Posted: 04/07/17
ADAPT researchers recently applied to the Open Data Engagement Fund for two projects: an Outreach and Engagement Project informing the public about Linked Data and the generation of RDF from non-RDF resources led by Prof. Declan O’Sullivan, and an Innovative Use of Data project on Linking datasets with Ordnance Survey Ireland’s authoritative Linked Data driven by Dr. Christophe Debruyne. While the former taught the public how to generate RDF, the latter provided a lightweight method and a set of tools to interlink datasets and generate enriched CSV files containing additional columns with links (URIs) to other resources.
Seminars on Linked Data and Generating RDF Datasets
The goal of the Outreach and Engagement project was to organize seminars spread across two days. The objectives of these seminars were to: i) inform people about Linked Data; ii) instruct the public on how to distil RDF and Linked Data of datasets available on data.gov.ie; and iii) demonstrate how RDF can be used to support activities or build novel application.
Thanks to the support provided by the Open Data Engagement Fund, the two seminars were organised free of charge. Both events attracted around 40 participants, including students and academics, as well as delegates from industry and public administration.
The first seminar took place on May 4th in Ordnance Survey Ireland’s O’Donovan Room. It was in this room that Colin Bray, Chief Executive and Chief Survey Officer of OSi, and Prof. Declan O’Sullivan, Head of Intelligent Systems and Principal Investigator in the School of Computer Science and Statistics of Trinity College Dublin, welcomed the participants and introduced the speakers. Presentations on the day were as follows:
The second seminar was held on May 10th in Trinity College Dublin. This seminar lasted the whole day, with events ranging from presentations on the RDB to RDF Mapping Language (R2RML) to tutorials in which the participants were challenged to generate RDF from CSV files available on the data.gov.ie portal. Both presentations and material for the tutorials are available here. The tutorials used ADAPT’s implementation of the R2RML engine (https://opengogs.adaptcentre.ie/debruync/r2rml), though other (commercial) implementations can be adopted. Prof O’Sullivan and Dr Debruyne also referred to ongoing research in representations that facilitated the creation, maintenance and interpretation of mappings, one of which is currently being investigated in ADAPT (see, for instance, [1]).
A Method and Tools for Enriching CSV with Authoritative Geospatial
The goal of this project is to add a geospatial dimension to datasets available on data.gov.ie with and using Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSi’s) authoritative Linked Data datasets available on data.geohive.ie, which is the result of an ongoing collaboration between the OSi and the ADAPT Centre. Using this method, data.gov.ie will be able to host data with an explicit authoritative spatial component, and data providers will have access to best practices and guidelines to provide that spatial component in their datasets. We hope that our work would contribute to the provision of aligned open datasets on the portal.
The results of this project were published at the 4th International ACM SIGMOD Workshop on Managing and Mining Enriched Geo-Spatial Data (GeoRICH 2017), Co-located with SIGMOD/PODS 2017 last May in Chicago [2]. Some of the insights gained in conducting this work were also incorporated in the aforementioned seminars.
While the concepts of Linked Data and RDF dataset generation were already a lot to cover in only two days. Participants did express their interest in a seminar dedicated to discovering and creating links, which is something that the ADAPT Centre hopes to look into in the future.
Acknowledgements
The ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology is funded under the SFI Research Centres Programme (Grant 13/RC/2106) and is co-funded under the European Regional Development Fund. ADAPT gratefully acknowledges the support provided by the Irish Government Department of Public Expenditure and Reform’s Open Data Engagement Fund initiative to undertake these projects.
The complete version of this blog post will be published shortly on data.gov.ie, at which point the link will be provided here.
References
[1] Ademar Crotti Junior, Christophe Debruyne, and Declan O’Sullivan. Juma: an Editor that Uses a Block Metaphor to Facilitate the Creation and Editing of R2RML Mappings. The Semantic Web – ESWC 2017 Satellite Events
[2] Christophe Debruyne, Kris McGlinn, Lorraine McNerney, and Declan O’Sullivan. A Lightweight Approach to Explore, Enrich and Use Data with a Geospatial Dimension with Semantic Web Technologies. In Fourth International ACM SIGMOD Workshop on Managing and Mining Enriched Geo-Spatial Data (GeoRICH 2017), Co-located with SIGMOD/PODS 2017 in Chicago, IL, USA, 2017
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