By a mile the highlight of last week or so was the 2nd Linked Data meet-up. Silver and Georgi did a great job of organising the day and I came away with a real sense that not only are we on the cusp of seeing a lot of data on the web but also that the UK is at the centre of this particular revolution. All very exciting.

For my part I presented the work we’ve been doing on Wildlife Finder – how we’re starting to publish and consume data on the web. Ed Summers has a great write up of what we’re doing I’ve also published my slides here:

I also joined Paul Miller, Jeni Tennison, Ian Davis and Timo Hannay on a panel session discussing Linked Data in the enterprise.

In terms of Wildlife Finder there are a few things that I wanted to highlight:

1. If you’re interested in the RDF and how we’re modelling the data we’ve documented the wildlife ontology here. In addition to the ontology itself we’ve also included some background on why we modelled the information in the way we have.
2. If you want to get you’re hands on the RDF/XML then either add .rdf to the end of most of our URLs (more on this later) or configure your client to request RDF/XML – we’ve implemented content negotiation so you’ll just get the data.
3. But… we’ve not implemented everything just yet. Specifically the adaptations aren’t published as RDF – this is because we’re making a few changes to the structure of this information and I didn’t want to publish the data and then change it. Nor have we published information on the species conservation status that’s simply because we’ve not finish yet (sorry).
4. It’s not all RDF – we are also marking-up our taxa pages with the species microformat which gives more structure to the common and scientific names.

Anyway I hope you find this useful.