describe events which are then linked to a user pro-
file, for which FOAF
9
is used. This way, an event is
modelled whenever a song is played. Originally, this
model was intended to describe musical events, but
due to its simplicity and usability, it has been proven
useful in a wide range of contexts. This model de-
scribes an event as anything that has a spatial and
temporal dimension. Such an event is described by
its participating agents, its passive factors influenc-
ing the event, its products as a consequence of the
event and a location in time as well as space. In addi-
tion, this model allows describing relations between
events. However, its simplicity is also a disadvantage
since the model lacks some advanced features, like
pricing information, more detailed relations between
events, minimum age for participation, etc., which are
essential for describing events in our context.
Finally, the format that we adopted for mod-
elling events is the EventsML-G2 (International Press
Telecommunications Council, 2009) standard. This
is a standard of the International Press Telecommuni-
cations Council
10
(IPTC) for conveying event infor-
mation in a news industry environment. EventsML-
G2 is intended for receiving, storing and exchang-
ing event information from organisers as well as pub-
lishing event information by news providers. This
model delivers the right context for our event descrip-
tions since it allows describing events in different lan-
guages, together with their relations, the pricing in-
formation, the minimum age, etc.
Currently, the EventsML-G2 standard is described
as an XML (Bray et al., 2006) schema. In order to ap-
ply semantic web techniques, we developed an OWL
(McGuinness and van Harmelen, 2004) ontology of
this standard. An alternative to make the EventsML-
G2 schema usable in the Semantic Web Stack, is de-
scribing the schema in RDFS (Brickley, 2004). How-
ever, since OWL is a richer language for develop-
ing models and permits to mix RDFS and OWL con-
structs, we opted for describing the EventsML-G2 se-
mantic ontology by using OWL. This OWL ontology
is published online on the website of the Multimedia
Lab research group of Ghent University
11
.
By describing all the aggregated events using this
ontology, a common format is created for exposing
the event information. This common format acts as
a unifying layer, relating all the information com-
ing from different data providers. By providing a
semantic ontology for these events, content-based
recommendation algorithms are able to analyse the
9
http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/
10
http://www.iptc.org
11
http://multimedialab.elis.ugent.be/ontologies/
EventsML-G2/v1.0/
events in detail, and additionally, semantic web tech-
niques can be used. Moreover, this semantic ontol-
ogy allows complex queries for events by a SPARQL
(Prud’hommeaux and Seaborne, 2007) endpoint and
the enrichment of event descriptions with information
from other data providers as described in Section 2.
EventsML-G2 has two manners for conveying
event information: as a conceptItem or as a knowl-
edgeItem. A conceptItem is aimed at describing
an event solely. A knowledgeItem is intended for
bundling a set of events which are managed as a
whole. Given our context, i.e. publishing and recom-
mending events from event organisers, we utilize the
conceptItem to model the events. For interoperability
issues, we modelled agents involved in an event, e.g.
organisers or participants, using the FOAF ontology.
This allows us to incorporate more easily information
about the agents from other data sets afterwards. This
additional advantage is the main difference between
our developed ontology and the EventsML-G2 speci-
fication.
The descriptive metadata about the event is cap-
tured by the Concept class, which stores a description
of the event, the title of the event, the event details, re-
lations to other events, and the language of the event
description. The relations to other events can be de-
scribed by owl:sameAs for stipulating that this event
is the same as another event, and by skos:related,
skos:broader or skos:narrower for pinpointing the re-
lations to other events. The EventDetails class con-
tains a more complete event description and is linked
to ten other classes for storing detailed information
about the event, namely: Dates, Location, Contact-
Info, Agent, Language, Subject, OccurStatus, Regis-
tration, ParticipationRequrement, and Media.
4 EVENT RECOMMENDATION
To handle the overload of information, a recom-
mender system is necessary to assist users in find-
ing the most relevant events. Traditionally, recom-
mender systems have been categorized into two main
classes: collaborative filtering (CF) and content-based
(CB) methods. CF techniques are based on the hy-
pothesis that a good method to find interesting con-
tent is to search for other people who have similar
interests, and then recommend items that those sim-
ilar users like (Breese et al., 1998). Most existing
recommender applications utilize these CF techniques
in making predictions about which items an e-service
user is likely to be interested in (Linden et al., 2003).
Traditional CF techniques, however, can not cope at
all with time specific items, like events, which typ-
AN EVENT DISTRIBUTION PLATFORM FOR RECOMMENDING CULTURAL ACTIVITIES
233