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Industry news and comment, from practical tips for publishing open data to inspiring accounts of how open data has changed businesses.
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An organization ontology : Requirements
Background The data.gov.uk linked data project found itself in need on an ontology or vocabulary to support linked data publishing of government organizational information. A check for existing ontologies didn’t turn up an ideal solution so we decided to develop one. This is the first of a series of posts describing the process we went…
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An organization ontology : Survey
This is the second in our series of posts recording the (currently ongoing) process of developing an organization ontology. Here we are focused on surveying the options that already exist to confirm we haven’t missed anything. Check for existing ontologies By far the best way to define an ontology is to just find one and…
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Using Interval Set URIs in Statistical Data
Statistical publications generally include at least one dimension comprised of the time intervals over which data has been aggregated. Linked data vocabularies for representing statistical information, such as SCOVO and current SDMX/Linked-Data collaborative activities refer to time intervals as ‘things’ or ‘objects’ rather than as literal values. This will typically involves the assignment of a…
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An RDF to JSON converter on Google App Engine
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…
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Generating RDF from CSV – example using xlwrap
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. This…
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OWL 2 for RDF Vocabularies
I was at the Bristol Vocamp recently (a fun event) and there was a lot of discussion around issues of validating RDF and checking conformance with lightweight RDF vocabularies. There was some talk about constraint expression languages but I suggested that OWL, and especially OWL 2, already do quite a lot of that. Couple that…
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RDF Result sets
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 The…
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Investigating VoID and CKAN
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.…