The following guest post is by Pablo Mendes and the rest of the team working on the new LOD cloud diagram.
The LOD cloud diagram is a depiction of datasets that have been published in Linked Data format, by contributors to the Linking Open Data (LOD) community project and other individuals and organisations around the world. By sharing information as Linked Open Data, providers make it easier for data consumers to combine information from multiple providers. The LOD cloud diagram provides statistics about the structure and content of the LOD cloud and analyzes the extend to which LOD data sources implement nine best practices that are either recommended W3C or have emerged within the LOD community.
The LOD cloud diagram is based on metadata collected and curated by contributors to the CKAN directory. We are in the process of regenerating the next LOD cloud diagram and associated statistics. We would like to invite those of you who publish data sets as Linked Data to join the other ~2000 data sets already in CKAN to help us extend the list of ~300 candidates to the LOD cloud diagram. For those of you that already have entries on CKAN, we ask you to please review and update your entries accordingly. Please finalize your dataset descriptions until the end of this week to ensure that your entry will be considered for this round of the diagram.
We will be analyzing all data sets tagged with “lod” in CKAN from the perspective of a data consumer, looking for best practices that make it easier to access, understand and use your data. The compliance with the best practices will be checked manually and with scripts that download and analyze data from the data sources. Therefore it is important that you provide as much information as possible in your CKAN entry.
You can use the CKAN entry for DBpedia as one example:
http://ckan.net/package/dbpedia
In order to aid you in this quest, we have provided a validation page for your CKAN entry with step-by-step guidance for the information that we will be looking for:
http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/lodcloud/ckan/validator/
After you have completed the description of your data sets, we invite you to fill up this 5 minutes survey about your experience. This will help us to make the process easier, more complete and exciting for the next time around.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TDS3TML
Thank you and happy dataset description!
Theodora is press officer at the Open Knowledge Foundation, based in London. Get in touch via press@okfn.org
