[wdmmg-discuss] Fwd: [uk-government-data-developers] Example sparql queries

Wed Nov 3 13:39:53 UTC 2010

Interesting thread from data.gov.uk list

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dave Reynolds <dave.e.reynolds at gmail.com>
Date: 3 November 2010 12:01
Subject: Re: [uk-government-data-developers] Example sparql queries
To: uk-government-data-developers at googlegroups.com

Hi Chris,

Actually Unit4 aren't doing one data model per customer. They are moving
to use the payments ontology [1] that we developed with LeGSB (Paul
Davidson), LG Group et al. They are going up the linked data learning
curve pretty fast.

To address Tony's question: for payments data sets using this ontology
the stores will contain an instance (or instances) of
payment:PaymentDataset to represent the dataset itself which is where
the metadata can sit. This "should" include descriptive metadata
(DCterms), void metadata (vocabularies used, example resources) and data
cube structural information (the dimensions of the cube etc [2]).

However, by the "finance" store I assume you mean the finance linked
data endpoint currently on data.gov.uk. That pre-dates all the work on
data cubes, payments, reference time and all that. It is a Scovo dataset
and so does have a scovo:Dataset resource [3]. That resource doesn't
seem to have any useful metadata (unless you count the URI itself :))
but it points to observations it contains which you can then follow.
E.g.

DESCRIBE
<http://finance.data.gov.uk/statistics/public-expenditure-statistical-analyses/2009#public-expenditure-on-services-by-function-in-real-terms-1987-88-to-2008-09-V8>

>From that you can see the pattern for observations and start to slice by
e.g. time:

PREFIX rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>
PREFIX xsd: <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#>
PREFIX owl: <http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#>
PREFIX skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#>
PREFIX scovo: <http://purl.org/NET/scovo#>
PREFIX dim: <http://finance.data.gov.uk/statistics/dimension#>
DESCRIBE ?o WHERE { ?o scovo:dimension dim:financial-year-2007-08 . }

Dave

[1] http://reference.data.gov.uk/def/payment documentation for that will
be up somewhere public shortly.

[2]
http://publishing-statistical-data.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/specs/src/main/html/cube.html

[3]
http://finance.data.gov.uk/statistics/public-expenditure-statistical-analyses/2009#public-expenditure-on-services-by-function-in-real-terms-1987-88-to-2008-09

On Tue, 2010-11-02 at 23:56 +0000, Christopher Gutteridge wrote:
> Unit4 who make the software used by a number of council finance systems
> are making their first steps into linked data. I'm going to try and
> encourage them to get places to build a standard pattern then extend it,
> rather than one data model per customer...
>
> Tony Hirst wrote:
> > Hi
> >
> > Are there any example queries on the finance or analytics datastores
> > that serve as "this is the sort of thing the datastore usefully
> > contains" examples, rather than "select ?a ?b c? WHERE { ?a ?b ?c}
> > LIMIT 10 #what do you mean that's not useful?"
> >
> > So for example, on finance, can i see what the budget was for a
> > government department in a given year? OR is that not what;s in the
> > datastore at the moment?
> > For analytics, can I get a report on site visits that maybe hint at
> > the numbers used in the COI Reporting on Progress/gov websites report
> > earlier this year [ http://coi.gov.uk/aboutcoi.php?page=357 ] or is
> > that not what the analytics datastore is about?
> >
> > thanks
> > tony
>

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