Following the worldwide trend of Open Government Data as well as Linked (Open) Data, REEEP launched in cooperation with our implementation partner “Semantic Web Company” the new reegle data portal today. On data.reegle.info you now can find data on stakeholders in the clean energy area as well as (energy) country profiles. This is just the first step, currently we are working on providing all data of reegle’s renewable energy and energy efficiency thesaurus for public re-use and we are plannign to continuously open up and provide more and more clean energy data on data.reegle.info.
The idea of providing raw data (first mentioned by Sir Tim Berners Lee in the course of the W3C LinkedData movement) for free and unrestricted re-use perfectly fits into reegle’s idea and objectives to act as a single point of access for worldwide clean energy data (renewable energy as well as energy efficiency).
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
What is Linked Open Data?
(see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_Data and http://linkeddata.org/)
The term Linked Data refers to a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the Web. Key technologies that support Linked Data are URIs (a generic means to identify entities or concepts in the world), HTTP (a simple yet universal mechanism for retrieving resources, or descriptions of resources), and RDF (a generic graph-based data model with which to structure and link data that describes things in the world).
Simply saying: Linked Data is about using the Web to connect related data that wasn’t previously linked, or using the Web to lower the barriers to linking data currently linked using other methods. More specifically, Wikipedia defines Linked Data as “a term used to describe a recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs and RDF.”
LOD-Could: Source http://richard.cyganiak.de
The LOD Cloud (see figure above) develops into a new key player in the market of the modern content industry – for example New York times (http://data.nytimes.com/) is publishing all their data to the LOD Cloud. Further key players are BBC, Eurostat, DBPedia (= Wikipedia Data), US Census Data and the World Factbook, u.v.m. Also several governments and international organisations started to publish their data as linked open data. USA (http://www.data.gov/) and UK (http://data.gov.uk/) are early adopters and leading in this area.
Linked Open Data on reegle:
data.reegle.info follows W3C standards and recommendations for Linked Open Data as well as Open Government Data, and is implemented under the the Open Government Data License for public sector information licence.
For developers we have created a comprehensive developer guide as well as a SPARQL endpoint as the central API to the reegle.info data.
As the field of Linked Open Data / Open Government Data (Linked Government Data) is very innovative we would like to ask you for your feedback on data.reegle.info – please let us know what is useful for you and what could be useful in the future as well as if you have any problems with the system and / or any suggestions for optimisation!
Many thanks in advance!
We do hope that data.reegle.info initiates a lot of new (data) mash ups as well as innovative apps using data.reegle.info and also people that re-use the provided data for their daily work in the clean energy business!
Btw: Next week we (REEEP and our implementation partner “Semantic Web Company“) will be at the Open Government Data Camp 2010 in London and showcase data.reegle.info at the streetmarket … hope to see some of you there.
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