What does it take to create a web of government Linked Data? The UK government is finding out. Our story is one of pioneers. You will hear how we are moving out of existing settlements to the wide plains of government data. How we are starting to build the first railroads across this vast territory to open a new lands of opportunity. All the time, of course, having to avoid both outlaws and the Civil War back east.

1. How the Web of Data
Will be Won
John Sheridan
Jeni Tennison

2. Overview
• Mapping Territory
• Laying Tracks
• Gold Mining
• Civil War
• Winning the Web of Data

3. photo from Cornell University Library on flikr
Mapping Territory

4. Open Gov't Data
• Pioneers
• Wide open plains
• data.gov.uk
• Our legacy?

5. Why Linked Data
• "web data"
• Publishers and consumers
• Open standards
• Distributed data
• Small pieces loosely joined

6. Our Approach
• Winchester '73
• Design patterns
• Try and evolve
• Learning from mistakes

7. photo from Cornell University Library on flikr
Laying Tracks

8. URIs
• Things, documents, definitions, datasets
http://{sector}.data.gov.uk/id/{concept}/{id}
http://{sector}.data.gov.uk/doc/{concept}/{id}
http://{sector}.data.gov.uk/def/{scheme}/{concept}
http://{sector}.data.gov.uk/data/{package}/{subset}
• Recommendations for persistence
• Initial URI sets: legislation, schools, geographies ...

9. Versioning
• Multiple sources, multiple versions over time
• Named graphs and metadata
• dates and relations to other versions
• authority
• source and provenance
• Time-based slices of data

10. Provenance
• Reproduceability as the basis of trust
• Hugely complex
• origination
• processing
• validation
• Applies to real-world artifacts as well as data

11. photo from http://www.archives.gov/research/american-west/
Gold Mining

12. Statistics
• Rich seam of data
• SDMX from eg Office for National Statistics
• Excel spreadsheets
• Pattern for publishing statistics in RDF
• Tools to create linked data from Excel
• http://groups.google.com/group/publishing-
statistical-data

13. Geo-spatial Data
• Tie in with INSPIRE European Directive
• spatial objects must have identifiers (URIs)
• specific metadata about spatial objects
• Publication of geometries (eg boundaries)
http://www.terrafuture.com/
•

14. photo from ♪_Lisa_♪ on flikr
Civil War

15. Linked Data API
• Neglect usability at our peril
• ease of querying
• ease of processing
• Layer processing on SPARQL endpoint
• create developer-friendly APIs
• More later this afternoon...

16. Other Services
• Resolution
• searching for the right URI
• Enrichment
• marking up text with UK Government terms
• Backlinking
• Finding pointers from the rest of the cloud

17. photo from http://www.archives.gov/research/american-west/
Winning the WoD

18. Winning the WoD
• For everyone
• Brutally practical
• Doing "stuff" matters

19. Conclusions
• Early days
• Making progress
• Come join us