Publishing open linked gov data with OntoWiki / Triplify

All,

I noticed that there were some discussions lately on publishing open 
governmental data, which due to the lack of time unfortunately I was not 
able to contribute to.

Since this is my first post to the IG I want to briefly introduce 
myself: I'm heading the research group Agile Knowledge Engineering and 
Semantic Web (AKSW <http://aksw.org>) at Uni Leipzig in Germany. With 
AKSW we develop pragmatic solutions to semantic Web information 
integration problems. AKSW projects include the Wikipedia knowledge 
extraction DBpedia (<http://DBpedia.org>), the LOD version of 
OpenStreetMap LinkedGeoData (<http://LinkedGeoData.org>) and the 
machine-learning framework (<http://DL-Learner.org>).

Two of our tools I think are particularly useful for easily publishing 
governmental data as RDF and LinkedData:

*OntoWiki* (<http://OntoWiki.net>) is originally a tool for the 
collaborative creation and maintenance of RDF and OWL knowledge bases, 
but includes sophisticated navigation, browsing and search features as 
well. You can load any RDF file into OntoWiki and it will take care of 
generating a comprehensive user interface for navigation, browsing, 
search, querying and also serves the data machine-readably as 
LinkedData, SPARQL, JSON ...

As a *demo*, how OntoWiki can be used for governmental data we set up 
<http://gov-data.aksw.org>, where we currently loaded the financial 
transparency data from the EU (disclaimer: this is just as simple 
prototype, which was developed in a few hours - there are lots of things 
to improve and extend).

A second tool we develop, which could be very beneficial for publishing 
governmental data is *Triplify* (<http://triplify.org>). Triplify brings 
existing relational databases to the Linked Data Web, with minimal 
effort. Creating a Triplify configuration for a relational database 
schema is easy and takes not much time. As a result Triplify will take 
care of publishing your data as LinkedData, RDF and JSON (no SPARQL 
support yet). You can also use Triplify as an RDF-from-relational-DB 
extraction tool and load the output into OntoWiki for example to provide 
a nice GUI to people.

Let me know if you have any questions on our tools, which are btw. all 
*open-source* and have a strong maintainer and developer communities.

Best,

Sören

-- 

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Sören Auer, AKSW/Computer Science Dept., University of Leipzig
http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~auer,  Skype: soerenauer

Received on Thursday, 29 October 2009 06:27:22 UTC