Semantic Online Data Access

Attempts to setup a good web-based identifiers for each objects in SODA. These URLs will provide a standardized way of handling viewing, editing, adding, and deleting SODA objects from the database. In this case, the Drupal CMS is handling the appropriate security to display these pages to authorized users, especially for the but pages that modify the content. The for viewing purposes, and accessibility to the encoded version of these formats (e.g. the RDF version of the Dublin Core record generated), a standardize schema is helpful.

Note that these URL's (for viewing) can be stored in the Dublin Core identifier field as they will be unique, especially since it includes the hostname (in this case, soda.ucdavis.edu/actual).

View

• soda.ucdavis.edu/actual -- view overall status of soda, including some summary stats
• soda.ucdavis.edu/actual/datasource/view -- view all datasources in a table

This page tracks changes between versions of SODA. This file will be updated periodically, and may eventually become a part of the Handbook. This is a place the information is being collected. It will list architectural restructuring, source code revisions, and backend database structure changes. The format will be somewhat loose.

Version 0.3.0

API incompatible with 0.2.0. There were so many design changes, it is easier to enforce a superior interface than propagate previous poor design choices.

Improved class design, with a core and ui version of the standard classes (station, primitives, events, ...).

Moved most code into classes. More careful when classes are loaded to minimize the size of the necessary information extraction. May not be optimized yet, but much better than 0.2.0.

Altitude and depth added and made an optional key.

Additional tables added for client databases:
* provenance (log)
* primitives
* upload history

The word 'semantic' is charged with meaning, no pun intended. This weblog will attempt to discern its meaning in relation to this project, and describe some of the implications. Yes, it is a buzz word that people use in a wide variety of contexts, and SODA likely adds to this feeling of word-overuse and overall confusion. But in the end, it is just a word, and we feel this word does capture the spirit of this project, and have decided to use it!

Through SODA's ontology, we are providing a standardized way of representing datasets. SODA ontology has a direct translation to the online data that his holds, so a system should be able to process this ontology and be able to query from that data source, through SODA. The encoding of these data sources, using it's metadata, also provides the semantic seach tools, like Swoogle, to search for these online datasets with greater accuracy.

In constructing both this site and SODA, I am experimenting using various Internet tools and methods. I have started this 'blog' not really wanting people to see my comments, but wanting a handy place to write down ideas and things relating to this work. So the technique I'm using right now is called the 'Modified Blogging Technique' (MBT for short), which is imply a fancy name for a weblog that has been edited numerous times until the text is used elsewhere... technique.

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other site info
http://www.rdfabout.com/demo/census/
http://esw.w3.org/topic/SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenD...

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Adding a single site at a time can take a long time, if you already have a full list of stations in a delimited format. This page helps add a list of sites and associates them to an existing data source.