allows voice-based access to the data. 4http://www.itu.int/en/wtpf-13/ V. de Boer et al. / 3 ing areas. Examples include SPIDER 5, IDRC 6 or the A related project on Linked Data for developing coun- Nethope network of ICT4D practitioners 7. Success tries is described by Guéret et al. [15]. The Seman- stories of such mobile services include studies in fish- ticXO is a system that connects rugged, low-power, ing villages in India [7], grain markets in Niger [8] or low-cost robust small laptops for empowerment of crop markets in Uganda [9]. poor communities in developing countries. Related work on voice technologies started in the 1930s in research on speech recognition. The first commercial deployments of voice-based services took 3. The RadioMarché Market Information System place in the early 1970s. Major achievements on language recognition took place in the 1980s and Our efforts center around, RadioMarché [16,17], a 1990s, but this was mainly focused on English. While web-based information system developed within the Text-To-Speech and Speech Recognition are key in VOICES project8 aimed at stimulating agricultural voice application development, the creation of the trade in the Sahel region. The RadioMarché system is a VoiceXML standard by the W3C Voice Browser MIS that supports local farmers of Non-Timber Forest group, in 1999, further facilitated the development of Products (NTFPs) such as honey, tamarind and shea voice applications [10]. nuts. It was introduced under support of a local partner Agarwal et al. from IBM Research India, devel- NGO, Sahel Eco9, in the Tominian Area in Mali. oped a system to enable authorship of voice con- RadioMarché is used to distribute up-to-date mar- tent for 2G phone in a Web space, they named the ket information via community radio in the area. A WWTW (World-Wide Telecom Web). The whole sys- Sahel Eco staff member receives offerings from local tem creates a closed web space, within the phone farmer’s representatives in the form of an SMS text network.
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