Self-service Linked Government Data

Copyright 2011 Digital Enterprise Research Institute. All rights reserved.

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Enabling networked knowledge

Self-service Linked Government Data

Fadi Maali, Richard Cyganiak, Vassilios [email protected]


Enabling networked knowledge2

data.gov.uk



data.gov.uk



data.gov



data.gov

4997 datasets

2590 in CSV

272 in RDF



Why Linked Governemnt Data (LGD)?

Web accessible

Interlinkable

Decentralised publishing of data

Standardised



We need government data as Linked Data not just Raw Data

….aha, and of a good quality!

LGD



We want governments to provide Linked Data not just Raw Data… and of good quality

TIM

EM

ONE

Y SKIL

LS

LGD is Costly

http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/



DIY

Self-service Approach



Self-service Approach

DIYProvide tools, models and algorithms that enable the self-service approach (a publishing pipeline)



Interactive approach

Graphical user interface

Reproducibility and traceability

Flexibility

Decentralisation

Results sharing

Publishing pipeline requirements




Graphical user interface

Reproducibility and traceability

Flexibility

Decentralisation

Results sharing

Publishing pipeline requirements



Powerful data editing, transformation and enriching capabilities

Import capabilities e.g. JSON, Excel, CSV, TSV, XML, etc.

Persistent undo/redo history

Popular in open data community

Extensible and under active development

Free and open source

Google Refine

http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/



DIY Recipe (1000 feet view)

Publishers provide RDF representation of their catalogues

User shares the RDF data

Tool support to select datasets of interest and put them into RDF





dcat

User shares the RDF data

Tool support to select datasets of interest and put them into RDF



Tool support to select datasets of interest and put them into RDF User shares the

RDF data


dcat

Google Refine

+ RDF export extension+ RDF reconciliation extension




User shares the RDF dataTool support to select datasets of interest and put them into RDF


dcat Google Refine

+ RDF export extension

+ RDF reconciliation extension

Share RDF data publicly (on CKAN.net) along with the sufficient provenance description




A Walk-through (1/5)



Data on CKAN.net



:dataset

:csv-ds:export-process:json-history

dct:source:wasExportedBy

:usedData:operations

Data Provenance (simplified)



An RDF vocabulary to describe government catalogues

Current status: First Public Working Draft by the W3C GLD Working Grouphttp://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat/

Used on data.gov.uk (RDFa) and CKAN-based catalogues

“Enabling Interoperability of Government Data Catalogues.”EGOV 2010


Dcat



RDF Mapping




RDF-centric mapping

Multiple tree structure

Expression language for custom expression

Vocabularies/ontologies support

More on RDF Mapping



Interlinking

RDF Reconcile Extension

Silk Server

SPARQL endpoint

Sindice se

arch A

PI

Crafted RDF

SPARQL

SPARQL endpoint with fulltext extension

Hybrid SPARQL

Silk LSL

Google Refine




More on Interlinking

Interlinking as a pre-RDF-creation step less unnecessary owl:sameAs

Focus on the interface

Semi-automatic process with good user support

“Re-using Cool URIs: Entity Reconciliation Against LOD Hubs.”LDOW 2011



Sharing

Captures the operations applied to the data

Represent them according to Open Provenance Model Vocabulary (OPMV)

Share the data and its provennce on CKAN.net

CKAN Extension fro Google Refinehttp://lab.linkeddata.deri.ie/2011/grefine-ckan/




Case study - Fingal Catalogue

Number of datasets: 74 (68 available in CSV and 56 in XML)

Top publishers: Fingal county Council (41), Central Statistics Office (17), Department of Education and Science (4)

Top domains: Demographics(18), Citizen Participation(18), Education(9)

http://data.fingal.ie



Case study - Fingal Catalogue

The catalogue was represented in Dcat

60 datasets were converted to RDF using the publishing pipeline (~300K triples)

Data Cube was used for statistical data

URIs were used consistently and shared among datasets the data was interlinked

Externally linked to DBpedia



Evaluating/Refining the crowd-sourcing aspects of the RDF creation process

RDF Modeling: Can we assist RDF modeling by examining the raw data?

Open Issues



Lessons Learned


Focus on plumbing tools together but don’t enforce a rigid process

Make it easy to adopt best-practices and good recipes

Self-service Linked Government Data

Technology

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