How are you using Ordnance Survey Linked Data?

I might have mentioned (a few times) that the new look Ordnance Survey linked data site is now live. A question I ask from time to time is:

1) Are you using the data, and if so what for (if you don’t mind saying)?

2) Even if you aren’t actively using the data are you linking to it?

Please comment below if you have anything you’d like to share. Thank you in advance!

New Ordnance Survey Linked Data Site not just for Data Geeks

Ordnance Survey’s new linked data site went live today. You can read the official press release here. One of the major improvements to the site is the look and feel of the site, and as a result of this the site should be useful to people who don’t care about ‘scary things’ like APIs, linked data or RDF.

One key additional feature of the new site is map views (!) of entities in the data. This means the site could be useful if you want to share your postcode with friends or colleagues as a means of locating your house or place of work. Every postcode in Great Britain has a webpage in the OS linked data of the form:

http://data.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/id/postcodeunit/{POSTCODE}

Examples of this would be the OS HQ postcode:

http://data.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/id/postcodeunit/SO160AS

or the postcode for the University of Southampton:

http://data.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/id/postcodeunit/SO171BJ

Click on either of these links you’ll see a map of the postcode – which you can view at various levels of zoom. You’ll also see useful information about the postcode such as its lat/long coordinate. More interestingly you’ll notice that it provides information about the ward, district/unitary authority, county (where applicable) and country your postcode is located in. So for the University of Southampton postcode we can see it’s located in the ward Portswood, the district Southampton and the country England.

Another interesting addition to the site is links to a few useful external sites such as: They Work For You, Fix My Street, NHS Choice and Police UK. This hopefully makes the linked data site a useful location based hub to information about what’s going on in your particular postcode area.

Why not give it a try with your postcode…:)

GeoSPARQL and Ordnance Survey Linked Data

The Ordnance Survey Linked Data contains lots of qualitative spatial information – that is topological relationships between different regions. We have information about what each region contains, is within and touches (e.g. Cambridgeshire touches Norfolk). These relationships were encoded using an Ordnance Survey vocabulary as there was nothing suitable at the time. Since then a new standard has emerged from the OGC called GeoSPARQL. In the long term we would probably like to migrate the OS data over to the GeoSPARQL standard, but to stop third party applications using the data from breaking we decided not to on this release. However, mappings from the OS vocabulary have been made to the GeoSPARQL vocabulary via ‘owl:equivalentProperty’. So each of the spatial relationships now have a link to their equivalent in GeoSPARQL. Please see: contains, within, touches, equals, disjoint and partially overlaps for more details on which properties they are related to in GeoSPARQL.

 

Ordnance Survey Linked Data and the Reconciliation API

The new Ordnance Survey Linked Data has a reconciliation API that allows users to turn text into URIs by matching against the Ordnance Survey linked data using a tool called open refine.

I’m not an expert on open refine but had a quick try of the tool today using some open data about libraries (available here). Instructions on installing Open Refine can be found here.

To use the Open Refine load your data into the tool and create your new project. On loading the library data into Open Refine you should see something like this:

We can use Open Refine to turn the labels in both the ‘county’ column and postcode column into URIs. For the county column click the down arrow next the column name and select reconcile -> start reconciling. Now click ‘Add Standard Service’ and add the following URL http://beta.data.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/datasets/boundary-line/apis/reconciliation. 

As the ‘county’ column will contain a mixture of types select the ‘reconcile against no particular type’ option and click ‘start reconciling’. You should now see that most of the text labels have turned to hyperlinks (note OS linked data does not included Northern Ireland data…this accounts for the missing values).

You can do the same for the postcode column, but this time use the API at: http://beta.data.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/datasets/code-point-open/apis/reconciliation

Your data should now look something like:

You have now successfully replaced the text in these columns with links to the OS linked data.

Another useful thing to try is a simple bit of geocoding based on postcodes. Again go to the postcode column and select “Edit Column -> Add Column by fetching URLs’. Where asked type in a column name (e.g. PC JSON) and in the Expression box type:

‘http://beta.data.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/datasets/code-point-open/apis/search?output=json&query=’ + escape(value,’url’)

You should now see a column appear full of JSON results:

On the PC JSON column select “Edit Column -> Add Column Based on this column”. Again add a column name of your choice. I wanted to extract the value of the easting and northing and add it as a column so I called my new column ‘easting,northing’. In the expression box enter the following to get the value of the easting and northing:

with(value.parseJson(), pair, pair.results[0].easting + ‘,’ + pair.results[0].northing)

and you should now see something like:

Congratulations…you have now geo-coded your libary spreadsheet via a postcode and the OS linked data.

For more info on how to use Open Refine for reconciliation watch this youtube video.

Announcing new beta Ordnance Survey Linked Data Site

Ordnance Survey has released a new beta linked data site. You can read the official press release here.

I thought I’d write a quick (unofficial) guide to some of the changes. The most obvious one that is hopefully apparent as you navigate round the site is the much improved look and feel of the site. Including maps (!) showing where particular resources are located. Try this and this for example. Maps can be viewed at different levels of zoom.

Another improvement is the addition of new APIs. The first of these is an improved search function. Supported fields for search and some examples can be found here. The search API now includes a spatial search element.

The SPARQL API is improved. Output is now available in additional formats (such as CSV) as well as the usual SPARQL-XML and SPARQL-JSON. Example SPARQL queries are also included to get users started.

Another interesting addition is a new reconciliation API. This allows developers to use the Ordnance Survey linked data with the Open Refine tool. This would allow a user to match a list of postcodes or place names in a spreadsheet to URIs in the Ordnance Survey linked data.

In the new release the Ordnance Survey linked data has been split into distinct datasets. You could use the above described APIs with the complete dataset or, if preferred, just work on the Code-Point Open or Boundary Line datasets.

For details on where to send feedback on the new site please see the official press release here.

Update: I blogged a bit more about some of the new APIs here.

My Family Tree Linked Data Resurrected with some RAGLD Help

I’ve been looking for a new home for my family tree linked data since the Talis Store holding the data was turned off.  A new (temporary) home has been found thanks to the RAGLD project. RAGLD is all about creating simple tools and services to allow people to publish and consume linked data. One of these simple RAGLD services is a linked data publishing platform. I have moved my Family Tree linked data onto a RAGLD service for the time being. You can find the service here. The service still needs some polish, but it works well as a very simple platform for publishing linked data. For more information on how that works be sure to check the RAGLD website, or follow RAGLD on Twitter.

Meanwhile here is a SPARQL endpoint and here are some example URIs: my grandfather and I.

So long and thanks for all the triplestores…

Not the most exciting of updates this one. A number of the linked data hacks I have built over on my homepage were powered by Talis services. It’s old news now that Talis have focused their efforts elsewhere and as a result a lot of my linked data applications (including my family tree linked data) no longer work. I’m currently considering other options at the moment such as running my own triplestores in the cloud using Apache Jena or Stardog Community Edition, or possibly using the EasyRDF library. Watch this space…

Meanwhile I’d just like to say a bit thank you to the folks at Talis (and ex-Talis folks) for letting me use their services to experiment – it was fun while it lasted