This is the website for the pilot project SODA, Semantic Online Data Access. SODA is a web software component that manages data and metadata, providing utilities to both upload data to a relational database and download data to a format conducive for statistical analysis. This software is being designed to work with the Semantic Web, specifically a Linked Data resource.
SODA is a stand-alone product, but can run in conjunction with a Content Management System (CMS). This website is built with Drupal.
Overview
Sun, 03/11/2007 - 13:53 — dwaetjenLarge amounts of data are produced each second; the challenge that many organizations face is how to provide quick and easy access to this data while ensuring the data is in a safe and flexible format. The web is a convenient way to distribute data. SODA attempts to make that job easier by providing a tool which sits between a distributed databases and the Internet, producing a generic query interface to these datasources. Additionally, it manages the metadata, and uses global parameters to represent the data (called primitives) to semantically identify what is being stored. It can produce output to the screen for viewing, or create a flat file that can be downloaded and easily imported into your favorite statistical package. It provides a template-based datafile upload mechanism so repositories are easy to maintain as new data is collected.
Why "Semantic"?
Fri, 03/09/2007 - 21:32 — dwaetjenThe 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.
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