Cross-border data discovery

« 
Previous topic
|
Forum
|
Next topic
 »

You need to be logged in to post a topic or reply. Log in here

Robert Davies

Rob Davies

Monday 07 June 2010 6:55:55 pm

Cross-border data discovery

I read Paul Miller's Topic Report (No 7, Open and Linked Data) with great interest, not least because I am about to author a subsequent report in the series on PSI Portals, which will draw upon the growing list of initiatives now listed on the PSI Catalogues page of the ePSIplatform site.

I would like to invite comment from Paul (and others) on the issue of supporting 'cross-border', even 'trans-European', products through enabling discovery of PSI data for re-use with reasonable ease. This was an issue which epsiplus attempted to promote in the context of the Directive and which has been the subject of previous Commission-supported efforts such as the PSI Navigator project.

My question is, put simply, how might we best begin in terms of technical approach to assist discovery from multiple European PSI sources? On the one hand, in the cultural sector, we have the model of a major initiative such as Europeana (www.europeana.eu) which has so far harvested metadata from repositories and aggregations all around Europe for approaching 10 million cultural objects,gathered this into an index and is now, at a later stage, working on ways to apply semantic web approaches such as Linked Data to this corpus (a white paper has just been published on the subject). The data (or 'digital objects') themselves, stay on their original site.

To me, at least, Paul's paper suggests a different approach, whereby the act of 'harvesting' metadata would become unecessary in favour of a behaviorally-driven linking of all kinds of named data. But my understanding is not good enough to see how this might work in practice in the real context of PSI across Europe.

I would very much welcome the thoughts of people with greater insight than me on and around this point.

Best Regards

Rob Davies
Coordinator
ePSIplatform

Paul Miller

Paul Miller

Thursday 10 June 2010 11:19:58 am

Re: Cross-border data discovery

Rob

A Linked Data approach is certainly capable of supporting the sort of cross-border accessibility that I think you're seeking. The biggest single factor in its favour is actually that it *doesn't* require cross-border agreement on every schema, tag, term and attribute before things can get going. Instead, national, regional, local, and domain-specific initiatives can gradually be stitched together as and when required.

Those with an interest in combining a specific set of resources from (say) London, Glasgow, Amsterdam and Rome can - presuming that those cities have made the data openly available in the first place - map key attributes to one another at the point of need and enable their users to move reasonably painlessly from one resource to another.

There is certainly value in identifying some core terminologies (administrative areas, etc?) and bringing pressure to bear upon those responsible for maintaining them in order to have them made freely available in a manner that complies with Berners-Lee's four principles. This would make it far easier for those four cities to refer unambiguously to a set of shared concepts, without the need to duplicate prior effort or map redundantly from one set of terms to another. There's no need to *wait* for those core terminologies to become available before doing anything, though, as a degree of duplication or mapping to bootstrap things may be preferable to waiting months or years for the 'right' solution to come along...