Author
Anne Cregan (Intersect Australia Ltd, National ICT Australia)
Abstract
The Open Data Movement aims at making data freely available to everyone. A Data Commons is rapidly emerging, and the World Wide Web is fast becoming a space not only for linking documents and web pages, but for interlinking data sets. This interlinkage is taking place not only at the collection level, but at the object level – that is, rather than just linking a whole data set to another data set, the individual data items within the data set are interlinked to related data items in other data sets.
Since inception in 2007, the W3C's Linking Open Data Project, based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF) standard, has grown into a data cloud now containing billions of items. This data cloud provides a useful repository of data for use in research and is also an important place to publish open research data sets to be shared with other researchers and the community. A large component of research data is suitable for linking into the open data cloud, and international researchers have commenced the process of publishing their data sets online as a collaborative research initiative, as it is an excellent way to expose, share, and connect pieces of research data. Greater visibility and ability to process data with a common theme generated by different research groups enables new research studies and insights to emerge.
About the speaker
Anne Cregan is a projects consultant at Intersect Australia. She has a diverse background in a range of academic disciplines and her commercial IT background encompasses programming, business analysis, data mining and senior level management, as well as project management and co-ordination. Anne has a doctorate in Computer Science from UNSW, sponsored by NICTA and specialising in semantic web technologies. She is on the Program Committee for several semantic Web-related conferences and has a BSc (Hons) in Psychology from the University of Sydney.