Linked Data - the story so far

The term “Linked Data” refers to a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the Web. These best practices have been adopted by an increasing number of data providers over the last three years, leading to the creation of a global data space containing billions of assertions— the Web of Data. In this article, the authors present the concept and technical principles of Linked Data, and situate these within the broader context of related technological developments. They describe progress to date in publishing Linked Data on the Web, review applications that have been developed to exploit the Web of Data, and map out a research agenda for the Linked Data community as it moves forward

An extensible web interface for databases and its application to storing biochemical data

This paper presents a generic web-based database interface implemented in Prolog. We discuss the advantages of the implementation platform and demonstrate the system's applicability in providing access to integrated biochemical data. Our system exploits two libraries of SWI-Prolog to create a schema-transparent interface within a relational setting. As is expected in declarative programming, the interface was written with minimal programming effort due to the high level of the language and its suitability to the task. We highlight two of Prolog's features that are well suited to the task at hand: term representation of structured documents and relational nature of Prolog which facilitates transparent integration of relational databases. Although we developed the system for accessing in-house biochemical and genomic data the interface is generic and provides a number of extensible features. We describe some of these features with references to our research databases. Finally we outline an in-house library that facilitates interaction between Prolog and the R statistical package. We describe how it has been employed in the present context to store output from statistical analysis on to the database.Comment: Online proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Implementation of Constraint Logic Programming Systems and Logic-based Methods in Programming Environments (CICLOPS-WLPE 2010), Edinburgh, Scotland, U.K., July 15, 201

Supporting security-oriented, inter-disciplinary research: crossing the social, clinical and geospatial domains

How many people have had a chronic disease for longer than 5-years in Scotland? How has this impacted upon their choices of employment? Are there any geographical clusters in Scotland where a high-incidence of patients with such long-term illness can be found? How does the life expectancy of such individuals compare with the national averages? Such questions are important to understand the health of nations and the best ways in which health care should be delivered and measured for their impact and success. In tackling such research questions, e-Infrastructures need to provide tailored, secure access to an extensible range of distributed resources including primary and secondary e-Health clinical data; social science data, and geospatial data sets amongst numerous others. In this paper we describe the security models underlying these e-Infrastructures and demonstrate their implementation in supporting secure, federated access to a variety of distributed and heterogeneous data sets exploiting the results of a variety of projects at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow

Managing polyglot systems metadata with hypergraphs

A single type of data store can hardly fulfill every end-user requirements in the NoSQL world. Therefore, polyglot systems use different types of NoSQL datastores in combination. However, the heterogeneity of the data storage models makes managing the metadata a complex task in such systems, with only a handful of research carried out to address this. In this paper, we propose a hypergraph-based approach for representing the catalog of metadata in a polyglot system. Taking an existing common programming interface to NoSQL systems, we extend and formalize it as hypergraphs for managing metadata. Then, we define design constraints and query transformation rules for three representative data store types. Furthermore, we propose a simple query rewriting algorithm using the catalog itself for these data store types and provide a prototype implementation. Finally, we show the feasibility of our approach on a use case of an existing polyglot system.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft