About the Data-gov Wiki

From Data-gov Wiki

Contents 1 What is the Data-gov Wiki? 2 What data is in the Data-gov Wiki? 3 Demos 3.1 Interactive Bureau Budget Graph 3.2 Interactive Faceted Browser for Earthquake Data: 3.3 Tracking Changes in the data.gov Catalog via RSS: 4 For more Demos and Information: 5 Topic pages for Government Data properties

What is the Data-gov Wiki?

The Data-gov wiki is a project of the Tetherless World Constellation at RPI. The project is headed by Jim Hendler and Deborah McGuinness and led by Li Ding. The contributors of the project are listed at the Project Members page. For more information about the project or about joining the wiki, please see contact us page.

The Data-gov Wiki project investigates the role of semantic web technologies, esp. linked data, in producing, processing and utilizing government data found in data.gov. Our projects goals are:

• to enrich the value of data via normalizing, linking and information-extraction
• to help realize the value of government data through applications and visualizations
• to support web developers via machine-friendly data access and web services using W3C Web standards.

Currently, we are instantiating Tim Berners-Lee's vision of linked government data via the following activities: translating government datasets into RDF, linking them to the linked data cloud, and developing interesting applications and demos on semantically linked government data.

Here's a diagram displaying the semantic web architecture for government data.

What data is in the Data-gov Wiki?

• There are currently 303 converted RDF datasets contributing 89090182 triples.

The following is a diagram showing what is currently available on the Data-gov Wiki and how that data is linked together.

All the datasets in Data.gov Wiki can be found at Data.gov_Catalog.

Datasets from data.gov were translated from CSV to RDF using a simple Java program. Other datasets in different formats will be translated soon. For more information as to how the data was translated and how it is currently formatted please see Generating_RDF_from_data.gov.

Demos

We have some visualization demos showing how this semantic government data can be used. These demos use a variety of technologies such as Tabulator, the Google Visualization API, and Exhibit.

Here's some example demonstrations:

Interactive Bureau Budget Graph

This demo uses Dataset_402, Public Budget Database - Outlays and offsetting receipts 1962-2014 (Office_of_Management_and_Budget), to show accounts that belong to that bureau and their outlays (expenditures) for each year from 1962 to 2014 (2009-2014 are projected values).

Interactive Faceted Browser for Earthquake Data:

This demo uses Dataset_34, Worldwide M1+ Earthquakes, Past 7 Days (US_Geological_Survey), to earthquakes all around the world in the past week. This Demo takes advantage of Exhibit's faceted browsing capabilities.

Tracking Changes in the data.gov Catalog via RSS:

This demo uses Dataset_92, Data.gov Catalog (Office_of_Management_and_Budget), to create a RSS feed for all changes and updates on datasets in data.gov.

For more Demos and Information:

To see all our other demos, please visit Demos.

For the main entry page to the Data-gov Wiki and more information on the technical details of this project, please visit [1].

Topic pages for Government Data properties

For each data set in our catalog, there is a metadata page available in both human and machine-readable (RDF) forms that provides both information about that dataset and the properties it uses. Each property referenced in any of the datasets we have translated gets a wiki page in which we show all datasets that use that property, and in which it is possible to add either textual as to the meaning of those propoerties or machine-readable assertions as to how the properties may be linked. The wiki page Property:Dgtwc:uses_property has a list of all of these properties, from which those knowledgable in a dataset can make assertions as to these meanings and uses.