As the next step in developing the Earthster vision of creating a web of linked open sustainability data, Epimorphics is designing a core domain ontology for representing Life Cycle Analysis information about products. The Earthster Core Ontology (ECO) is a core domain ontology for life cycle analysis which is capable of representing models of product supply chains with inputs and outputs to and from nature and flow of goods and services through the supply chain. The first draft of ECO is planned to be ready for consultation in March 2010.

Last week I attended a cross-political party dinner given by the Technology Strategy Board(TSB) to promote their Digital Britain programme to policy-makers. There were about 20 of us there – mostly politicians, a number of people from the TSB and a few people from industry.

As part of our work on the SDX project we felt one requirement was to enable typical web developers to exploit the RDF linked data in a simpler, more developer friendly form. In particular it would be nice to be able to access an RDF model of a resource as JSON to simply using it from ajax clients.

Although there is a dump of the RDF data from CKAN available on-line, it's the full CKAN dataset and not the UK Government-specific set. For some ongoing experiments, I want some CKAN data in RDF for the published government data listed on data.hmg.gov.uk. The source data is published, however, in CSV and JSON format.

First and foremost it’s a nice name. And no-one’s used it before. But it does have some significance.

Our goal in building linked data solutions is to provide complete solutions to particular problems by bringing together data from multiple sources – and our name tries to capture this goal.

Combining data from multiple sources involves transforming the ontologies of all the different data sources into a combined ontology describing all the data.

[This entry is a cross-post of an earlier personal blog post.]

In some recent semantic web applications, where we’ve been creating user interfaces over REST style interfaces over RDF data sets, we found a common pattern emerging – ResultSets. The approach we took has been documented but it’s buried in other details so I’d like to pull out the essential pattern in this post.

Situation

[This entry is a cross-post of an earlier personal blog post.]

For some experiments we're doing at the moment, I need some datasets from CKAN that also include VoID markup. Fortunately, the metadata from CKAN has been translated to RDF: there's no official reference that I can find, but this thread describes the main points. Sadly, the CKAN RDF does not include any elements from VoID.

On November 9th we launched Epimorphics limited, a new company providing consultancy, software tools and services for the web of data.

This is an exciting time for us, taking the expertise we have from many years of semantic web research, tool development and standards leadership and applying it more broadly.