LOD MOOC

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) are available worldwide and offer tons of topics, also about Linked Open Data (LOD). An easy way to enter the semantic web.

Two examples:

HPI

The Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam provides, for some years now, a course in Linked Data Engineering with a certificate. I did it some years ago and enjoyed it.

FUN (INRIA)

The French platform FUN offers a LOD course, too. (Thanks to Adrian at zazuko.com for the hint)

And books

Step by step Bob DuCharme introduces RDF, SPARQL, LOD …

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Open Data Portals: News

There are new or refurbished open data portals to be announced.

opendata.swiss

Switzerland just published opendata.swiss in a new look for a better presentation of data. See the press release.

europeandataportal.eu

The European Commission published some months ago the European Data Portal.

europeandataportal.eu is much more than a collection of open data. It is an ecosystem with lots of documents explaining and promoting open data.

SPARQL inside!

The portal offers metadata as linked open data with an SPARQL endpoint for powerful searching.

select ?theme (count(?theme) as ?count) where {?s a dcat:Dataset . ?s dcat:theme ?theme} GROUP BY ?theme LIMIT 100  gives all  data categories/themes and their number of datasets .

Impact studies

Most of all these data are already published on other websites. The advantage of such open data portals are a centralized access and clear licence information, A main intention is to attract developers, to foster data usage and with this economic growth.

A Swiss study (January 2014) assesses the economic impact of Open Government Data: ´The report determined that the economic benefits from OGD for Switzerland lie most likely between CHF0.9 B and CHF1.2 B´.

       All the details >>> here  (look for the extended executive summary).

A European Study (November 2015) within the context of the launch of the European Data Portal got these results: “The aim of this study is to collect, assess and aggregate economic evidence to forecast the benefits of the re-use of Open Data for the EU28+. Four key indicators are measured: direct market size, number of jobs created, cost savings, and efficiency gains. Between 2016 and 2020, the market size of Open Data is expected to increase by 36.9%, to a value of 75.7 bn EUR in 2020. The forecasted number of direct Open Data jobs in 2016 is 75,000 jobs. From 2016 to 2020, almost 25,000 extra direct Open Data jobs are created. The forecasted public sector cost savings for the EU28+ in 2020 are 1.7 bn EUR. Efficiency gains are measured in a qualitative approach. ”

See the details >>> here

Next: LOD

Open and machine-readable formats help to access data and foster the economic impact. Even better when the data have metadata in a standardized description. Linked Open Data (LOD) in RDF format provide this; europeandataportal.eu uses this format describing the harvested datasets (metadata). The next step will and must be data in this format in order to link masses of data in the linked data cloud.

With data.admin.ch a first step is been made in Switzerland.

Linked Data? In europeandataportal.eu’s ecosystem well made videos present explanations:

 

 

EU Open Data Portal. An Evaluation.

Evaluating the EU Open Data Portal

‘The Department of Library and Information Science at the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain) has published a study that analyses and evaluates the European Open Data Portal.’ . Report presentation: http://www.epsiplatform.eu/content/analysis-and-evaluation-european-union-open-data-portal-0 or direct download:  http://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/RGID/article/download/99-118/42697. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Some interesting findings summarized below:

Editors

As with most of the other Open Government Data Portals the bulk of data comes from statistical agencies, here from Eurostat: .

Top 10

Number 1 is a translation help for all EU languages (‘translation memory, TM; i.e. sentences and their professionally produced translations’) .

Formats

Evaluation of data formats  follows Tim Berners-Lee’s 5star schema. .

5star for metadata queries

Semantic (****)  or even Linked (*****)  Data are not part of the portal’s data repository. BUT the description of the data with metadata follows 5star requirements and the EU Portal offers a SPARQL endpoint. Great! https://open-data.europa.eu/en/linked-data

Let’s learn SPARQL!

And now: Semantic Statistics (SemStats)

Official Statistics has a long tradition in creating and providing high-quality metadata. And the Semantic Web needs just this: metadata!

So it’s not surprising that these two find together, more and more.
A special workshop will be organized during the The 12th International Semantic Web Conference ISWC, 21-25 October 2013, Sydney, Australia.

It is the 1st International Workshop on Semantic Statistics (SemStats 2013) organized by Raphaël Troncy (EURECOM), Franck Cotton (INSEE), Richard Cyganiak (DERI), Armin Haller(CSIRO) and Alistair Hamilton (ABS).

‘ISWC 2013 is the premier international forum for the Semantic Web / Linked Data Community. Here, scientists, industry specialists, and practitioners meet to discuss the future of practical, scalable, user-friendly, and game changing solutions.’

The workshop summary

How to publish linked statistics? And: How to use linked data for statistics? These are the key questions of this workshop.

‘The goal of this workshop is to explore and strengthen the relationship between the Semantic Web and statistical communities, to provide better access to the data held by statistical offices. It will focus on ways in which statisticians can use Semantic Web technologies and standards in order to formalize, publish, document and link their data and metadata.

The statistics community faces sometimes challenges when trying to adopt Semantic Web technologies, in particular:

• difficulty to create and publish linked data: this can be alleviated by providing methods, tools, lessons learned and best practices, by publicizing successful examples and by providing support.
• difficulty to see the purpose of publishing linked data: we must develop end-user tools leveraging statistical linked data, provide convincing examples of real use in applications or mashups, so that the end-user value of statistical linked data and metadata appears more clearly.
• difficulty to use external linked data in their daily activity: it is important do develop statistical methods and tools especially tailored for linked data, so that statisticians can get accustomed to using them and get convinced of their specific utility.’

A tradition

RDF, Triples, Linked Data … these are topics statisticians already treated and adapted. But rather on an individual track and not as an organization.

This blog has a lot of information about Semantic Web and Official Statistics, about 40 posts since 2007.

See this post (2012) with a recent paper from Statistics Switzerland (where a study on publishing linked data has just been finished in collaboration with the Bern University of Applied Sciences): https://blogstats.wordpress.com/2012/10/15/imaodbc-2012-and-the-winner-is/

Or this (2009) about SDMX and RDF https://blogstats.wordpress.com/2009/10/27/sdmx-and-rdf-getting-acquainted/ or about LOD activities in 2009: https://blogstats.wordpress.com/2009/04/25/semantic-web-and-official-statistics/

Europe has an Open Data Portal, too

The European Commission

opened its Open Data Portal some days ago.
Powered by CKAN.

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Most of the 5811 datasets (97%) are statistical ones provided by Eurostat.

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‘Top Publishers
Eurostat (5634 datasets)
European Environment Agency (106 datasets)
Joint Research Centre (37 datasets)
Directorate-General for Health and Consumers (12 datasets)
Publications Office (11 datasets)
Directorate-General for Education and Culture (3 datasets)
Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (2 datasets)
Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion (1 datasets)
Directorate-General for Enterprise and Industry (1 datasets)
Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy (1 datasets)‘.

Linked Open Data are provided

An important step! ‘The European Commission Open Data Portal is well aligned with the initiatives of linked data and semantic web technologies. The dataset metadata is available as triples on triple store and attached to the dataset records.’

One App for the moment…

… but an interesting one creating visualisations based on RDF input, with javascript based output (Highcharts charting library).

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‘CubeViz is a facetted browser for statistical data utilizing the RDF Data Cube vocabulary which is the state-of-the-art in representing statistical data in RDF. This vocabulary is compatible with SDMX and increasingly being adopted.’