Linked Data

Open PHACTS Closing Symposium

For the last 5 years I have had the pleasure of working with the Open PHACTS project. Sadly, the project is now at an end. To celebrate we are having a two day symposium to look over the contributions of the project and its future legacy.

The project has been hugely successful in developing an integrated data platform to enable drug discovery research (see a future post for details to support this claim). The result of the project is the Open PHACTS Foundation which will now own the drug discovery platform and sustain its development into the future.

Here are my slides on the state of the data in the Open PHACTS 2.0 platform.

MACS Christmas Conference

I was asked to speak at the School (Faculty) of Mathematical and Computer Sciences (MACS) Christmas conference. I decided I would have some fun with the presentation.

Title: Project X

Abstract: For the last 11 months I have been working on a top secret project with a world renowned Scandinavian industry partner. We are now moving into the exciting operational phase of this project. I have been granted an early lifting of the embargo that has stopped me talking about this work up until now. I will talk about the data science behind this big data project and how semantic web technology has enabled the delivery of Project X.

You can find more details of flood defence work in this paper.

A short project on linking course data from Sharing and learning

During the summer my colleague Phil Barker (author of the Sharing and Learning blog) and I hosted a summer intern, Anna Grant.

Anna’s project was to investigate the feasibility of publishing the data about our courses as Linked Data. Phil subsequently wrote up a blog post about the work which I have been meaning to share for a long time, so here it is; long overdue.

Below I have picked out some quotes from Phil’s original blog post that describe the work that Anna did.

The objectives for Anna’s work were ambitious: survey existing HE [Higher Education] open data and ontologies in use; design an ontology that we can use; develop an interface we can use to create and publish our course data. Anna made great progress on all three fronts.

…

The ontologies reviewed were: AIISO, Teach, CourseWare, XCRI, MLO, ECIM and CEDS. A live working draft of the summary / review for these is available for comment as a Google Doc.

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The final draft [of the extended MLO Ontology] is shown below. Key:  Green= MLO, Purple=MLO extension, Blue=ECIM / previous alteration to MLO Yellow= generic ontologies such as Dublin core and SKOS.

MLO Extension to capture taught courses and their relationships to degree programmes.

…

Anna has finished her work here now and returns to Edinburgh Napier University to finish her Master’s project. Alasdair and I think she has done a really impressive job, not least considering she had no previous experience with RDF and semantic technologies. We’ve also found her a pleasure to work with and would like to thank her for her efforts on this project.

Source: A short project on linking course data | Sharing and learning