SemWeb 4 Gov – opportunities and challenges

SemWeb 4 Gov – opportunities and challenges
Dr. Andrew Woolf
Acting Assistant Director (Climate & Water IT Services), Bureau of Meteorology

Acknowledgements…
• Josh Bobruk, Robert Boczek, Karl Braganza, Sarah
Callaghan, Shirley Crompton, Armin Haller, Colin Harpham,
Mike Jackson, Bryan Lawrence, Laurent Lefort, Brian
Matthews, Tim Osborn, Clinton Rakich, Will Rogers, Arif
Shaon, Jeremy Tandy, Kerry Taylor, Blair Trewin

Outline
• Drivers
• Use case exemplars
• SemWeb as enabler
• A few projects
• Next steps
• Key lessons

Information explosion

http://www.economist.com/node/21537922

Big data

http://strataconf.com/

Data journalism

http://www.guardian.co.uk/data

Data for development

http://data.worldbank.org/

Harvard Business Review (Oct 2012)

United States
My Administration will take appropriate action … to
disclose information rapidly in forms that the public
can readily find and use. Executive departments and
agencies should harness new technologies to put
information about their operations and decisions online
and readily available to the public.

Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government,
Federal Register Vol. 74, No. 15

United Kingdom
Our plans include:
•Radically opening up data and public information,
releasing thousands of public data sets – including
Ordnance Survey mapping data, real-time railway
timetables, data underpinning NHS choices, and more
detailed departmental spending data – and making
them free for re-use.

Putting the Frontline First: smarter government
Cabinet Office, 7 December 2009

Europe
…open access is reaching the tipping point, with around
50% of scientific papers published in 2011 now available for
free.
…open access will be mandatory for all scientific publications
produced with funding from Horizon 2020, the EU's Research &
Innovation funding programme for 2014-2020.
…Under Horizon 2020 … the Commission will also start a
pilot on open access to data collected during publicly funded
research…

European Commission - IP/13/786, Brussels, 21 August 2013

United Nations
We also call for a data revolution for sustainable
development, with a new international initiative to
improve the quality of statistics and information
available to citizens.

A NEW GLOBAL PARTNERSHIP: ERADICATE POVERTY AND
TRANSFORM ECONOMIES THROUGH SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
The Report of the High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post2015 Development Agenda
United Nations, 30 May 2013

Australia
Principle 1: Open access to information - a default position
Principle 2: Engaging the community
Principle 3: Effective information governance
Principle 4: Robust information asset management
Principle 5: Discoverable and useable information
Principle 6: Clear reuse rights
Principle 7: Appropriate charging for access
Principle 8: Transparent enquiry and complaints processes

Principles on open public sector information
OAIC, May 2011

Australia
We will [establish] policies to:
•accelerate Government 2.0 efforts to engage online,
make agencies transparent and provide expanded
access to useful public sector data;
…The next wave of opportunities to improve the quality
and effectiveness of government services are likely to be
driven by access to (appropriately anonymized) public
sector data sets and ‘big data’.

The Hon Andrew Robb AO MP, The Hon Malcolm Turnbull MP
Liberal Party of Australia, 2 Sep 2013

Government Open Data
“We commit to pro-actively provide
high-value information, including
raw data, in a timely manner, in
formats that the public can easily
locate, understand and use, and in
formats that facilitate reuse.”

Independent reviews

“We … conclude that there is independent verification… of the results and
conclusions of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. ...
We … consider that climate scientists should take steps to make
available all the data used to generate their published work, including
raw data”
House of Commons Science and Technology Committee (31 Mar 2010)

CRU should make available sufficient information, concurrent with
any publications, to enable others to replicate their results. …
It would benefit the global climate research community if a
standardised way of defining station metadata and station data
could be agreed, preferably through a standards body, or perhaps the
WMO.
The Independent Climate Change E-mails Review, Sir Muir Russell
(7 Jul 2010)

National Plan for Environmental
Information
“an environmental information system
to support the delivery and discovery
of priority environmental information”

http://www.bom.gov.au/environment
/

Sir Tim Berners-Lee on open data...

Linked Data

Linked Data Principles
1. Use URL (Web
addresses) as identifiers
for objects
2. Publish them on the
Web
3. Use Semantic Web
standards to model the
data
4. Link objects in your
dataset to objects in other
datasets

‘5 stars’ maturity model

Geospatial Transformation with
OGSA-DAI (GeoTOD) [2010]
•Project aims:
– Exploit a high-profile
outcome from the >£200M
UK government-funded eScience program
– Implement the UK Cabinet
Office guidelines on ‘URI
Sets for Location’
– Enable dynamic
transformation of existing
large spatial datasets
http://data.gov.uk/sites/default/files/
Designing_URI_Sets_for_Location-V1.0_10.pdf

Designing Location URIs
‘Spatial T
hing’ http:/ea.gov.uk/
/
id
/ Y/ atercourse/ hames
H W
T
‘303 See other:’
‘web document’
http://ea.gov.uk/doc/HY/Watercourse/Thames
rdfs:seeAlso http://ea.gov.uk/so/ Y/ atercourse/
H W
ea-UK
rivers/
e7w1
rdfs:seeAlso http://geotod/so/ Y/ atercourse/
H W
stfc-strategi/
4a97
ov:similarTo http://ceh.nerc/so/ Y/ atercourse/
H W
nerc-hydrodb/
thames-001
‘Spatial Object’
http://geotod/so/ Y/ atercourse/
H W
stfc-strategi/
4a97.rdf
H W
stfc-strategi/
4a97.html
H W
stfc-strategi/
4a97.kml
H W
stfc-strategi/
4a97.gml

‘ content negotiation’

OGSA-DAI SO store

orkflow
L
inked SO W
Store

OGSA-DAI
service

GM query
L

GeoServer
W
S
W resources
eb

SP
ARQL query
+
output formatting

SQL

RDB
Generate
RDB
-specific SQL
using mapping file

GeotodD2RQ

Relational resources

D2RQ
M
apping
F
ile

GeoTOD
• Challenges:
– Pragmatic interpretation of URI guidelines
– Mapping UML geospatial conceptual models to RDF

• GeoTOD demo:
– http://tiger.dl.ac.uk:8080/geotodls
• UML-to-RDF schema generator:
– http://tiger.dl.ac.uk:8080/rdfsgenerator

Advanced Climate Research Infrastructure
for Data (ACRID) [2010]

https://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/
comm/media/press/2010/july/
climatedataproject

•Project aims:
–
–
–
–

Address Climategate concerns re publishing climate data
Enable seamless link from research publication to data
Include dataset provenance information
Verify linked-data principles for this problem

DOI and OAI-ORE
•CrossRef DOIs (e.g.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.11
57784) are linked-data-enabled (as
of April 2011) with conneg:
– RDF/XML, TTL, ATOM
•Open Archives Initiative Object
Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE)
– description and exchange of
aggregations of Web
resources
– http://www.openarchives.org
/ore/

ACRID – dataset workflows /
provenance
•Various choices
– Open Provenance Model
– Provenance Markup Language
– ISO 19156 (Observations and
Measurements)
– Climate Science Modelling
Language (CSML)

•Adopted CSML
– Observation measures a
Property of a Feature-of-interest
using a Procedure and
generating a Result

Australian Climate Observations
Reference Network – Surface Air
Temperature (ACORN-SAT) [2012]
•High-quality daily surface temperature
(min/max) timeseries’
•112 stations
•Over 100 years of records
•Homogenised for
– Site relocations
– Instrument replacement
– Local changes

ACORN-SAT
• Project aims:
– Establish the first Australian Government linked data
under data.gov.au
– Trial linked-data for large time-series observation dataset
– Gain experience in applying linked data to information
sharing in support of the National Plan for Environmental
Information

Station history: e.g. Darwin

014016
014015

014040
014015

Semantic Sensor Network Ontology
(W3C Incubator Group)

ACORN-SAT observations as a cube
(W3C DataCube ontology)

Coupling SSN and Data Cube
ontologies

Querying: SPARQL
PREFIX gn: <http://www.geonames.org/ontology#>
PREFIX acorn-sat: <http://lab.environment.data.gov.au/def/acorn/sat/>
SELECT ?station ?day ?month ?year ?temp
WHERE {
?obs acorn-sat:maxTemperature ?temp;
acorn-sat:timeSeries ?tseries;
acorn-sat:day ?day;
acorn-sat:month ?month;
acorn-sat:year ?year.
?tseries gn:name ?station.
FILTER (?temp > 50).
}
station
day
month

year

temp

Forrest
New record Jan 2013: Seven
consecutive days over 45oC

13

01

1979

50.1

Oodnadatta

03

01

1960

50.3

Oodnadatta

02

01

1960

50.7

Albany

08

02

1933

51.2

Australian Government Linked Data
Working Group (AGLDWG)
•Terms of reference
– Develop technical guidelines
and best practice on the use of
‘linked-data’ by AG agencies
– Inform the development of
data.gov.au as a platform for
publishing Commonwealth PSI
– Promote the benefits and
encourage adoption of ‘linkeddata’ for publishing
Commonwealth PSI
– Where appropriate, undertake
specific activities and coordinate
projects in pursuit of these
objectives

AGLDWG meeting with Sir Tim Berners-Lee,
31 Jan 2013 (Canberra)

LD-enabling CKAN
• CKAN used by a number of Government open data
platforms (incl. UK, AU, US)
• Could it be made more LD-friendly?
– Add registry functionality (e.g. for simple term
dictionaries)
– Support namespace-forwarding (e.g. for proxying manyto-many agency-to-subdomain mappings)
• UK Gov LD WG has a prototype already
– https://github.com/der/ukl-registry-poc/wiki
– http://www.slideshare.net/der42/ukgovld-registrywebinarv3

1. Believe in SemWeb 4 Gov!
• Domain/agency-neutral data publishing mechanism
• Encourages information points-of-truth
• Assists ‘naturally’ with cross-agency data integration

• BUT:
– Need to demonstrate value (pilots, prototypes, etc.)
– Agencies will have security concerns
– Deployment behind government firewalls is difficult

2. Address agency needs
• Simple dictionary publishing would be a good start!
– http://test.wmocodes.info/
• Create robust guidance on simple things
– GeoRSS
– schema.org
– URI Rules
– Vocabulary management
– Effective use of CKAN

3. Be pragmatic
• At this stage of the adoption curve, more important to get
something up than establishing complete semantics
• Agency people mostly won’t like sitting through multi-day
ontology workshops!

4. Establish enabling infrastructure
• May be difficult to deploy own triplestores
• Encourage cloud solutions (public, government, research)
e.g. NCI in Australia
• Build SemWeb into collaborations around data.gov(.xxx),
e.g. AGLDWG, Cross Jurisdictional Open Government Data
Working Group

5. ‘Geo’ as killer app for LD
• Much government data is spatially-enabled
• Huge value proposition in technology enabling linkage by
location of: health, education, statistics, transport,
environmental data, etc
• Note geospatial semantics standards work
– ISO 19150 (Geographic information – Ontology)
– OGC GeoSPARQL

6. Skill-up the ICT contractor pool
• Government uses contractors
• Need to build up a SemWeb ‘cottage industry’
– critical mass issue
• Research partners are essential, but also need industry
partners

7. Engage with Gov
• Chat to your local friendly Gov IT geeks
• Be aware of stuff already happening
– e.g. in environmental information sharing: WaterML,
GeoSciML, GWML, INSPIRE

Thank you…
Acknowledgements (again) to collaborators: Josh Bobruk,
Robert Boczek, Karl Braganza, Sarah Callaghan, Shirley
Crompton, Armin Haller, Colin Harpham, Mike Jackson,
Bryan Lawrence, Laurent Lefort, Brian Matthews, Tim
Osborn, Clinton Rakich, Will Rogers, Arif Shaon, Jeremy
Tandy, Kerry Taylor, Blair Trewin

Dr Andrew Woolf
a.woolf@bom.gov.au

SemWeb 4 Gov – opportunities and challenges

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