One year of PiLOD project

Yesterday was the closing event of the Pilot Linked Open Data project. A significantly big crowd of politicians, civil servants, hackers, SME owners, open data activists and researchers gathered in the very nice building of the RCE in Amersfoort to hear about what has been done within this one year project lead by Erwin Folmer. But not only that, the participants also got some more insights into Linked Data usage outside of the project and a guided tour through the RCE. More information, photos, and links to the slides, can be found in the report about the event.

Oliver Bartlett and John Walker gave two keynotes explaining how Linked Data is put into use respectively at the BBC and at NXP. Both companies are using this technology to better describe their content and interconnect separated data sources. A shared objective besides having better and more efficient internal processes is to provide better services to the customers. Thanks to the harmonization and linkage of the data, these customers can expect to get more coherent data about what they care, be it a chip or a football player. The two presentations also highlighted two important facts about Linked Data: it’s versatile enough to be applied to two very different business domains such as media and chip manufacturing, 2) the data does not have to be open to be benefit form Semantic Web technologies – as of now, a lot of data at the BBC is becoming LD but none of this LD is LOD.

My activity within the project was around chatting (a lot, as I usually do :-p), writing two book chapters (“Publishing Open Data on the Web”, and “How-to: Linking resources from two datasets” ) and giving an hand on the “HuisKluis” work package managed by Paul Francissen.  I spoke a bit about the latest, showing a demo and some slides to explain how data is managed in the back-end. In short, the “HuisKluis” is a place where information about a house is found and shared. See the following video for a better introduction:

The prototype can be found at http://pilod-huiskluis.appspot.com/ . It works only for houses in the Netherlands but there are a few examples that can be used too:

Here are the few slides giving more details about the implementation:

If you want to really know everything about how things work, feel free to just look at the source code.

This PiLOD project was a pleasant and enriching experience, I’m very much looking forward to a PiLOD2 for a second year of LOD brainstorming and hacking together with Marcel, Arjen, Erwin, Paul, Lieke, Hans, Bart, Dimitri, … and the rest of the (the rather big) group 🙂 This post is also a good opportunity to thank again the Network Institute for having supported this collaboration with a generous research voucher. Thanks!