{"id":330,"date":"2010-07-14T05:52:05","date_gmt":"2010-07-14T05:52:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/?p=330"},"modified":"2010-07-14T05:52:05","modified_gmt":"2010-07-14T05:52:05","slug":"linked-data-for-universities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/2010\/07\/14\/linked-data-for-universities\/","title":{"rendered":"Open &amp; Linked Data for Universities"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m currently at <a href=\"http:\/\/iwmw.ukoln.ac.uk\/iwmw2010\/\">IWMW2010<\/a> which is going pretty well. I ran a <a href=\"http:\/\/iwmw.ukoln.ac.uk\/iwmw2010\/sessions\/gutteridge\/\">90 minute workshop<\/a> yesterday on university linked-data for university web managers. My basic points were:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Get your URIs right. eg. http:\/\/data.foo.ac.uk\/type\/scheme\/id.format<\/li>\n<li>Start with DC, SKOS, SIOC, FOAF, GEO (I wish I had that list 5 years ago!)<\/li>\n<li>Pick the easy stuff and do that first<\/li>\n<li>Don&#8217;t focus on accurate modeling in the ontology &#8212; rather think about how people might use the data for something useful<\/li>\n<li>CSV is much better than no raw data<\/li>\n<li>RDFa is not the place to start learning RDF.<\/li>\n<li>A linked-data manager does not need to understand the fine details RDF, any more than a web manager needs to understand HTML &amp; CSS<\/li>\n<li>Build data for your own consumption<\/li>\n<li>You&#8217;re already paying someone somewhere to keep much of this data up to date, but they are just failing to share it in a useful way. Turning it into open data should save lots of people around the university recreating existing datasets.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/graphite.ecs.soton.ac.uk\/browser\/\">Use a tool to check your RDF says what you meant<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Don&#8217;t worry about OWL &amp; ontologies. You are better off (initially) writing your ontology for humans to understand, rather than machines.<\/li>\n<li>I am not my homepage! &#8212; as RDF uptake increases there will be more people confusing URLs of documents with URIs for things. We&#8217;ll cope with that from the great unwashed linked data sources, but there&#8217;s no reason to do it when you know better.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>For my talk I did something which I wish could become standard practice. Make a <a href=\"http:\/\/graphite.ecs.soton.ac.uk\/iwmw2010links.html\">web page containing all the links in the slides<\/a> and give the audience a tiny URL to write down to save them trying scribble every URL down. I also owe thanks to Dr Nick Gibbins, who provided me his Intro to Linked Data slides and saved me a hell of a lot of work.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve spent the past few months working on a brainstorm of all the possible datasets a university could consider publishing.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/mind42.com\/pub\/mindmap?mid=605c3bad-3980-4d4b-9155-75b33af8860d\">University datasets mindmap<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Over the session, and talking to people at IWMW, I&#8217;ve added a few new entries such as Reading Lists and data for accountability. Suggestions from the peanut gallery are positively encouraged!<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve also been busy converting Southampton&#8217;s list of &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.southampton.ac.uk\/studentadmin\/academicprogmang\/timetabling\/learningspace.html\">Common Learning Spaces<\/a>&#8221; into RDF, via screen scraping and a whole bunch of RegExp&#8217;s. Next I plan to build a dataset of all the university buildings including latitude and longitude. It turns out this is quite easy to do, all I had to do was create a <a href=\"http:\/\/maps.google.com\/maps\/ms?ie=UTF8&amp;hl=en&amp;msa=0&amp;msid=114656900779020742504.00048b47c68134e971fc3&amp;t=h&amp;z=13\">Google Map of University Buildings<\/a> based on our campus map and then export it to Google Earth, which really produces a KML file which I can easily munge into RDF.<\/p>\n<p>Given that data I should then be able to create a tool which mashes up the two sets of data and can produce a map of all teaching rooms on campus with movable seating, or a smart screen. Hopefully this will be a killer example of how very simple open &amp; linked data can be a win for a university.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m currently at IWMW2010 which is going pretty well. I ran a 90 minute workshop yesterday on university linked-data for university web managers. My basic points were: Get your URIs right. eg. http:\/\/data.foo.ac.uk\/type\/scheme\/id.format Start with DC, SKOS, SIOC, FOAF, GEO (I wish I had that list 5 years ago!) Pick the easy stuff and do [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[198,136],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-practice","category-rdf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":333,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions\/333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}