ADAPT Collaborates with Ordnance Survey Ireland to Record Ireland’s Geospatial Information as Linked Data on the Web
The ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology and the Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSi) recently signed an agreement to collaborate on a project to serve Ireland’s geospatial information as Linked Data on the Web. The project aims to facilitate easier access to OSi data sets for third parties allowing for more meaningful interactions with the data. The collaboration marks the commencement of ADAPT’s first ‘spokes’ targeted project, a mechanist that enables joint research collaboration aimed at developing innovative technologies to solve industry problems.
How Linked Data combines to form the bigger picture.
In 2014, OSi delivered a newly developed spatial data storage model known as Prime2. With Prime2, OSi moved from a traditional map-centric model towards an object-oriented model from which various types of mapping and data services can be produced. Prime2 and the associated workflows furthermore designed governance practices to cope with evolution of spatial objects in their model. The system currently holds information of over 45,000,000 spatial objects (road segments, buildings, fences, etc.), of which some have more than one geometry representation.
The goal of the project with ADAPT is to demonstrate the possibility of taking the Prime2 model as a basis for publishing OSi’s geospatial data as Linked Data on the Web whilst adhering to best practices in the domain of geospatial information. The adoption of Linked Data enables third parties to explore and consume rich data in a meaningful manner via a combination of simple, standardized technologies (e.g., RDF and URI) that operate over the Web’s existing HTTP infrastructure.
Speaking about the partnership with ADAPT, Lorraine McNerney, General Manager for Geospatial Systems at OSi said: “It is expected as a result of this project that application and web developers will be able to interact with some of OSi’s key data sets and content in more intelligent, exciting and creative ways.”
Next to achieving a sustainable integration with OSi’s current technology stack, challenges in the project include the formulation of an appropriate URI strategy, capturing the provenance of a spatial object’s evolution, and the organization of the different representations of spatial objects.
This project is led in ADAPT by Dr Christophe Debruyne with Professor Declan O’Sullivan and Dr Atul Nautiyal. Eamonn Clinton and Lorraine Mc Nerney are leading the collaboration from OSi.
Download: OSi (2015) Prime2: Data Concepts and Data Model Overview.