LATC’s rock ...

The LOD Around The Clock (LATC) project kicked off on September 13 and 14 in DERI, National University of Ireland Galway. The project supports publishing and consuming Linked Data by offering:
  1. A recommended tools library for publishing and consuming Linked Data, supplementing documentation for the tools, and free implementation support for large-scale data publishers and consumers. Tools include the D2R Server for publishing relational databases on the Semantic Web, the Drupal CMS and related publishing and consumption tools, and others.
  2. A 24/7 interlinking platform that acquires new data and finds interlinkages with existing datasets.
  3. Publication of new large-scale LOD datasets with data from governmental departments and other organizations. The focus will be on EU level datasets such as CORDIS, the European Patent Office, and Eurostat.
LATC project partners are DERI/National University of Ireland Galway, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Freie Universität Berlin, Institut für Angewandte Informatik, and Talis Information Ltd. The LATC Advisory Committee has currently 36 members: governmental organisations such as the UK Office of Public Sector Information and the European Environment Agency; researchers and practitioners such as the University of Manchester, University of Economics Prague, Vulcan Inc., CTIC Technological Center, the Open Knowledge Foundation; and standardisation bodies, including W3C (Tim Berners-Lee). Within the LATC project, the partners will also liaison with other EC projects and related activities, including LOD2, PlanetData, SEALS, datalift.org, Semic.EU, and the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Developments and Outcomes

After introductions from EU scientific project officer Stefano Bertolo and from project co-ordinator Michael Hausenblas, the partners presented lightening talks, introducing ideas and tools to incorporate in the project. Talks ranged from the analytical, such as “Improving the WoD by finding the weak spots”, to concrete demonstrations of tools and vocabularies:
  • Christophe Guéret: Improving the WoD by finding the weak spots
  • Christophe Guéret: How to deal with duplicated efforts for RDFizing data (datalift.org, etc.)
  • Christophe Guéret: linkeddatamarketplace.com
  • Richard Cyganiak, Anja Jentzsch: CKAN, voiD and the LOD Cloud
  • Richard Cyganiak: Vocabulary hosting and development with Neologism
  • Richard Cyganiak: The Data Cube Vocabulary
  • Giovanni Tummarello: Data that links itself
  • Giovanni Tummarello: The gap between LOD and the real world, and about closing it
  • Giovanni Tummarello: Sindice status
  • Lin Clark: The LATC Web site
  • Lin Clark: Consuming data with Drupal and SPARQL Views
  • Chris Bizer: Silk Linking Framework
  • Sören Auer: SCOVO importer extension for OntoWiki
  • Tom Heath: Links: Variety is the Spice of Life
  • Michael Hausenblas: qualitywebdata.org
Note: if you're interested in any of the lightening talks details, please contact us.

The second half of the day covered most of the work packages (WP):

  • WP1 is devoted to the deployment of the 24/7 quality improvement and assessment infrastructure. Each partner of the LATC consortium brings in components such as the Sindice indexer, the Silk - Link Discovery Framework, etc. which are made available in an open and extensible way.
  • WP2 (Test-bed for Data Intensive Applications) provides an in-depth test-bed for data intensive applications by publishing datasets produced by the European Commission, the European Parliament, and other European institutions.
  • WP3 (Data Publication & Consumption Tools Library) compiles and documents a library of open source tools that will cover all stages of the publication and deployment process. Both WP2 and WP3 feed into WP1 and experiences from WP1 are integrated again in WP3. Further, WP1, WP2 and WP3 are communicated through
  • WP4 (Dissemination and Community Relation) engages the larger Web community in the production and consumption of Linked Data.
On the second day, the team covered management and reporting and broke into technical sessions. The technical sessions moved towards defining the 24/7 platform. This will lead to deployment of an initial version of the linking platform, including Silk on the DERI cluster, a voiD-based Data Source Inventory, and an assessment framework for increasing the quality of the links between datasets: