Creating And Publishing Semantic Metadata About Linked And Open Datasets

The number of open datasets available on the web is increasing rapidly with the rise of the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud and various governmental efforts for releasing public data in various formats, not only in RDF. However, the metadata available for these datasets is often minimal, heterogeneous, and distributed, which makes finding a suitable dataset for a given need problematic. Governmental open datasets are often the basis of innovative applications but the datasets need to be found by the developers first. To address the problem, we present a distributed content creation model and tools for annotating and publishing metadata about linked data and non-RDF datasets on the web. The system DATAFINLAND is based on a modified version of the VoiD vocabulary for describing linked RDF datasets, and uses an online metadata editor SAHA3 connected to ONKI ontology services for annotating contents semantically. The resulting metadata can be published instantly on an integrated faceted search and browsing engine HAKO for human users, as a SPARQL end-point for machine use, and as a source file. As a proof of concept, the system has been applied to LOD and Finnish governmental datasets.