Kamis, 20 Januari 2011

From tables to 5 star linked data


The goal and vision of the Semantic
Web is to create a Web of connected and interlinked data (items)
which can be shared and reused by all. Sharing and opening up “raw
data” is great; but the Semantic Web isn’t just about
sharing data. To create a Web of data, one needs interlinking
between data. In 2006, Sir Tim Berners-Lee introduced the notion of
linked data in which he outlined the best practices for creating
and sharing data on the Web. To encourage people and government to
share data, he recently developed the following rating system -

The highest rating is for the data
that can link to other people’s data to provide context. While the
Semantic Web has been growing steadily, there is lot of data that
is still in raw format. A study by Google researchers shows that there are 154 million
tables with high quality relational data on the world wide web. The
US government along with 7 other nations have started sharing data
publicly. Not all the data is RDF or confers with the best
practices of publishing and sharing linked data.
Here in the Ebiquity Research Lab,
we have been focusing on converting data in tables and spreadsheets
into RDF; but our focus is not on generating just RDF, but rather
generate high quality linked data (as now Berners-Lee calls it
“5 star data”). Our goal is to build a completely automated
framework for interpreting tables and generating linked data from
it.

As part of our preliminary
research, we have already developed a baseline framework which can
link the table column headers to classes from ontologies in
the linked data cloud datasets, link the table cells to entities in
the linked data cloud and identify relations between table columns
and map them to properties in the linked data cloud. You can read
papers related to our preliminary research at [1]. We will use this
blog as a medium to publish updates in our pursuit of creating
“5-star” data for the Semantic Web.
If you are data publisher, go grab
some Linked Data star badges at [2]. You can show your support to
the open data movement by gettings t-shirts, mugs and bumper
stickers from [3] ! (all profits go to W3C)
Happy Holidays ! Let 2011 be yet
another step forward in the open data movement !

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