LOD2 Creating Knowledge out of Interlinked Data

Team contact: Bastiaan Deblieck, Tenforce, Belgium

Abstract:
The Federal Environmental Agency of Austria (UBA) is the leading expert organisation for all environmental issues and media. It works for the conservation of nature and the environment and thus contributes to the sustainable development of society. Its core tasks include the monitoring, management and evaluation of environmental data.

The UBA intends to learn how Linked Open Data can help them to aggregate, share and publish data. As the UBA primarily deals with measurements, statistics, research results and geolocation, they face the following specific challenges:

• how to align meta-data
• how to connect data in general
• how to geolocate the data

LOD2 PubLink is currently defining the scope of a small consulting project.

Team contact: Hugh Williams, OGL, U.K.

Abstract:
The Greater London Authority (GLA) is home to the Mayor of London and the London Assembly. As part of its commitment to openness and transparency, the GLA has published a number of datasets in their currently available formats on its data store site (http://data.london.gov.uk/). They would now like to consolidate this effort around a concrete data model enabling a general deployment as Linked Open Data. Initially, the Greater London Assembly members' data is being considered for the Proof of concept dataset, with some of the challenges to be addressed being:

• Is this a suitable dataset for initial publication?
• How do we model the data?
• What do we do with the temporal aspect of the data?
• What is the best format to present this data to a community of developers?
• What is the technology for publishing linked open data?

LOD2 PubLink is currently defining the scope of a small consulting project.

Team contact: Thomas Riechert, ULEI, Germany

Abstract:
The German Biography is an online project of the Historical Commission at the Bavarian Academy of Science. The original print version of two biographical lexica contains information about 47.000 biographies, including 45.000 additional persons and over 12.000 places. Funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), some 55 volumes in print have already been digitalized and tagged according to TEI-P5, while all persons have been aligned to the open data authority file PND. This information is publicly available at http://www.deutsche-biographie.de/.

The aim of the current project with PubLink is to provide metadata about the individual biographies to enable the visualization of interpersonal relations, for instance. The publication of the metadata in RDF will make the retrieval of such information and inference of new statements not only possible, but also very flexible. Likewise, the integration of the biographical metadata into the Linked Data Cloud will also enhance the use of the biography for researchers. In this way, it is also an example of how European cultural heritage is merged into the digital world. The project is supported by PubLink in the transformation and publication of the data as RDF and helps to foster the establishment of a knowledge engineering methodology.

You can see the result of the support activities by LOD2/PUBLINK here: http://ndb.publink.lod2.eu.

Team contact: Martin Kaltenböck, SWCG, Austria

Team contact: Michael Hausenblas, NUIG/DERI, Ireland

Team contact: Bastiaan Deblieck, Tenforce, Belgium

Abstract:

The EC Directorate General Information Society and Media (DG Infso) is one of the larger DGs in the European Commission and aims at supporting the development and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) for cultural, societal and economic benefits. The PubLink project with the DG Infso has mainly focused on the publication of the Digital Agenda Scoreboard as Open Data with a flexible but pragmatic visualization through the support from the LOD2 consortium. This statistical information had previously been published as a report in PDF format. Yet, this format used to have extremely limited capabilities for reuse and browsing.

In May 2010, the European Commission adopted the Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE) - a strategy to take advantage of the potential offered by the rapid progress of digital technologies. The DAE is part of the overall Europe2020 strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. The Digital Agenda contains commitments to undertake 101 specific policy actions (78 actions to be taken by the Commission, including 31 legal proposals, and 23 actions proposed to the Member States) that are intended to stimulate a virtuous circle of investment in and usage of digital technologies. It identifies thirteen key performance targets to show whether Europe is making progress in this area. The present Scoreboard only addresses policy actions planned for the last twelve months in the Digital Agenda.

You can see the result of the support activities by LOD2/PUBLINK here: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/digital-agenda/scoreboard/graphs/index_en.htm