ADRC-Scotland

Raasay House

Will the real Kevin Macleod please line up?

Last week I attended the Digitising Scotland Project Colloquium at Raasay House (featured image above) on the Isle of Raasay. The colloquium was a gathering of historians and computer scientists to discuss the challenges of linking the vital records of the people of Scotland between 1851 and 1974.

The Digitising Scotland Project is having the birth, marriage, and death records of Scotland transcribed from the scans of the original hand written registration books. This process is not without its own challenges, try reading this birth record of a famous Scottish artist and architect, but the focus of the colloquium was on what happens after the records have been transcribed.

Each Scottish vital record identifies several individuals, e.g. on a birth record you will have the baby, their parents, the informant, and the registrar. The same individuals will appear on multiple records relating to events in their own life, e.g. an individual will have a birth record, potentially one or more marriage records, and a death record, assuming that they have not emigrated. They can also appear in the records of other individuals, e.g. as a mother on a birth record, the mother-of-the-bride on a marriage record, or the doctor on a death record. The challenge is how to identify the same individual across all the records, when all you have is a name (first and last) and potentially the age.

The problem is compounded in an area like Skye, which was one of the focus regions of the Digitising Scotland project, because there is a relatively small distribution of names on which to draw upon. For example, a name like Kevin Macleod will appear on multiple records. In some cases the name will correspond to a single Kevin Macleod, in other cases it will be a closely related Kevin Macleod, e.g. Kevin Macleod the father of Kevin Macleod, and in others the two Kevin Macleods will not be related at all. The challenge is how to develop a computer algorithm that is capable of making these distinctions.

The colloquium was a great opportunity for historians and computer scientists to discuss the challenges and help each other to develop a solution. However, first we had to agree on a common understanding for terms such as “record” and “individual”.

Overall, we made great progress on exchanging ideas and techniques. We heard how similar challenges are being addressed in a related project focusing on North Orkney, how historians approach the record linkage challenge, and about work for automatically classifying causes of death to their ICD10 code and jobs to HISCO. There was also time to socialise and enjoy some of the scenery of Raasay, which is a beautiful island the size of Manhattan but with a population of only 160.

View from the meeting room

View from the meeting room

Sunset over Portree, Skye

Sunset over Portree, Skye

Data Integration in a Big Data Context

Today I had the pleasure of visiting the Urban Big Data Centre (UDBC) to give a seminar on Data Integration in a Big Data context (slides below). The idea for the seminar came about due to my collaboration with Nick Bailey (Associate Director of the UBDC) in the Administrative Research Data Centre for Scotland (ADRC-S).

In the seminar I wanted to highlight the challenges of data integration that arise in a Big Data context and show examples from my past work that would be relevant to those in the UBDC. In the presentation, I argue that RDF provides a good approach for data integration but it does not solve the basic challenges of messy data and generating mappings between datasets. It does however lay these challenges bare on the table, as Frank van Harmelen highlighted in his SWAT4LS keynote in 2013.

The first use case is drawn from my work on the EU SemSorGrid4Env project where we were developing an integrated view for emergency response planning. The particular use case shown is that of coastal flooding on the south coast of England. Although this project finished in 2011, I am still involved with developing RDF and SPARQL continuous data extensions; see the W3C RDF Stream Processing Community Group for details.

The second use case is drawn from my work on the EU Open PHACTS project. I showed the approach we developed for supporting user controlled views of the integrated data through Scientific Lenses. However, I also talked about the successes of the project and the fact that is currently being actively used for pharmacology research and receiving over 20million hits a month.

I finished the talk with an overview of the Administrative Data Research Centre for Scotland (ADRC-S) and my work on linking birth, marriage, and death records. I am hoping that we can adopt the lenses approach together with incorporating feedback on the linkages from the researchers who will use the integrated views.

In the discussions following the talk, the notion of FAIR data came up. This is the idea that data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable by both humans and machines. RDF is one approach that could lead to this. The other area of discussion was around community initiatives for converting existing open datasets into an RDF format. I advocated adopting the approach followed by the Bio2RDF community who share the tasks of creating and maintaining such scripts for biological datasets. An important part of this jigsaw is tracking the provenance of the datasets, for which the W3C Health Care and Life Sciences Community Profile for Dataset Descriptions could be beneficial (there is nothing specific to the HCLS community in the profile).

SICSA Databases for the Environmental and Social Sciences

Today I attended the SICSA Databases for the Environmental and Social Sciences event hosted by Andy Cobley from the University of Dundee. I gave the below talk on the challenges of linking data.

Many areas of scientific discovery rely on combining data from multiples data sources. However there are many challenges in linking data. This presentation highlights these challenges in the context of using Linked Data for environmental and social science databases.