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SLiDInG 6
Today, the Semantic Web Lab hosted the 6th Scottish Linked Data Interest Group workshop at Heriot-Watt University. The event was sponsored by the SICSA Data Science Theme. The event was well attended with 30 researchers from across Scotland (and Newcastle) coming together for a day of flash talks and discussions. Live minutes were captured during the day and can be found here.
Congratulations Qianru Zhou
This morning Qianru Zhou successfully her PhD thesis “Ontology-driven knowledge based autonomic management for telecommunication networks: Theory, implementation and applications”, receiving minor corrections. Congratulations!
UK Ontology Network 2018
This week I went to the UK Ontology Network meeting hosted at Keele University. There was an interesting array of talks in the programme showing the breadth of work going on in the UK.
Bioschemas Samples Hackathon
Last week the Bioschemas Community hosted a workshop. The focus of the meeting was to get web resources describing biological samples to embed Schema.org mark up in their pages. The embedded mark up will enable the web resources to become more discoverable, and therefore the biological samples also.
NAR Database Paper
The new year started with a new publication (Harding et al., 2018), an article in the 2018 NAR Database issue about the IUPHAR Guide to Pharmacology Database.
ISWC2017 Papers
I have had two papers accepted within the events that make up ISWC2017.
My PhD student Qianru Zhou has been working on using RDF stream processing to detect anomalous events through telecommunication network messages. The particular scenario in our paper that will be presented at the Web Stream Processing workshop focuses on detecting a disaster such as the capsizing of the Eastern Star on the Yangtze River (Zhou et al., 2017).
The second paper is a poster in the main conference that provides an overview of the Bioschemas project where we are identifying the Schema.org markup that is of primary importance for life science resources. Hopefully the paper title will pull the punters in for the session (Gray, Goble and Jimenez, 2017).
SICSA Digital Humanities Event
On 24 August I attended the SICSA Digital Humanities event hosted at Strathclyde University. The event was organised by Martin Halvey and Frank Hopfgartner. The event brought together cultural heritage practitioners, and researchers from the humanities and computer science.
DUCS not LOD
The follow is an excerpt from a blog by Keir Winesmith, Head of Digital at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (@SFMOMAlab)
Linked Open Data may sound good and noble, but it’s the wrong way around. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an organization in possession of good Data, must want it Open (and indeed, Linked).
Well, I call bullshit. Most cultural heritage organizations (like most organizations) are terrible at data. And most of those who are good at collecting it, very rarely use it effectively or strategically.
Instead of Linked Open Data (LOD), Keir argues for DUCS:
An Identifier Scheme for the Digitising Scotland Project
The Digitising Scotland project is having the vital records of Scotland transcribed from images of the original handwritten civil registers . Linking the resulting dataset of 24 million vital records covering the lives of 18 million people is a major challenge requiring improved record linkage techniques. Discussions within the multidisciplinary, widely distributed Digitising Scotland project team have been hampered by the teams in each of the institutions using their own identification scheme. To enable fruitful discussions within the Digitising Scotland team, we required a mechanism for uniquely identifying each individual represented on the certificates. From the identifier it should be possible to determine the type of certificate and the role each person played. We have devised a protocol to generate for any individual on the certificate a unique identifier, without using a computer, by exploiting the National Records of Scotland’s registration districts. Importantly, the approach does not rely on the handwritten content of the certificates which reduces the risk of the content being misread resulting in an incorrect identifier. The resulting identifier scheme has improved the internal discussions within the project. This paper discusses the rationale behind the chosen identifier scheme, and presents the format of the different identifiers.
Interoperability and FAIRness through a novel combination of Web technologies
New paper (Wilkinson et al., 2017) on using Semantic Web technologies to publish existing data according to the FAIR data principles (Wilkinson et al., 2016).
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About Me
I'm an Associate Professor in Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University. My research focuses on linking datasets. Read more