Why bother with linked data?
Comments (10) In my last blog post I gave a brief introduction to the linked data offered by Ordnance Survey. Furthermore, in that post I said ‘By linking to identifiers for places and postcodes in your data you can enrich the information you hold’. It is this point I want to expand on here.
Last year Talis, Iconomical and the data.gov.uk team got together to build a Research Funding Explorer. The idea behind this (as explained here) was to show how linked data techniques could bring real benefit when it comes to joining and analysing data from a number of different sources.
The original application allows a user to browse funded research projects by subject and organisation. Furthermore, the original work contained a geographical element which allowed you to see which projects were being funded in which region.
Linked Data
Following this link we can see which projects are being worked on by institutions in the South East of England, and how much funding they are receiving. However, it would arguably be useful if you could also view the geographic distribution of projects at a more fine grained level. This can be made possible by linking the data to Ordnance Survey linked data.
Here’s how…
Themocracy