Linking Data

Much of what universities and businesses collect every day is information that gets locked away – in an excel spreadsheet, an access database, a repository, a content management system or a pdf – limiting the opportunities for it to be repurposed. Similarly, there is a wealth of useful information on the web that could feed into the organisation’s business strategy if only you could get hold of it – for example, national employment statistics, the career paths of alumni, or research data.

Linked data is one way of repurposing and aggregating all these nuggets of information in machine-readable format, so you don’t have to spend hours searching for it.

If you are running linked data technology on your system, these data can be connected instantly – using web technology – instead of staying in their separate database management systems. You can ask for the information you want in the format you want and the computer works out what is relevant and useful. In its simplest form it means more or less what it says: all available data linked together, similar to how web pages are linked.

Linked data can exist out on the open web, where anyone can see it, or it can exist behind organisational firewalls or password/authentication challenges – or even in systems with no connection to the public web at all. A good example is a lecture timetable which is confidential to the student, but links to data about rooms and modules which are open. If we want to link data from many different sources we need to be able to identify things globally and uniquely.

For example, a data file on the web says ‘John Smith is an employee of NASA’. Using linked data technology, a computer can now recognise John Smith as a person, and NASA as an organisation, even though these facts were not in the initial data document.

While humans can make this distinction easily because they understand the context, a computer needs an unambiguous description. In the case of linked data, this is made through a link that, in the example given above, could point to the entry for NASA on a separate database, e.g. DBPedia. And just as html delivers human-readable data, the linked data Resource Description Framework (RDF) delivers this information in machine-processable form.

Tim Berners-Lee has explained it, “With Linked Data you’ve got the ability to give a thing a Unique Resource Identifier (URI). So I can give a URI to my phone, and I can say that’s my phone in Linked Data. And also the company that made it can give a URI to the model of the phone. They can also put online all the specs of the phone, and then I can make a link to say that my phone is an example of that product. So now any system which is dealing with me and has access to that data will be able to figure out the sorts of things I can do with my phone, which actually is really valuable. Especially if the phone breaks.”

Putting it into practice

One of the most impressive linked data projects in UK higher education is the Southampton Open Data Service. This project is taking data sets, used by institutional administrators, and making them available in linked data formats. A number of applications have been built on the data including an interactive university map, a catering menu search function, university telephone directories, and apps making it easier for students to navigate open days.

Chris Gutteridge, the architect behind Southampton’s Open Data Service took a softly, softly approach to liberating data from the various silos of the institution. He began by asking the local curator of each type of information to simply email the spreadsheet to him once a week. Automated download of the data was a second step that followed once the data provider had seen some of the uses of their data. So far the data has actually been utilised by staff and students within the university, but it is available for anyone to use.

Southampton’s catering manager James Leeming is a new convert: “As a caterer I am often quoting that ‘I bake bread, I don’t do IT!’ We like to keep it simple and this is exactly what open data does for us. We can use formats and software we are used to and manage up to date real time information. This will ensure we are keeping customers up to date with information that they want.”

What next?

Back in 1950, the science fiction author Robert Heinlein said, “We need a new 'specialist' who is not a specialist, but a synthesist. We need a new science to be a perfect secretary to all other sciences.”

Successful universities and colleges of the future will have to build an infrastructure that turns them into reliable data hubs, able to analyse even very large and complex datasets internally and to pass on their insights – for free to students, for a fee to business.

As a technology, linked data is still work in progress and JISC is working to develop its capabilities for further and higher education. Data are only a raw material and their present and future value depends on how we can use them.