1. Introduction to the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data

2. Dramatis Personae Nick Gibbins (in spirit) Christopher Gutteridge

3. Overview of issues relating to the publication and use of linked data in HEIs The lessons that we’ve learned! Pragmatism rather than perfection General guidelines rather than detailed specifications Coining cool URIs Publication alongside existing resources Licensing Goals

6. http://is.gd/dqiJc (The only URL you need to write down)

7. Detailed tutorial on the finer points of: RDF RDFa RDF Schema OWL SPARQL … (an hour and a half isn’t enough for this – and there are good tutorials available online) Non-Goals

8. “If HP knew what HP knows, we’d be three times more profitable” Lew Platt Hewlett-Packard Chairman and CEO

9. Linked Data in a Nutshell http://www.flickr.com/photos/arielarielariel/322301228/

10. Linked Data is about providing structured data on the Web Doesn’t necessarily require RDF (though it usually uses it)

11. Underlying model of triples used to describe the relations between entities in linked data This is the basis of the RDF data model (subject, predicate, object) e.g. “The Hobbit”, “created by”, “JRR Tolkien” The triple The Hobbit JRR Tolkien created by subjectpredicateobject

12. Take a citation: Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila. The Semantic Web. Scientific American, May 2001 We can identify a number of distinct statements in this citation: There is an article titled “The Semantic Web” One of its authors is a person named “Tim Berners-Lee” (etc) It appeared in a publication titled “Scientific American” It was published in May 2001 Example

13. We can represent these statements graphically: Example Tim Berners-Lee James Hendler Ora Lassila The Semantic Web Scientific American name title creator publishedIncreator 2001-05 date

14. Example There are two types of node in this graph: Literals, which have a value but no identity (a string, a number, a date) Resources, which represent objects with identity (a web page, a person, a journal) Scientific American

15. Resources are identified by URIs Property labels are also identified by URIs, and are drawn from a vocabulary or ontology Example http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/title http://www.sciam.com/ Scientific American subjectpredicateobject

16. The triple-based graph model makes it possible to mix terms from different vocabularies in the same graph Simplifies the task of information integration Mixing Vocabularies Tim Berners-Lee James Hendler Ora Lassila The Semantic Web Scientific American name title creator publishedIncreator 2001-05 date foaf dc bibo

17. Set of publishing practices for SW data: 1.Use URIs as names for things 2.Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names 3.When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information 4.Include links to other URIs. so that they can discover more things Effectively, putting the hypertext back into the Semantic Web Simplifies integration between datasets while maintaining loose coupling Linked Data Principles

18. Example graph describing ‘sw’ sci am tbl jh ora sw The Semantic Web title creator publishedIncreator 2001-05 date graph describing ‘tbl’ Tim Berners-Lee name tbl graph describing ‘jh’ James Hendler name jh graph describing ‘ora’ Ora Lassila name ora graph describing ‘sciam’ Scientific American title sci am

20. URIs must only identify one concept. Ever. I am not my homepage. Person  Document

21. URI represents a person. Requesting URI via web gets a “See Other” response. Requester redirected to most appropriate document URL. usually HTML or RDF+XML Publishing Example

22. > <>><>>><>><>><>><>><><>>>> <> <> <><><><><><><><><><><> >><> <><>><> DON’T worry about understanding the XML. It’s the equivalent of “view-source” in a webpage! Use a tool to covert it to something less icky! (http:/graphite.ecs.soton.ac.uk/browser/ for example) Publishing RDF

23. Worry about it later! Start with data you can make freely available Access Control

24. You want your data to be used & reused, right? Don’t prevent commercial use. Don’t prevent derivative works (prevents people using it at all!) If there are any things which your data should not be used for why are you publishing it? Licensing

25. Must-Attribute license Public Domain license (your info still can’t be used in illegal ways, of course) Procrastinate and worry about it later (much better than not publishing your data) Licensing Options

26. Breakout

27. What datasets does your organisation already maintain? What is the business case for making them available? in a machine readable form to all members without bureaucracy or restriction. What are the barriers to putting them online and maintaining them? What are the benefits to the wider community? What are the risks? Task

28. List your 3 easiest wins - the lowest hanging fruit. Starting suggestion: Every building & campus in your organisation with: Number Building Name Site (Campus) Lat & Long This data changes very slowly and also made freely available already. Task

29. ECS Demo

30. http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/docs/ http://rdf.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/1248 http://rdf.ecs.soton.ac.uk/project/42

31. Cool URIs

32. Beauty http://domain/classOfThing/scheme/identifier http://domain/classOfThing/scheme/identifier.rdf http://domain/classOfThing/scheme/identifier.html http://mysite.org/person/username/t23 http://mysite.org/person/username/t23.rdf http://mysite.org/person/username/t23.html Scheme is optional but futureproofs you against next time the university reorganises everything.

33. And The Beast http://www.diy.com/diy/jsp/bq/nav.jsp?action=detail&fh_ oneslice=true&fh_view_size=10&fh_reffacet=styleStyle&fh _location=%2f%2fcatalog01%2fen_GB%2fcategories%3C{ 9372014}%2fcategories%3C{9372039}%2fcategories%3C{ 9372150}%2fspecificationsProductType%3done_hole_taps %2fstyleStyle%3E{adelaide}&fh_refview=summary&fh_ref path=facet_159017215&fh_secondid=10507747&fh_eds=% C3%9F&ts=1279018688652

34. Linked Data http://www.flickr.com/photos/reedsturtevant/4288406152/

35. Further Reading http://www.flickr.com/photos/markhillary/337685031/

36. http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/ http://www.w3.org/standards/techs/rdf http://www.w3.org/standards/techs/owl http://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-vocab-pub/ W3C Specifications

37. Tools Graphite Browser http://graphite.ecs.soton.ac.uk/browser/ Tabulator http://www.w3.org/2005/ajar/tab

38. Linked Data Help Linked Data Website http://linkeddata.org/ The Patterns Book http://patterns.dataincubator.org/book/ Semantic Overflow http://www.semanticoverflow.com/

39. SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organisation Scheme) Taxonomies and thesauri SIOC (Semantically Interlinked Online Communities) Web forums, mailing lists, etc FOAF (Friend of a Friend) People, social networks DC (Dublin Core) Basic bibliographic information BIBO (Bibliographic Ontology) Advanced bibliographic information GEO Simple geolocation (lat/long) ontology Common Namespaces

40. Cool URIs Cool URIs don't change (by TimBL) http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI Cool URIs for the Semantic Web http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/ ECS URI scheme documentation http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/docs/

41. Infrastructure Namespaces RDF & RDFS These describe classes & predicates which are used to tie everything together. rdf:type is used to give a URI a class rdf:type foaf:Person.http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/1248> OWL Used to describe the meaning of predicates & classes in machine- readable form. Start with a human readable documents, OWL is not widely consumed (yet?) XSD Describes datatypes like String, Positve Integer etc.

42. Take Home Messages http://www.flickr.com/photos/71894657@N00/2696793132/

43. ‘Cool URIs don’t change’ – once you’ve chosen a URI convention for your organisation, it’s a pain to change it Getting this right is key to having your linked data used more widely We think that we got this one mostly right… …but we still had too many anonymous nodes around Good URI Selection

44. Go for an incremental approach …but keep an eye on possible avenues for future expansion RDFa is not for beginners! Don’t do as we did: we tried to build linked data for all of our internal data in one go Start with the easy stuff

45. Regardless of your application domain, there is probably already an ontology that does some of what you want …but don’t be afraid to invent relationships and classes if you can’t find any suitable Don’t do as we did! we wrote a new ontology from scratch, rather than reusing FOAF+DC) Don’t reinvent the wheel

46. Build linked data for your own consumption first You know what your use cases are – better to support these than to second guess those of unknown future users Don’t do as we did: we overcomplicated our data by trying to support all of the plausible scenarios that we could think of, rather than concentrating on what mattered to us (be glad I couldn't find any clip art for this slide) Eat your own dogfood

47. You should aim to publish as RDF Publishing as CSV may get your data out there faster as an interim measure We used CSV as a ‘glue’ data format between different systems, but chose not to expose data until we could do so as RDF. Don’t underestimate CSV

48. Thanks cjg@ecs.soton.ac.uk @cgutteridge http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/webteam/ http://is.gd/dqiJc