Regional Knowledge Maps - Potential and Challenges

Regional knowledge map is a tool recently demanded by some actors in an institutional level to help regional policy and innovation in a territory. Besides, knowledge maps facilitate the interaction between the actors of a territory and the collective learning. This paper reports the work in progress of a research project which objective is to define a methodology to efficiently design territorial knowledge maps, by extracting information of big volumes of data contained in diverse sources of information related to a region. Knowledge maps facilitate management of the intellectual capital in organisations. This paper investigates the value to apply this tool to a territorial region to manage the structures, infrastructures and the resources to enable regional innovation and regional development. Their design involves the identification of information sources that are required to find which knowledge is located in a territory, which actors are involved in innovation, and which is the context to develop this innovation (structures, infrastructures, resources and social capital). This paper summarizes the theoretical background and framework for the design of a methodology for the construction of knowledge maps, and gives an overview of the main challenges for the design of regional knowledge maps.

Challenges and Potentials for Keyword Extraction from Company Websites for the Development of Regional Knowledge Maps

Regional Innovation Systems describe the relations between actors, structures and infrastructures in a region in order to stimulate innovation and regional development. For these systems the collection and organization of information is crucial. In the present paper we investigate the possibilities to extract information from websites of companies. First we describe regional innovation systems and the information types that are necessary to create them. Then we discuss the possibilities of text mining and keyword extraction techniques to extract this information from company websites. Finally, we describe a small scale experiment in which keywords related to economic sectors and commodities are extracted from the websites of over 200 companies. This experiment shows what the main challenges are for information extraction from websites for regional innovation systems.

HaptOSM – Creating tactile maps for the blind and visually impaired

This paper describes the latest accomplishments on the current research that is based on the master’s thesis “Ein System zur Erstellung taktiler Karten für blinde und sehbehinderte Menschen” (German for “A system creating tactile maps for blind and visually impaired people”) (Hänßgen, 2012). The system consists of two parts. The first part is new software especially designed and developed for creating tactile maps addressing the needs of blind and visually impaired people on tactile information. The second is an embossing device based on a modified CNC (computer numerical control) router. By using OpenStreetMap-data, the developed system is capable of embossing tactile maps into Braille paper and writing film.