Subsetting data

At various times in recent months I have promised to look into the topic 
of persistent identifiers for subsets of data. This came up at the SDW 
F2F in Sapporo but has also been raised by Annette in DWBP. In between 
festive activities I've been giving this some thought and have tried to 
begin to commit some ideas to a page [1].

During the CEO-LD meeting, Jeremy pointed to OpenSearch as a possible 
way forward, including its geo-temporal extensions defined by the OGC. 
There is also the Linked Data API as a means of doing this, and what 
they both have in common is that they offer an intermediate layer that 
turns a URL into a query.

How do you define a persistent identifier for a subset of a dataset? IMO 
you mint a URI and say "this identifies a subset of a dataset" - and 
then provide a means of programmatically going from the URI to a query 
that returns the subset. As long as you can replace the intermediate 
layer with another one that also returns the same subset, we're done.

The UK Government Linked Data examples tend to be along the lines of:

http://transport.data.gov.uk/id/stations
returns a list of all stations in Britain.

http://transport.data.gov.uk/id/stations/Manchester
returns a list of stations in Manchester

http://transport.data.gov.uk/id/stations/Manchester/Piccadilly
identifies Manchester Piccadilly station.

All of that data of course comes from a single dataset.

Does this work in the real worlds of meteorology and UBL/PNNL?

Phil.




[1] https://github.com/w3c/sdw/blob/gh-pages/subsetting/index.md




-- 


Phil Archer
W3C Data Activity Lead
http://www.w3.org/2013/data/

http://philarcher.org
+44 (0)7887 767755
@philarcher1

Received on Wednesday, 30 December 2015 18:30:46 UTC