Blog
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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Experimenting with AI for Data Analysis
When we last experimented with Large Language Models (LLMs), and their embodiment in agents like ChatGPT, we had mixed results. Applying ChatGPT-3, as it was then, to the problem of data modelling and ontology generation we found it impressive but ultimately the results were superficial and of limited use for practical modelling work in its…
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Exploring the use of Zapier and the FSA Food Alerts data
In this post, Paul explores the use of Zapier and similar services use of the FSA Food Alert API, as a way for pulling in data from the API as part of a workflow. We recently met with a food tech service provider and learnt that they use the Food Standard Agency (FSA) Food Alerts…
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URIs for Linked Data
#TechTalk: URIs and URLs for linked data, is an old topic but one which keeps coming up in discussions so it seemed worth a refresher… Why URLs at all? Linked Data is all about helping people understand and combine data from different sources, or over time. For that to be possible we want to create…
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Tracking environmental data using the Hydrology service API
Our CTO Dave Reynolds explains how the new Hydrology API can be used efficiently to keep a local copy of some hydrology data up to date.
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Implementing a GraphQL API for a Graph Database
Simon, one of our senior engineers talks about his experiences implementing a GraphQL API for a Graph Database.
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Accessing the Environment Agency’s continuous monitoring archive via API
Our delivery manager Tom Guilbert highlights the updated API that underpins the Environment Agency’s continuous monitoring archive that we designed, built and run. The API is a way to access the massive volume of data behind the Hydrology Data Explorer. Introduction This blog follows on from a previous #TechTalk post about a new and hugely…
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Writing ontologies with ChatGPT
We’ve been watching the development of modern Large Language Models (LLM) like GPT with keen interest and some awe. Like much of the tech world we’ve been fascinated by ChatGPT and the mix of impressive results, some errors and some outright making (convincing) stuff up, that it delivers As others have noticed, ChatGPT has a…
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The problem of state, running linked data services in Kubernetes
An important part of our work involves running and managing services for our clients. Whether public facing data services such as the Environment Agency Hydrology service or Food Standards Agency listings of regulated products, or private data services used for data integration and access within a client’s business. Running so many managed services efficiently means…
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Regression testing and data checking using SPARQL
Many of our projects involve the transformation of source data from a tabular format into RDF that has been aligned with classes and properties drawn from RDF vocabularies. Over time the source data, target vocabularies and the transforms themselves can be subject to change. We have a growing number of relatively generic regression checks that…