Using Citizen Dan for Data Federation

structWSF has been designed explicitly to enable data federation (or "mixing") of the widest variety possible of datasets and dataset formats. Because Citizen Dan and its open semantic framework (OSF) is built centrally around the various structWSF Web services, it makes Citizen Dan an excellent vehicle for federating data as well.

There are a number of perspectives and contexts to view this structWSF data framework. We'll look at both data formats and data exchange:

The basic design has two key data considerations. First, all structWSF tools and Web services and schema work from the canonical RDF data model (center in right bubble). It is the hub and common denominator for all structWSF installations. We are able to design and optimize generic tools and services (including converters) around this canonical framework.

Second, we assume most everything in the outside world to be non-compliant with this canonical model, with the data representations often naïve and incomplete. Converters (also known as translators or RDFizers) are an essential bridge to this external world, and need to be designed for re-use and extensibility.

Where the outside world is compliant, they conform to the structWSF APIs or are themselves structWSF installations. In these cases, direct data exchange and access with permission rights occurs at a dataset level (not shown).

Another common service for this data is to give it unique URI identifiers and to make it Web-accessible, thus turning it into linked data.

Such generic services are possible because the “highest common denominator” for the system is the canonical RDF model. Because it is the consistent basis for tools and services, once a converter is available and the external information schema is mapped to the internal structure, all existing tools and services are available for re-use. Moreover, this system and its datasets are now ready for sharing with other structWSF instances, within the current Citizen Dan instance or beyond.

Out of the box, Citizen Dan supports ingest of datasets in XML, spreadsheet (CSV), JSON (via the irON protocol) and RDF in various serializations. Additional converters may be readily added to the system.

See further the technical documentation on this native data federation capability of structWSF.