How the Web of Data Will be Won

John SheridanJeni Tennison

Overview

• Mapping Territory

• Laying Tracks

• Gold Mining

• Civil War

• Winning the Web of Data

Mapping Territory

photo from Cornell University Library on flikr

Open Gov't Data

• Pioneers

• Wide open plains

• data.gov.uk

• Our legacy?

Why Linked Data

• "web data"

• Publishers and consumers

• Open standards

• Distributed data

• Small pieces loosely joined

Our Approach

• Winchester '73

• Design patterns

• Try and evolve

• Learning from mistakes

Laying Tracks

photo from Cornell University Library on flikr

URIs

• Things, documents, definitions, datasets

• Recommendations for persistence

• Initial URI sets: legislation, schools, geographies ...

http://{sector}.data.gov.uk/id/{concept}/{id}http://{sector}.data.gov.uk/doc/{concept}/{id}http://{sector}.data.gov.uk/def/{scheme}/{concept}http://{sector}.data.gov.uk/data/{package}/{subset}

Versioning

• Multiple sources, multiple versions over time

• Named graphs and metadata

• dates and relations to other versions

• authority

• source and provenance

• Time-based slices of data

Provenance

• Reproduceability as the basis of trust

• Hugely complex

• origination

• processing

• validation

• Applies to real-world artifacts as well as data

Gold Mining

photo from http://www.archives.gov/research/american-west/

Statistics

• Rich seam of data

• SDMX from eg Office for National Statistics

• Excel spreadsheets

• Pattern for publishing statistics in RDF

• Tools to create linked data from Excel

• http://groups.google.com/group/publishing-statistical-data

Geo-spatial Data

• Tie in with INSPIRE European Directive

• spatial objects must have identifiers (URIs)

• specific metadata about spatial objects

• Publication of geometries (eg boundaries)

•http://www.terrafuture.com/

Civil War

photo from ♪_Lisa_♪ on flikr

Linked Data API

• Neglect usability at our peril

• ease of querying

• ease of processing

• Layer processing on SPARQL endpoint

• create developer-friendly APIs

• More later this afternoon...

Other Services

• Resolution

• searching for the right URI

• Enrichment

• marking up text with UK Government terms

• Backlinking

• Finding pointers from the rest of the cloud

Winning the WoD

photo from http://www.archives.gov/research/american-west/

Winning the WoD

• For everyone

• Brutally practical

• Doing "stuff" matters

Conclusions

• Early days

• Making progress

• Come join us