The Tetherless World Weblog

This is an invitation to participate in the RPI Hackathon 2009 for linking government data. For more detailed information check our wiki.

Part of the work done here in the Tetherless World Constellation consists in translating the government datasets available from data.gov into RDF. This effort has produced billions of triples from (at the moment of writing this post) more than 130 datasets. This data can used in multiple ways: It can be queried from a SPARQL endpoint, used in visualizations such as maps or it can be combined with other datasets (whether from data.gov or other sources) to find correlations, clustering or other types of analysis.

However, we think that the data is more interesting and useful when is linked: For example, a system can answer a specific query and also suggest other sources of information that may be relevant to the user. Thus we think that while we keep translating datasets, it also would be nice to link these datasets to the Linked Data cloud and, in order to do that, we are asking your help.

During December 12th and 13th we will host a Hackathon (i.e., an event where people gather together to work on a specific computational problem). This event is part of the Great American Hackathon promoted by Sunlight Labs. We will host this event at Winslow Building, RPI, in Troy NY. It will start from 10AM to 5PM , but if you have only a few spare hours, you are also welcome! As I mentioned above, our main goal is to link the available data to the Linked Data cloud, but if you have also other ideas to develop using one or more of the datasets, please join us too! The only requirement is to bring your computer and register by email to gravea3[@]rpi.edu or difrad[@]rpi.edu. Because we know big brains needs energy, food and beverages will be provided. Even if you can’t attend physically you can help us working online.

Everyone is invited to participate. If you have any comments, questions, etc. please don’t hesitate to contact me at gravea3[@]rpi.edu or check the announcement in data-gov.

Alvaro Graves and the Data-gov team.

We recently revised the data-gov wiki demos and published a guided tour for web users to better understand and use the projects published at the Data-gov Wiki.We also expect the article to be  a tutorial that meet the increasing requests from web developers who want to integrate semantic technology with existing web technology. Here are some highlights:

• it lists pointers to datasets converted from data.gov and other data sources
• it lists a couple of simple demos for using critical technologies, such as Google Visualization API, MIT Exhibit, SPARQL (and extended features), SparqlProxy, Triple Store Usage.  All source code and services are included and replicable. You may see the source code at this link.
• it further lists advanced demos showing how government data are linked by e.g. sharing properties, reusing URI and literal identifiers, and common time and location.

Comments are welcome to be reported at http://code.google.com/p/data-gov-wiki/issues/list.  We are incrementally improving the article, please come back and subscribe our announcement RSS Feeds.

Li Ding and the Data-gov Wiki team