1. Converting WHO’s Global
Health Observatory Data to
RDF
Amrapali Zaveri, PhD student
August
27,
2012
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2. Outline
• Background
• What is the RDF Data Cube Vocabulary?
• Semi-automated approach
• OntoWiki's CSVImport plug-in
• RDFized GHO data
• Limitations and Future Work
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3. 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/
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4. What is the RDF Data Cube
Vocabulary?
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5. What is the RDF Data Cube
Vocabulary?
• Dimensions
• Attributes
• Measures
• Observations
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6. 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

7. 1. Create Knowledge Base
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8. 2. Import a CSV file
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9. 3. Define dimensions
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10. 4. Define data range
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11. 5. Save template, extract triples
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12. 6. Re-use template for similar files
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13. 7. View resources
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14. 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 .
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15. 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
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16. Limitations and Future Work
• Conversion
• Coherence
• Temporal Comparability
• Exploring GHO
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17. Thank You!
Questions?
http://aksw.org/AmrapaliZaveri
zaveri@informatik.uni-leipzig.de
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