to boldly go pc-axis reference group, copenhagen, 2014 central statistics office, cork, ireland...
TRANSCRIPT
To Boldly Go
PC-Axis Reference Group, Copenhagen, 2014
Central Statistics Office, Cork, IrelandKevin Healy , [email protected] (00353 21) 453 5719
Eoin MacCuirc [email protected] (00 353 21) 453 5504
Linked Open Data
The Tower of Babel
“If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
Tim Berners Lee – Founder of the Web“In an extreme view, the world can be seen as only connections, nothing else. We think of a dictionary as the repository of meaning, but it defines words only in terms of other words. I liked the idea that a piece of information is really defined only by what it's related to, and how it's related. There really is little else to meaning. The structure is everything. There are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected.”
How open is the data? - Linked Open Data star scheme
Tim Berners-Lee suggested a 5-star deployment scheme for Linked Open Data and Ed Summers provided a nice rendering of it. In the following, examples are given for each level. The example data used throughout is 'the temperature forecast for Galway, Ireland for the next 3 days':
★ make your stuff available on the Web (whatever format) under an open license 1 example ...
★★ make it available as structured data (e.g., Excel instead of image scan of a table) 2 example ...
★★★ use non-proprietary formats (e.g., CSV instead of Excel) 3 example ... ★★★★ use URIs to identify things, so that people can point at your stuff4
example ... ★★★★★ link your data to other data to provide context 5 example
http://lab.linkeddata.deri.ie/2010/star-scheme-by-example/
Linked Open Data cloud
http://lod-cloud.net/
Media
Government
Geo
Publications
User-generated
Life sciences
Cross-domain
Linked open data -The Semantic Web
Copenhagen – 99,100,000 hitslooking for a needle in a haystack
URI – Uniform Resource Identifier give the thing a name and an address
The following picture shows the desired relationships between a resource and its representing documents:
Tim’s cool URIs
Cool URIs don't changeWhat makes a cool URI?A cool URI is one which does not change.What sorts of URI change?URIs don't change: people change them.
It is the the duty of a Webmaster to allocate URIs which you will be able to stand by in 2 years, in 20 years, in 200 years. This needs thought, and organization, and commitment.
The Web of Things – The Internet of Things
The Internet of Things is coming, but it needs a semantic backbone to flourish. With some 25 billion devices expected to be connected to the Internet by 2015 and 50 billion by 2020, providing interoperability among the things on the IoT “is one of the most fundamental requirements to support object addressing, tracking, and discovery as well as information representation, storage, and exchange.” So write the authors of Semantics for the Internet of Things: Early Progress and Back to the Future, Payam Barnaghi and Wei Wang, Centre for Communication Systems Research, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK and Cory Henson, Kno.e.sis – Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing.
“The suite of technologies developed in the Semantic Web … such as ontologies, semantic annotation, Linked Data and semantic Web services … can be used as principal solutions for the purpose of realizing the IoT,” they state. “Defining an ontology and using semantic descriptions for data will make it interoperable for users and stakeholders that share and use the same ontology.”
Where is the CSO with all this?
• In partnership with DERI/NUIG/INSIGHT
• One of the first NSIs in the world to upload census data as linked open data – data.cso.ie – Census 2011
• One of the organisations involved in the EU Open Cube pilot projects
• Launched apps4gaps competition
data.cso.ie
Census – Linked Open Data
• 12 million RDF triples from Census
• Geographical entities (counties, cities, etc.)
• Codelists
• Most technical work done by students/interns at NUIG
• CSO supplied data, use cases, and expertise• Lots of manual work and ad-hoc solutions• Results not fully “owned” by CSO• Skills needed to maintain/extend are mostly in
NUIG
18-19 November 2013 OpenCube kick-off meeting 15
CSO/NUIG collaboration summary position
18-19 November 2013 OpenCube kick-off meeting
Open Cube Project Pilots
Pilot Focus Tool/platform Data sets Type of users Number ofusers
EvaluationCycle
DCLG Publish Swirrl’s PublishMyData
50-100 open datasets regarding finance, planningPerformance, land use, housing and homlessness.
Public servants(members ofthe DCLG statistical data management team) as well as statisticians/ researchers
3-4 members of the data management team and 5 test users (statisticians, research analysts)
2 evaluationcycles: M9-M12 andM18-M21
Flemish Gov Publish/Reuse
FluidOps’ IWB
1100 open datasetsVRIND
A varied audience ranging from public servants to data scientists
5-10 2 evaluationcycles: M9-M12 andM18-M21
Central Statistics Office
Publish/Reuse
OpenCube toolkit
2011 Census dataset &StatBank dataset
Public servants
25 employees 2 evaluationcycles: M9-M12 andM18-M21
OpenCube Pilots
• Publishing statistics from StatBank as linked data
• Publishing statistics from StatBank as SDMX-ML
• Facilitate the creation of general reports aimed at the general public
• Assist with answering queries from the public• Help third parties to tell stories with CSO data
Open Cube business case for the CSO
• Own the data.cso.ie process and technology– Enable in-house maintenance, changes, etc.
• Publish StatBank* data as Linked Open Data– Ongoing publication process– Adhering to release schedule is critical– Publish data that are regularly updated (monthly, quarterly,
annual) as linked open data ( Census 2011 static data)*StatBank is the CSO published time series database (PC Axis)
• Deploy tools that enable analytics and exploitation of linked data– Both internally and externally
CSO goals (independent from OpenCube)
The Role of the CSO in the Future of Linked Data in Ireland
As the technology trends that drive adoption of Linked Data continue further, and theimportance of Open Data increases, the CSO is well-positioned to play a leading role as a “hub”in the Irish data Web.Some key steps include:1. Proactively encourage the adoption of standard classifications and metadata for Open Data that are published by different public bodies within Ireland. The CSO isalready documenting classifications on its StatCentral (Portal) website, and has more experiencein disseminating data on the Web than perhaps any other organisations in the publicsector. Ideally, the classifications themselves would be published as Linked Data.2. Going beyond pure classifications, encourage the use of standard identifiers (URIs) forgeographical areas.3. Support Linked Data as a new dissemination format for the CSO StatBank. Keyeconomic and demographic statistics are necessary in all sorts of data analysis tasks,and ideally they should be published as Linked Data directly by the source (CSO).
Application Programming Interface (API)
StatBank API
StatBank API – by theme
StatBank API – Downloadhttp://www.cso.ie/StatbankServices/StatbankServices.svc/jsonservice/responseinstance/AAA01
Key Indicators , quick tables and multi-quick tables
Key Economic Indicatorshttp://www.cso.ie/indicators/Maintable.aspx
Quicktables http://www.cso.ie/Quicktables/GetQuickTables.aspx?FileName=CNA13.asp&TableName=Population+1901+-+2011&StatisticalProduct=DB_CN
Multi-quicktables http://www.cso.ie/multiquicktables/quickTables.aspx?id=qnq34
Public Sector Statistics Network (PSSN)
PSSN – Organisations hosted
data.gov.ie – Irish OGP portalhttp://data.gov.ie/dataset
Context and Impact Indicators
CSO - Context and Impact 2011 2012 2013
Printed output
No. of releases and publications 238 306 304
Online output – CSO website
Visits 2,387,000 2,303,441 2,718,287
Page views 10,070,000 13,997,031 17,034,035
Downloaded files 1,539,000 1,733,833 1,856,176
StatBank table accesses 400,400 1,042,750 1,282,674
Online output – StatCentral site
Visits 131,400 158,117 179,527
Page views 300,200 418,564 451,788
Publication of statistics on social media
Followers (at year-end) 3,030 5,644 8,548
Burden Reduction
Annual reduction in statistical burden on business -28% -4.7% n/a
Context and Impact Indicators
Questions?