The government is currently running consultations on two important aspects regarding the move towards a ‘data-driven’ economy. One is on open data (http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/resource-library/making-open-data-real-public-consultation) and the other on the proposed Public Data Corporation (http://discuss.bis.gov.uk/pdc/).

The closing date for both of these consultations is now only 9 days away.

TSO has been at the centre of the drive to open up government data and our Senior Content Analyst, Paul Appleby, took part in a recent workshop at the Cabinet Office to discuss the Open Data consultation. It was a very interesting and enlightening few hours and many different viewpoints were put forward, ranging from straightforward transparency demands (or simply publish the data) to the need for a more sustainable approach to support re-publishing opportunities (where things such as return on investment and SLAs become important factors). Events such as this surface the incredible passion that certain people have about opening up government whilst reinforcing the benefits, both in terms of cost saving and economic growth, that may also be unlocked.

Whatever your view the workshop did highlight the many challenges that the government faces and it is great that the opportunity to respond to the consultations is available.

We are pleased to announce that we will be attending the first Semantic Tech and Business Conference at the Hotel Russell in London on Monday 26 and Tuesday 27 September 2011.

TSO is a gold sponsor at the event and our semantic web team will be available throughout the two days to talk about TSO’s solutions. If you are attending the event come along to the TSO stand to find out how we can help you to unlock the value in your data.

On the first day of the event, TSO will present a session on Sustainable Semantic Publishing. We will discuss the benefits of creating a process that automates the capture, transformation and publishing of data in an efficient, seamless and reliable way and talk about the tools TSO has developed to help with this.

Visit the SemTech website to view the conference programme and register for the event

You can follow the event on Twitter #SemTechBiz

Over the last week or so organograms of UK government departments and agencies have been published online in a consistent format for the first time.

You can get more information and a list of organograms at data.gov.uk

TSO is hosting the organograms data and web applications and we wanted to provide a little bit more information about how we do it - using our OpenUp platform

The organogram data is stored as RDF. This RDF is harvested from various locations on the web (or locally) using our harvester component. This component is capable of retrieving and, if necessary, transforming data. The data is loaded into our RDF store.

The RDF is then used to drive the organograms visualisation, which is a browser-based application. It gets its data by calling the Linked Data API, a tool that makes it easier for web developers to access RDF data for use in web applications by providing a variety of results formats, simply by making a request to a URI. The API and the organograms configuration are also hosted on our platform servers. Calls to the API are converted into queries against the RDF store and the results returned in the requested format.

In addition a SPARQL endpoint is also available for those developers that want to query the RDF directly.

Up to now, when submitting SPARQL queries via a web page, users are generally presented with a bland text box (on our site and everyone else’s). There is none of the help that we typically have in IDEs (such as Eclipse) for editing code. When we edit code we have come to expect syntax highlighting and on-the-fly error checking. Marijn Haverbeke’s excellent CodeMirror javascript library has gone much of the way to solving this. In version 1.0 of CodeMirror, there was a provided mode for syntax highlighting for SPARQL. However, this doesn’t flag up errors, so users don’t find out about any mistakes in their query until they get a message back from the server.

At TSO, we are thinking about how far we could go with in-browser tools to support editing of the SPARQL queries. We have implemented a version of SPARQL highlighting in CodeMirror2.0, and also hooked in a full javascript parser for SPARQL 1.0 (built using David Majda’s excellent PEG.js parser generator). This enables not just highlighting, but full syntax checking as you type. The client-side code also detects what type of query you have written (select, construct, describe or ask), and enables the appropriate options for choosing output format. We think this gives a much smoother ride than current web-based SPARQL editors.