The Internet of Things generates vast data volumes via diverse sensors, yet its potential remains unexploited for innovative data-driven products and services. Limitations arise from sensor-dependent data handling by manufacturers and user companies, hindering third-party access and comprehension. Initiatives like the European Data Act aim to enable high-quality access to sensor-generated data by regulating accuracy, completeness, and relevance while respecting intellectual property rights. Despite data availability, interoperability challenges impede sensor data reusability. For instance, sensor data shared in HTML formats requires an intricate, time-consuming processing to attain reusable formats like JSON or XML. This study introduces a methodology aimed at converting raw sensor data extracted from web portals into structured formats, thereby enhancing data reusability. The approach utilises large language models to derive structured formats from sensor data initially presented in non-interoperable formats. The effectiveness of these language models was assessed through quantitative and qualitative evaluations in a use case involving meteorological data. In the proposed experiments, GPT-4, the best performing LLM tested, demonstrated the feasibility of this methodology, achieving a precision of 93.51% and a recall of 85.33% in converting HTML to JSON/XML, thus confirming its potential in obtaining reusable sensor data.

Crowd monitoring was an essential measure to deal with over-tourism problems in urban destinations in the pre-COVID era. It will play a crucial role in the pandemic scenario when restarting tourism and making destinations safer. Notably, a Destination Management Organisation (DMO) of a smart destination needs to deploy a technological layer for crowd monitoring that allows data gathering in order to count visitors and distinguish them from residents. The correct identification of visitors versus residents by a DMO, while privacy rights (e.g., Regulation EU 2016/679, also known as GDPR) are ensured, is an ongoing problem that has not been fully solved. In this paper, we describe a novel approach to gathering crowd data by processing (i) massive scanning of WiFi access points of the smart destination to find SSIDs (Service Set Identifier), as well as (ii) the exposed Preferred Network List (PNL) containing the SSIDs of WiFi access points to which WiFi-enabled mobile devices are likely to connect. These data enable us to provide the number of visitors and residents of a crowd at a given point of interest of a tourism destination. A pilot study has been conducted in the city of Alcoi (Spain), comparing data from our approach with data provided by manually filled surveys from the Alcoi Tourist Info office, with an average accuracy of 83%, thus showing the feasibility of our policy to enrich the information system of a smart destination.

The growing significance of sensor data in the development of information technology services finds obstacles due to disparate data presentations and non-adherence to FAIR principles. This paper introduces a novel approach for sensor data gathering and retrieval. The proposal leverages large language models to convert sensor data into FAIR-compliant formats and to provide word embedding representations of tabular data for subsequent exploration, enabling semantic comparison. The proposed system comprises two primary components. The first focuses on gathering data from sensors and converting it into a reusable structured format, while the second component aims to identify the most relevant sensor data to augment a given user-provided dataset. The evaluation of the proposed approach involved comparing the performance of various large language models in generating representative word embeddings for each table to retrieve related sensor data. The results show promising performance in terms of precision and MRR (0.90 and 0.94 for the best-performing model, respectively), indicating the system’s ability to retrieve pertinent sensor data that fulfil user requirements.

Scientists face challenges when finding datasets related to their research problems due to the limitations of current dataset search engines. Existing tools for searching research datasets rely on publication content or metadata, do not considering the data contained in the publication in the form of tables. Moreover, scientists require more elaborate inputs and functionalities to retrieve different parts of an article, such as data presented in tables, based on their search purposes. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel approach to retrieve relevant tabular datasets from publications. The input of our system is a research problem stated as an abstract from a scientific paper, and the output is a set of relevant tables from publications that are related to the research problem. This approach aims to provide a better solution for scientists to find useful datasets that support them in addressing their research problems. To validate this approach, experiments were conducted using word embedding from different language models to calculate the semantic similarity between abstracts and tables. The results showed that contextual models significantly outperformed non-contextual models, especially when pre-trained with scientific data. Furthermore, the importance of context was found to be crucial for improving the results.

The current tourism landscape intertwines physical and digital realms, giving rise to smart tourism. This paradigm shift leverages technology, generating large amounts of data from sensors and mobile devices, offering vast opportunities for strategic tourism planning and management. Smart tourism destinations (STDs) are pivotal in this context, utilising technology to enhance visitor experiences and facilitate informed decision-making through proficient data management. Within this framework, open data emerges as a crucial aspect. This study aims to demonstrate how combining open data with a local business campaign data can innovate tourism management and foster smart ecosystems. This approach facilitates public-private collaboration and strengthens STD models at various administrative levels. A novel search engine was used to identify suitable open data for integration, employing word embeddings to perform semantic searches and enhance traditional data retrieval methods. The findings highlight the potential of open data in supporting the tourism industry. Integrating open and proprietary data not only enriches tourist experiences but also informs destination management strategies. The contributions of this work enable STDs to enhance the decision-making process by (i) demonstrating the feasibility of integrating retail data and open data for tourism management; (ii) describing an AI-based data search engine for discovering open data relevant to STDs; and (iii) presenting and discussing new findings on the use of retail data in conjunction with external open data in a real case study.

We combine the lean startup approach with the last research mile methodology. We outline our journey in creating InferIA to provide lessons learned when research results on tabular data search are transferred as innovative services within a data space context.