Self-service linked government data with dcat and gridworks

By connecting a powerful Gridworks-based data workbench application directly to data catalogs, via a standard Data Catalog Vocabulary, data professionals outside of government can contribute to the Linked Data conversion process, thus obtaining data for their own needs and benefiting the larger Linked Government Data effort.

Abstract

Open Government Data initiatives in the US, UK and elsewhere have made large amounts of raw data available to the public on the Web. There is enormous potential in applying Linked Data principles to these datasets. This potential currently remains largely untapped because governments lack the resources required to convert from raw data to highquality Linked Data on a large scale. We present a selfservice approach to this problem: By connecting a powerful Gridworks-based data workbench application directly to data catalogs, via a standard Data Catalog Vocabulary, data professionals outside of government can contribute to the Linked Data conversion process, thus obtaining data for their own needs and benefiting the larger Linked Government Data effort.