On May 26, 2015, Eurostat organised a workshop on how to use the Data Cube RDF vocabulary to disseminate statistical data. Participants from public, private and academic sectors were brought together in Luxembourg to discuss concrete experiences of statistical data publishers and data consumers.
What is RDF Data Cube?“There are many situations where it would be useful to be able to publish multi-dimensional data, such as statistics, on the web in such a way that it can be linked to related data sets and concepts. The Data Cube vocabulary provides a means to do this using the W3C RDF (Resource Description Framework) standard. The model underpinning the Data Cube vocabulary is compatible with the cube model that underlies SDMX (Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange), an ISO standard for exchanging and sharing statistical data and metadata among organizations. The Data Cube vocabulary is a core foundation which supports extension vocabularies to enable publication of other aspects of statistical data flows or other multi-dimensional data sets.” |
The workshop was split in two sessions. During the first session, publishers of statistical data shared concrete experiences with publishing data as RDF Data Cubes. Among others, the following topics were discussed:
- Problems encountered with non-authoritative publications of data in RDF format and considerations about potential future developments
- The digital-agenda-data repository and visualization tool of DG CONNECT
- The Open Data Communities organisation (UK) with dissemination of statistical indicators
- ISTAT (IT) recent work to publish all last census indicators on a SPARQL endpoint
- ODI pilot project for ONS (UK)
The second session of the workshop focused on the viewpoint of data consumers by discussing data-linking use cases and tools for the reuse of data published on other stores. The following projects were discussed:
- The OpenCube project, which created a "browser" to easily explore statistical data published using the Data Cube vocabulary
- The joint work of the ISA programme, the Publications Office and Eurostat on creating an extension of the DCAT-AP for publishing statistical datasets on open data portals
- The experiments by Eau de Web using the digital-agenda-data visualization tool to explore and visualize statistical data exposed on other SPARQL endpoints
The workshop showed that both from the side of the data publishers and that of data consumers, many challenges still exist. On the publishers’ side, for example, it remains difficult to define the appropriate level of granularity at which data cubes can be defined. A common vocabulary for metadata, which is crucial for machine-readability, is still lacking. Moreover, the creation of an application profile of Data Cube for the Europe would bring much needed guidance and common stability. From the consumption side, many issues were identified with exploiting data cubes. Therefore, there is a clear need for further standardisation and for the development of a user community where experiences and best practices can be exchanged.
For more information, please refer to the workshop report.
City/Location: Brussels