Georgios Toubekis | Search arXiv

arXiv2026

Towards Insight-Centric Data Spaces: Integrating Visual Analytics and Decentralized Data Ecosystems

Visual analytics and dataspaces address complementary challenges in modern data ecosystems: visual analytics enables interactive exploration and human-centered reasoning over complex data, dataspaces provide decentralized infrastructures for sovereign and collaborative data sharing. Both fields have largely evolved independently, resulting in a gap between data management and data understanding in distributed environments.We explore their intersection and argue that integration is essential for next-generation data ecosystems. Visual analytics acts as a cognitive layer for dataspaces by making data availability, quality, provenance, and exchange processes observable and interpretable, while dataspaces reshape visual analytics by introducing decentralized, heterogeneous, and governed data environments. We illustrate this interplay through a semi-synthetic cultural dataspace scenario analyzing exchange patterns and metadata quality across a federated ecosystem. Based on these insights, we identify key open challenges and outline a vision of insight-centric data spaces, in which data management and analysis are tightly integrated into a unified, human-centered environment.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2026

Automated Construction of FAIR Digital Object Knowledge Graphs from Flat Cultural Heritage Records

The FAIR Digital Object (FDO) framework mandates that metadata attribute values be expressed as persistent identifiers (PIDs) wherever possible, to produce a fully machine-actionable graph in which every reference is resolvable. The Europeana Data Model was designed long before the FDO specification, and it stores most metadata values as plain text. This serves human browsing well enough, but gives an automated agent nothing to follow across records or collections. We present a pipeline that transforms flat Europeana records into an FDO-compliant knowledge graph structured with CIDOC-CRM. Following the FDO specification, we model every heritage entity as a discrete FDO with its own PID, type, profile, and metadata layer. The core technical challenge is automating the FDO-prescribed distinction between values that must become PID references (resolvable entities) and those that may remain literals (terminal leaves such as notes, measurements, and dates). We address this with a large language model that classifies each metadata value, routes it to a controlled vocabulary (Getty AAT, Wikidata, VIAF, PeriodO), and links it to a shared entity FDO. We evaluate using 637 archaeological records from five Europeana providers, processing each with the LLM. The pipeline links 86% of metadata slots, resolving 58.5% of values Europeana had not already enriched. It also merges cross-lingual surface forms that byte-identical matching keeps apart, where 17 of 33 such merges are correct on manual review. Graph connectivity does not separate this from string matching; what distinguishes the FDO graph is that every node is typed and resolvable.

cs.AI↗