linked data: thinking big, starting small

Department of Parliamentary ServicesParliamentary Library and Information Service

Linked Data:thinking big, starting small

VALA 6 February 2014

Peter Neish@peterneish


What will be covered

• Background

– What is Linked Data?

– Linked Data in Libraries and Government

• What we did

– Linked Data Workflow

• What did we get out of it?


What is Linked Data?

SubjectDenis Napthine

Predicateparty

ObjectLiberal Party

the triple statementslightly simplified example

http://www.w3.org/ns/org#memberOf

http://parliament.vic.gov.au/members/id/135 http://dbpedia.org/resource/Liberal_Party_of_Australia

1 October 1988

premier

United Australia

Party

Ted Baillieu

elected

hasRole

successorOf party

31 August 1945

formationDate

successorOf


Linked Data in Libraries

• OCLC – 1.2 million resources – 80 million triples

• LOC – Subject headings, authority files

• British Library – 2.8 million records, 93 billion triples

• BIBFRAME

• Schema Bib Extend Community Group

• LODLAM


Linked Data in Parliament and Government

– 6.4 billion triples of open government data


Open Government


Project aims• Is Linked Data useful in a

local context

• Explore the process of using Linked Data – where do you start?

• Being able to interrogate our data in new ways

• Use visualisation to gain new insights into data


Databases at Parliament

People and Organisations

Members of Parliament

government agencies

Media

media releases

newspaper clippings

video and audio clips

Documents

parliamentary debates (Hansard)

parliamentary papers

party policies


Linked Data Workflow

• choose ontology• investigate similar projectsPreparation

• clean data (cluster, facet)• named entity extraction• reconcile with other data

Clean and reconcile data

• output RDF• store data (files, triple store etc)Publish


• Investigate similar projects

– Don’t reinvent the wheel

– Collaborate

• Choose an ontology (or build your own)

– Linked Data Open Vocabularies (lov.okfn.org)

Preparation

http://lov.okfn.org/


• developing open government specifications relating to the legislature

• prioritizes reuse over novelty

• attempts to make it easy to represent real-world data

• consensus model – open to contributions (W3C community group, github)

Popolo Ontologypopoloproject.com


Clean and reconcile data


• create RDF (Open Refine can do this too)

• store data

– separate files

– embedded in html

– Database mapping using D2RQ

– triple store

Publish


• Combined approach

– embedded data in catalogue

– Fuseki Triple Store

• Complex queries using SPARQL:

– what have previous speakers being saying about the current issues in parliament?

– find all articles about transport that mention members of the Road Safety Committee

What do we get out of it?


Links to related articles


Federal Preferences 2013 Election

http://peterneish.github.io/preferences/


Conclusion

• The process itself is valuable

• Aligning data with standards (Popolo Ontology)

• Cleaning and reconciling adds value to data

• Databases linked internally

• Can now provide Linked Data externally


Further Information

Linked Data best practise and recipes

• freeyourmetadata.org

• linkeddatabook.com

• euclid-project.eu

@peterneish

github.com/peterneish

http://freeyourmetadata.org/

http://linkeddatabook.com/

http://linkeddatabook.com/

http://euclid-project.eu/

http://peterneish.github.io/preferences/

linked data: thinking big, starting small

Technology