Tools

Twine

Twine is a modular, queue-driven workflow engine for publishing linked open data.

Twine receives messages via the AMQP message queue protocol, processes them (translating to RDF), and pushes them into a store using SPARQL.

Although Twine includes some XSLT-based transformation capability out of the box, the intention is that users of Twine will develop their own processing modules to suit their particular workflows.

Quilt

Quilt is a modular front-end for publishing Linked Open Data.

Quilt powers the API of the Research & Education Space, as well as endpoints where we are publishing data ourselves. It is implemented primarily as a FastCGI applications (and so can be used with various different web servers) and includes engines for generating pages based upon graph queries from SPARQL servers and serving the contents of Turtle files in a directory.

Quilt itself performs content negotiation and will serve the various serialisations supported by librdf. A plug-in module included in the source tree, and used by the Research & Education Space, allows HTML to generated based upon a subset of the Liquid templating language.

Linked Open Data extension for Chrome

This is an extension for Google Chrome that looks for the presence of Linked Open Data behind the pages that you browse and reveals it if available.

Note that currently this must be installed as an “unpacked extension” using Chrome’s developer mode.

Datasets

As part of our development of the Research & Education Space, we are also publishing some Open Data, which will be incorporated into the platform.

BBC Broadcast Billings Data

This dataset publishes information about BBC broadcasts shortly after they end, as Linked Open Data. The dataset currently has coverage back to 2007. Over time we hope to extend both the services and the time period covered.

This set has been published primarily to ensure that the Research & Education Space includes information about these programmes, and can collate information about where playable versions of them can be accessed and by whom.

This dataset does not contain a great deal of descriptive metadata (such as synopses, genres and subject classifications), but does include technical metadata about broadcasts and, where it can be included, mappings to identifiers for programmes and services from other data sources.