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
Category: Open Data
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
Not Just Legislation: Sustainable Open Data Curation Projects
Francis Irving recently wrote an excited blog post about the open curation model that now backs legislation.gov.uk. It's hard not to get excited about legislation.gov.uk. There's been so much good work done on the project and everyone involved has achieved a great deal of which they can be proud. If you're not familiar with the … Continue reading Not Just Legislation: Sustainable Open Data Curation Projects
Data is Potential
Jeni Tennison asked an interesting question on twitter last week: Question: aside from personally identifiable data, is there any data that *should not* be open? The question prompted some interesting discussion which included examples of data that might be sensitive, suggestions about data that would be useful to open up, and the need for better … Continue reading Data is Potential
Open Data for (Big) Kids?
This afternoon Emma Mulqueeny asked on twitter if anyone had any ideas about fun, exciting datasets to inspire kids new to Open Data hacking. I asked whether she was interested in downloadable datasets or just APIs, or both. The answer was both. So below you'll find a few suggestions from me about datasets that kids … Continue reading Open Data for (Big) Kids?
Layered Data: A Paper & Some Commentary
Two years ago I wrote a short paper about "layering" data but for various reasons never got round to putting it online. The paper tried to capture some of my thinking at the time about the opportunities and approaches for publishing and aggregating data on the web. I've finally got around to uploading it and … Continue reading Layered Data: A Paper & Some Commentary
The Open Data Revolution
This post was originally published as an article for The Kernel. Open data is now mainstream. Spurred on by the US and UK governments vying over who could be the most open, there are now open data activities in many regions around the globe. Under the “Government as Platform” rubric, you can find the public … Continue reading The Open Data Revolution
Rights Statements on the Web of Data
This is a write-up of my contribution to the Legal and Social Frameworks for Sharing Data on the web workshop at ISWC 2009 in October 2009. It was later published in Nodalitied magazine Issue 9. Why do we publish open data? It’s to allow other people to reuse it; to take it and do creative and … Continue reading Rights Statements on the Web of Data
Lost Boy 