Southampton Open Data Blog

New additions to data.southampton.ac.uk

October 15, 2012
by Ash Smith

Ash mugshotMy name may not be familiar to people who follow this blog, so I’ll introduce myself first of all. I’m Ash, and I’m the new member of staff employed here at Southampton purely to manage the University’s linked open data. My official title, according to HR, is a ‘Data Management Specialist’, but Chris has been referring to me as a ‘Lodmaster’, which I think sounds far cooler. I used to work in ECS as a research fellow and did my PhD with Wendy Hall as my supervisor. I’m a lifelogger, and if you want some of my less thought-out comments, I can sometimes be found on Twitter as @DrAshSmith.

Apart from me, there are a few other additions to the site this week. Firstly, as users of the now-deprecated ECS EPrints system should be aware, the University has a central EPrints repository. So we now have a new regularly updated data set which maps users of the old system (and their papers) to the new system. The raw data is a massive list of owl:sameAs triples. On the subject of owl:sameAs, a new unofficial app that uses our data has been added to the Apps page of the site. SameAs.org is a service for finding equivalent URIs, and we now have a custom version of this service which looks for equivalent URIs according to our data only.