1. The Serbian
Business Registers Agency (SBRA)
Team contact: Valentina Janev,
IMP, Serbia
Abstract:
The Serbian Business Registers Agency (SBRA) is a single registration authority in charge of managing a unified, centralized database, thereby affirming the principle of rationalization of state administration ("all registers in a single location"). The One Stop Shop system, introduced in 2009, provides the communication and implementation of electronic procedures between different government agencies, thus allowing both starting and completing the registration process in the Business Registers Agency.
SBRA has been a member of the European Commerce Registers' Forum (ECRF) since 2005 and the European Business Register network (EBR) since 2007. Additionally, since its establishment, the SBRA has been constantly following up activities of the two non-European professional organizations: the Corporate Registers Forum (CRF) and the International Association of Commercial Administrators (IACA)
Committed to implementing best practices, in the LOD2 PubLink mini-project, the SBRA was very much interested in:
- applying the latest recommendations of the European Commission ISA Program (Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations), and in particular
- re-using open source software (the LOD2 stack) and semantic assets (eGovernment Core vocabularies) for data representation, interoperability enhancement and Linked Data publishing
The LOD2 team has been interacting with SBRA's Information Technology & Development Department in an effort to showcase the applicability of the LOD2 stack for publishing data from the Regional Development Measures and Incentives Register in a machine readable format.
The result of the LOD2/PUBLINK support activities can be found here
2. Health Insurance Fund of the
Republic of Macedonia
Team contact: Hugh
Williams, OGL, UK
Abstract:
The Health Insurance Fund of the Republic of Macedoniais an institution which is responsible for regulating and managing the public services for primary healthcare, specialist healthcare, and hospital healthcare. Additionally, the Fund along with other government institutions regulates the list of drugs which are covered by the health insurance, and defines the referent (nominal) prices for certain drugs.
The Health Insurance Fund has been publishing their public data on a regular basis on their website. These data contain information about healthcare services and their prices, statistics about the rate of usage of hospital beds, reports from the inspections in the public and private healthcare institutions, financial data about the Fund, insurance information, referent drug prices, private and public healthcare institutions which the Fund works with, etc. The Fund has not yet published its data on the official Macedonian Open Government Data portal.
Although the data from the Fund's website can be technically considered as Open Data, they are mainly published in PDF and Excel formats, making them only one-star and two-star data. In order to leverage the usability of the public data from the Fund, we decided to transform them into five-star Linked Open Data; first transform them into RDF, and then interlink them with data from other publicly available datasets from the LOD and LODD clouds.
As a starting point, the drug datasets from the Fund were chosen, which contain pharmacological and pharmaceutical information, along with the referent price for different drugs. The excel spread sheets available for these datasets were saved as CSV, and using the Virtuoso Universal Server transformed to RDF using the DrugBank ontology, stored in the Virtuoso Quad Store and published as 5-Star Linked Data with an online SPARQL endpoint available . The RDF dataset dumps are also published on a public CKAN instance. Both services are hosted at the Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, in Skopje who were the initial contact point for this initiative.
3. Flemisch Government,
Belgium
Team contact: Bert Van Nuffelen,
TenForce
Abstract:
The Open Data cell of the Flemish Government wanted to establish guidelines and good practices for assigning unique URI's to the entities the government has information on.
LOD2, though its partner TenForce, provided expertise for the definition of these guidelines and good practices suitable for the Flemish Government.
This resulted in a 'setting the stage' report on a URI strategy addressing following aspects:
- definition and structure of URI's
- quality aspects of good URI's
- how to assign URI's in a linked open data context
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- with advice on what to use for establishing uniqueness
- with pros and cons of different technical approaches
- how to handle versioning and time related aspects
- how to manage and maintain URI's
The delivered report has been helpful in different ways:
- It has been used as a teaching aid in explaining what 'linked data' is and involves.
- It served also as a framework to take decisions amongst different technical approaches.
- And it was a starting point to establish the necessary organizational context to coordinate, manage and maintain URI's.
The collaboration helped the Open Data cell of the Flemish government to 'kickstart' their linked open data project.
4. The
National Library of Israel
Team contact: Jindřich
Mynarz
Library Profile
The National library of Israel (NLI), established in 1892, holds more than items including books, newspapers, journals, manuscripts, archives and sound collections. The National Library owns the world's largest collections of Hebraica and Judaica, and is the repository of many rare and unique manuscripts, books and artifacts. Its growing digital collections include 800,000 newspaper pages, 4,000 digital books, 25,000 ephemera items, 35,000 hours of sound and more.
The National Library of Israel is positioning itself to become a leader in bibliographical and technical standards in the community of local libraries and institutions worldwide engaged with Hebrew language metadata.
The National Library is a member of VIAF and leading partner of Europeana Judaica. We strive to advocate usage and publication of Linked Open Data among Israeli libraries and institutions with Judaica collections worldwide.
Description of the data
The data set we propose for publication is an expansion of Library of Congress subject headings (LCSH):
The subject headings used in catalog of the National Library of Israel are based on Library of Congress headings (LCSH). For Judaica we use a slightly altered schema and we are in the process of translating all subject headings used in our catalog to Hebrew. We also propose to link our dataset to the subject headings published by LC Linked Data Service. The data is maintained in our ILS as MARC21 for authority records. It can be exported as MARCXML as a basis for its publishing as a dataset that is usable for RDF. Currently we have approximately 230,000 headings with Hebrew translations. The translation project started in 2012 and is an ongoing effort.
Potential stakeholders
Libraries and other cultural heritage organization with Judaica collections, in Israel and around the world, which wish to enrich their data with more accurate and standard subject headings and/or enable searching of their catalog with Hebrew terms via LOD.
Commitment
The National Library will prepare files with updated datasets on a regular basis. Hosting at the library depends on the type of server and other required technologies but in principle we are interested to look into this possibility. If the data is hosted at the National Library of Israel we may need support as technologies evolve.
Envisioned licensing model
The National Library of Israel will publish and distribute the data for use by any interested institution. We will commit to a specific open license before publishing, pending internal discussion.
5.The Regional Council of
the Pays de la Loire, Nantes
Team contact: Amar
Djalil MEZAOUR, Exalead, France
Abstract:
The Regional Council of the Pays de la Loire, the department of Loire-Atlantique, Nantes Metropole and the city of Nantes have recently launched a shared open data portal with more than 350 open data sets
The aim of the project LodPaddle is to publish regional data as semantic data interlinked with LOD cloud. It consists on transforming and publishing all regional raw structured datasets as RDF triples with relevant semantic and linked with other datasets. The LodPaddle project raises the following issues
- The selection of valuable data for publication as LOD
- the best practices for continuous transformation and linked open data publishing
- the best practices for publishing linked open data
Partners
- Regional Council of the Pays de la Loire is a territorial government in charge railway and territory planning, environmental, vocational training, aid to the economy and development. The region has more than 3.5 millions inhabitants and is composed of 5 departments.
- The department of Loire-Atlantique is one the department of the region Pays de la Loire, with more than one million inhabitants.
- Nantes Metropole is an urban community of 600000 inhabitants, it is composed of 24 communities in charge of transport, environment, energy, economical development, education and research
- The city of Nantesis the 6th largest city situated at the west of France. It is the official European green capital 2013
- Libertic is a not-for-profit organization promoting open data in France. Located in Nantes, Libertic organizes local open data events and sustain open data reuse by entrepreneurs.
- The Laboratory of Computer Sciences of Nantes, LINA is a research laboratory with skills in Semantic Web.
Further information are available on the project website
6. Stichting
Bibliotheek.nl
Team contact: Sebastian
Hellmann, ULEI, Germany
Abstract:
Stichting Bibliotheek.nl is a government funded organization responsible for the realisation of the digital public library of the Netherlands. Bibliotheek.nl started in 2009 with building a digital infrastructure for delivering a broad range of digital services to public libraries and their end users. One of the key projects is the realisation of search infrastructure that gives access to all the physical and digital collections of the public libraries. Based on this infrastructure libraries will be able to configure their local services for search and discovery.
The goal for this PUBLINK project is to get a better view of the challenges and the possibilities of converting, integrating and presenting different information sources using semantic technologies on data from the library domain. The PUBLINK activities will help BNL to define requirements about: a) the possible ways to integrate index search with semantic search, b) the technology and content to be used for building a knowledge base, c) the data modeling (e.g. BIBFRAME, BIBO, SOBR), d) the use of linked (open) data sources like dbpedia, geonames and viaf and e) the possible tooling for the different steps in the linked data life cycle.
General information about the PUBLINK can be found at the project homepage. The knowledge base can be accessed by a public Virtuoso endpoint and various tools have been built around the data. For instance an Ontowiki instance for authoring, modeling examples, a linked data browser, a >Dutch Windmills in SGVizler,relfinder and some extra bookmarklet scripts. All these demos used data from the Dutch DBpedia.
