ENSEMBLE

Iestyn Pryce is a 2nd year Engineering student at Cambridge. He intends to specialise in Information and Computer Engineering. Iestyn has been a UROP student at Caret with the Ensemble Project over the summer vacation this year, and he has developed a new RDF-izer called ‘Gwybodaeth’ (the Welsh word for ‘knowledge’).

“Gwybodaeth is a set of Perl classes for conversion of data into RDF. It is utility to convert data which isn’t semantic into nice, RDF-ized semantic data” says Iestyn. “It is designed to be modular and extensible because there are n-types of non-semantic data out there, so it was designed so that other people could easily add small bits to the program, so that they can convert from whatever format they have in to RDF”.

What sets Gwybodaeth apart from other existing RDF-izers is the ability to preserve namespaces, allowing data mapping, whilst being a simple to use, user-friendly web service. Iestyn says, “Maps are incredibly useful. Not only do they mean that you don’t have to change your data beforehand, it also means that you can have things like logic.”

Users within the University of Cambridge can use Gwybodaeth as a web service at http://gwybodaeth.caret.cam.ac.uk/. Gwybodaeth has also been released as an open-source application this week at the CPAN - click here to visit its webpage.

For further information:

• Read the Gwybodaeth documentation
• Get Gwybodaeth at the CPAN
• Github

The two linked ESRC students have begun work on the Ensemble Project. Their projects will complement and extend the work of the main project.

Nicola Beddall joins the project from Heythrop College London and will be based at City University, London, working on her project ‘Information visualisations as boundary objects? An actor-network theory approach to understanding HCI design’ under the supervision of Jonathan Raper, Uma Patel and Frank Webster.

Sanna Rimpilainen who has been working on the Applied Education Research Scheme at Strathclyde University will be based at the University of Stirling and working, under the supervision of Richard Edwards and Patrick Carmichael, on her project: ‘Fluid objects? An actor-network theory approach to studying cases and contexts in higher education’.