Jeni's Musings

I’ve written previously about how wonderful Freebase Gridworks (shortly to be “Google Refine”) is for cleaning and converting data. Within the UK public sector, there are two big barriers to its use, however:

1. Public sector workers typically can’t install software on their computers.
2. They’re also typically stuck with IE7 (or even, if they’re really unlucky, IE6).

When we encourage people to put their data on the web as linked data, the biggest question is “How?”. There are so many “How?” questions to answer:

• how do we choose what URIs to use for things?
• how do we choose what vocabularies to use?
• how do we handle changing data?
• how do we tell people how the data was created?
• how do we publish it?
• how will other people know about it?

and, of course:

• how do we create it?