Converting GHO to RDF

Converting WHO’s Global Health Observatory Data to

RDF

Amrapali Zaveri, PhD student

August  27,  2012

1

Outline

• Background• What is the RDF Data Cube Vocabulary?• Semi-automated approach• OntoWiki's CSVImport plug-in• RDFized GHO data• Limitations and Future Work

2

Background• Biomedical statistical data

• Published as Excel sheets• Advantage

• Readable by humans• Disadvantages

• Cannot be queried efficiently• Difficult to integrate with other data (in different formats)

• Our approach• Converting data into a single data model - RDF• Using the RDF Data Cube Vocabulary*• designed particularly to represent multidimensional

statistical data using RDF.

*http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-data-cube/

3

What is the RDF Data Cube Vocabulary?

4

What is the RDF Data Cube Vocabulary?

• Dimensions• Attributes• Measures• Observations

5

Semi-automated approach• Transforming CSV to RDF in a fully automated way is not

feasible.• Dimensions may often be encoded in heading or

label of a sheet• Our semi-automatic approach:

• As a plug-in in OntoWiki#• a semantic collaboration platform developed by

the AKSW research group.• A CSV file is converted into RDF using the RDF

Data Cube Vocabulary: http://aksw.org/Projects/Stats2RDF

# Sören Auer, Sebastian Tramp (geb. Dietzold), Jens Lehmann, and Thomas Riechert: OntoWiki: A Tool for Social Semantic Collaboration In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Social and Collaborative Construction of Structured Knowledge CKC 2007 at the 16th International World Wide Web Conference WWW2007 Banff, Canada, May 8, 2007 6

1. Create Knowledge Base

7

2. Import a CSV file

8

3. Define dimensions

9

10

4. Define data range

5. Save template, extract triples

11

6. Re-use template for similar files

12

7. View resources

13

RDFized GHO data

gho:Country rdfs:subClassOf qb:DimensionProperty; rdf:type rdfs:Class; rdfs:label "Country" .

gho:Disease rdfs:subClassOf qb:DimensionProperty; rdf:type rdfs:Class; rdfs:label "Disease" .

gho: Afghanistan rdf:type ex:Country; rdfs:label "Afghanistan" .

gho:Tuberculosis rdf:type ex:Disease; rdfs:label "Tuberculosis" .

gho:c1-r6 rdf:type qb:Observation;rdf:value "127"^^xsd:integer;qb:dimension gho:Afghanistan;qb:dimension gho:Tuberculosis .

14

RDFized GHO data

• Available at http://gho.aksw.org

• 50 datasets

• ~ 8 million triples

• Paper published at SWJ Call for Dataset descriptions: http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/content/publishing-and-interlinking-global-health-observatory-dataset

15

Limitations and Future Work• Conversion

• Coherence

• Temporal Comparability

• Exploring GHO

16

Thank You!

Questions?

17

http://aksw.org/AmrapaliZaveri

[email protected]