icegov2012 proceedings

more and more valuable with the growing amounts of linked data
and mappings between linked data resources on the Web.
As a concrete example, consider the faceted browsing interface
for IOGDS. One of the facets for IOGDS is the country of origin
for the data catalog. However, consider a case where a user is
interested in continent of origin for a dataset instead of country of
origin. IOGDS use DBPedia 2 URIs in its country of origin
metadata for dataset catalogs. An external source of continental
data, with mappings from continents to DBPedia URIs for
countries on those continents, can be used to populate a facet for
continents. The Web service abstraction layer in S2S handles the
transformation (using vocabulary mappings) from continents to
countries.
We have implemented this behavior in an ad hoc way for a
biological and chemical oceanography data catalog [3]. We used
mappings from catalog specific dataset parameters to an external
source of parameter categories. This enabled a more abstract
facet for data products that could be used by a broader community
of users. We are currently creating a generic architecture that
supports “facet mappings” at the abstract Web service layer in
S2S.
2.2 S2S Presentation Framework for
Localization and Context
S2S provides a presentation framework for developing UI
widgets. Widgets can be created to support facet constraint and
presentation of results in a UI. There are a number of ways to
leverage this presentation framework to improve the accessibility
of government dataset search interfaces such as IOGDS.
One of those options is to provide a widget that performs
localization of the information based on settings in the browser.
Going back to the countries facet example, before a user is
presented with facet options in the countries facet, the localization
widget could make a request to DBPedia to retrieve a humanreadable
label for the user’s localization settings. As such, an
English user would see “United States” in the countries facet, and
a French user would be presented with “États-Unis.” This same
sort of localization could occur in other facets, such as dataset
categories, assuming there was some external source of this
localization data. Localization at the UI layer can reduce
redundancy in required metadata for open government datasets by
leveraging the vast corpus of linked data already available on the
Web. It also adds value to dataset catalog service providers who
adopt localizable vocabularies (with little added effort).
Another option is to use the presentation framework to provide
different kinds of context for the search. For instance, instead of
presenting the countries facet as a list of options, the information
could be presented as a heat map where countries with available
datasets are highlighted more brightly. There are numerous ways
presentation “widgets” can be designed to help contextualize the
search experience. Providing this kind of context will enable
users to gain broader insights about open government data in
addition to enabling the discovery of individual datasets.
2 DBPedia, http://dbpedia.org/
481
Figure 1: A screenshot of the IOGDS faceted browsing
interface. In this example, the user first constrained his
search with the term “asthma”, and is presented with a
variety of facet values representing the remaining results.
3. CONCLUSION
We have discussed some of the current directions in IOGDS to
help improve discovery and accessibility of open government
datasets. Documentation on S2S framework can be found on the
Web at http://tw.rpi.edu/web/project/sesf/workinggroups/s2s.
You can also try out the IOGDS faceted browsing interface at
http://logd.tw.rpi.edu/demo/international_dataset_catalog_search.
4. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The work on the S2S Framework has been supported by the
Semantic eScience Framework project in the Tetherless World
Constellation at RPI, NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure award
number OCI-0943761. Partial funding for the work on IOGDS
has been provided by a gift from Microsoft Research to the
Tetherless World Constellation at RPI.
5. REFERENCES
[1] E. Prud’hommeaux and A. Seaborne, SPARQL Query
Language for RDF, W3C Recommendation, 15 Jan. 2008.
http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/
[2] J. Erickson, E. Rozell, Y. Shi, J. Zheng, L. Ding, J. Hendler.
2011. TWC International Open Government Dataset Catalog.
In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on
Semantic Systems (I-Semantics '11), Chiara Ghidini, Axel-
Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo, Stefanie Lindstaedt, and Tassilo
Pellegrini (Eds.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 227-229.
[3] Rozell, E., Wang, H., West, P., Zednik, S., Fox, P. (2011),
Configurable User Interface Framework for Data Discovery
in Cross-Disciplinary and Citizen Science, Abstract
EGU2012-12859 presented at General Assembly 2012, EGU,
Vienna, Austria, 22-27 April