Minecraft Activities for Younger Kids

So earlier today Thayer asked if I had any suggestions for things to do in Minecraft for younger kids. I thought I might as well write this up as a blog post rather than a long email, then everyone else can add their suggestions too. Of course, the first thing I did was turn to the … Continue reading Minecraft Activities for Younger Kids →

What Does Your Dataset Contain?

Having explored some ways that we might find related data and services, as well as different definitions of "dataset", I wanted to look at the topic of dataset description and analysis. Specifically, how can we answer the following questions: what kinds of information does this dataset contain? what types of entity are described in this … Continue reading What Does Your Dataset Contain? →

What is a Dataset?

As my last post highlighted, I've been thinking about how we can find and discover datasets and their related APIs and services. I'm thinking of putting together some simple tools to help explore and encourage the kind of linking that my diagram illustrated. There's some related work going on in a few areas which is … Continue reading What is a Dataset? →

Dataset and API Discovery in Linked Data

I've been recently thinking about how applications can discover additional data and relevant APIs in Linked Data. While there's been lots of research done on finding and using (semantic) web services I'm initially interested in supporting the kind of bootstrapping use cases covered by Autodiscovery. We can characterise that use case as helping to answer … Continue reading Dataset and API Discovery in Linked Data →

Publishing SPARQL queries and documentation using github

Yesterday I released an early version of sparql-doc a SPARQL documentation generator. I've got plans for improving the functionality of the tool, but I wanted to briefly document how to use github and sparql-doc to publish SPARQL queries and their documentation. Create a github project for the queries First, create a new github project to … Continue reading Publishing SPARQL queries and documentation using github →

sparql-doc

Developers often struggle with SPARQL queries. There aren't always enough good examples to play with when learning the language or when trying to get to grips with a new dataset. Data publishers often overlook the need to publish examples or, if they do, rarely include much descriptive documentation. I've also been involved with projects that … Continue reading sparql-doc →

A Brief Review of the Land Registry Linked Data

The Land Registry have today announced the publication of their Open Data -- including both Price Paid information and Transactions as Linked Data. This is great to see, as it means that there is another UK public body making a commitment to Linked Data publishing. I've taken some time to begin exploring the data. This … Continue reading A Brief Review of the Land Registry Linked Data →

How I organise data conversions

Factual announced a new project last week, called Drake which is billed as a "make for data". The tool provides a make style environment for building workflows for data conversions, it has support for multiple programming languages, uses a standard project layout, and integrates with HDFS. It looks like a really nice tool and I … Continue reading How I organise data conversions →

How to use dpm with data.gov.uk

The Data Package Manager is an Open Knowledge Foundation project to create a tool to support discovery and distribution of datasets. The tool uses the concept of a "data package" to describe the basic metadata for a dataset plus the supporting files. Packages are indexed in a registry to make them searchable and to support … Continue reading How to use dpm with data.gov.uk →

HTTP 1.1 Changes Relevant to Linked Data

Mark Nottingham has posted a nice status report on the ongoing effort to revise HTTP 1.1 and specify HTTP 2.0. In the post Mark highlights a list of changes from RFC2616. This ought to be required reading for anyone doing web application development, particularly if you're building APIs. I thought it might be useful to skim … Continue reading HTTP 1.1 Changes Relevant to Linked Data →