Developer:RDF

RDF Documentation

myExperiment's RDF is delivered following the principles of Linked Data. Linked Data is a way of interconnecting data published on the web that has not been previously linked.

Every myExperiment entity, whether it be a Workflow, Pack, User, Group, etc. has its own Non-Information Resource (NIR) URI to identify it. This URI can also be used in a HTTP request where the header's accept parameter is set to an appropriate MIME type to retrieve data about it in one of up to three different formats, HTML, RDF and XML. This is done through a process called Content Negotiation, which redirects to an explicit URL for that particular format. E.g.

   * wget --header "Accept: text/html" http://www.myexperiment.org/workflows/16 → http://www.myexperiment.org/workflows/16.html
   * wget --header "Accept: application/rdf+xml" http://www.myexperiment.org/workflows/16 → http://www.myexperiment.org/workflows/16.rdf
   * wget --header "Accept: application/xml" http://www.myexperiment.org/workflows/16 → http://www.myexperiment.org/workflows/16.xml

If you are using an application that does not allow you to specify parameters of the HTTP request you can use the explicit URL for the different formats to retrieve data in that format.

To make myExperiment's RDF truly Linked Data it must link in with other Linked Data projects. These links can either be from myExperiment, to myExperiment or a link created by a third party linking myExperiment and another Linked Data project. Currently myExperiment has only a couple of links out to other Linked Data projects but now that the infrastructure for Linked Data is in place it should be possible to add further links both to and from myExperiment.

Ontology

The structure of myExperiment RDF is defined by a ontology modules that can be assembled to build the complete myExperiment Ontology. This is a set of modules that borrows classes/properties from FOAF, SIOC, Dublin Core, Creative Commons and OAI-ORE, that can be assembled to build a comprehensive specification for the myExperiment data model. An auto-generated specification document for the ontology is also available. A ChangeLog is also maintained for the ontology.

SPARQL Endpoint

All myExperiment's public RDF data can queried using the query language SPARQL at myExperiment's SPARQL Endpoint. An introduction to SPARQL with a guide to querying myExperiment RDF is available here.

Vocabulary of Interlinked Datasets (VoID)

A description of myExperiment RDF is specified in voiD. One thing voiD encourages is the publication of RDF datasets so they can easily be reused by others rather than having to crawl each NIR for its RDF. All of myExperiment's Public RDF can be downloaded as a gzipped file.