Data access linking and integration with DALI: Building a safety net for an ocean of city data

Abstract

DALI is a practical system that exploits Linked Data to provide federated entity search and spatial exploration across hundreds of information sources containing Open and Enterprise data pertaining to cities, which are stored in tabular files or in their original enterprise systems. Our system is able to lift data into a meaningful linked structure with explicit semantics, and support novel contextual search and retrieval tasks by identifying related entities across models and data sources. We evaluate in two pilot scenarios. In the first, data-engineers bring together public and enterprise datasets about public safety. In the second, knowledge-engineers and domain-experts, build a view of health and social care providers for vulnerable populations. We show that our approach can re-use data assets and provides better results than pure text-based approaches in finding relevant information, as well as satisfying specific information needs.