OpenUp® Platform

What is the OpenUp^® Platform?

The OpenUp® Platform is a collection of integrated cloud based services available as Software as a Service (SaaS) allowing fast deployment at a reasonable cost. Together, the services provide a highly scalable and resilient platform that allows you to harvest, enrich, store and make your data available for querying.

• Data harvesting

Our harvesting system can pull data from the web or from supplied files and provides an increasingly sophisticated means of controlling the acquisition of data.

For example it is possible to schedule data collection at a predetermined time each day, or, as another example, it is also possible to throttle the level of requests so that a system is not overloaded. We can work with you to create a harvesting system that works for your data.

• Data Enrichment Service (DES)

If you are handling mainly unstructured text that you know has information hidden away inside it, then the Data Enrichment Service available as part of the OpenUp® services will help you to get at that information. It does this by ‘extracting’ useful items of information, such as peoples’ names, organisations or places. The extracted information can be made available in a variety of formats to suit the requirements of the user.

One of the formats that is available is RDF/XML. This information can then be stored in the RDF store making it available for querying. The combination of extraction and RDF store provides a powerful approach to maximising the information potential of documents.

• RDF store

Our datastore offering is built around 5Store, a highly scalable, clustered, commercial database storage and query engine that hosts RDF data. 5Store was designed and developed by Garlik, leaders in semantic technology. TSO’s RDF store is designed to scale to well over a trillion triples.

We provide a number of standards based data access and query options including SPARQL for easy integration with new and existing applications.

• Making your data available for re-use

From the RDF store, the data can be disseminated to third parties via APIs and through SPARQL endpoints. The RDF can be consumed on its own or used to develop creative new products such as mash-ups, aggregating information from various sources and presented as graphical representations.

• Web Development and Hosting

Having opened up your data, we can also help to develop and host the resulting web applications. We can create websites and host them with our website hosting service, certified to ISO 27001 Information Security Standard.

• Scalability and Resilience

At the heart of the OpenUp® is the ability to scale – and to do so in a resilient manner. The OpenUp® services can be expanded at all levels so if you have particular needs then we can expand that part of the system. If required, we can provide dedicated hardware for you for those parts of the system where you need that extra level of performance.

In addition the OpenUp® services will provide geographic failover so that, in the event of disaster at one data centre there is the reassurance that downtime will be minimal.

• Provenance

Provenance is at the heart of the OpenUp® services and gives you reassurance that you know what has happened to the data. This ensures that each stage of the process can be audited, throughout the lifecycle of the data.

Professional services

We can provide the appropriate level of assistance to organisations to help them make content available as Linked Data. We can provide advice and guidance to organisations who have not yet embarked on these initiatives. We can also provide a complete end-to-end service including data modelling, RDF conversion, API creation and RDF hosting.

For others who may have already converted their data to RDF, we can provide just the RDF hosting via our RDF store and SPARQL end point set up or API creation.

For those who have already created Linked Data services, TSO provide Flint, our SPARQL query editor, which is free to use. Find out more at http://openuplabs.tso.co.uk/demos

We have a team of talented developers who make full use of the wide range of OpenUp® services to help you to capture, transform and deliver your data in the most efficient way. We have already delivered a range of projects for our clients including the creation of APIs to access Linked Data.

Semantic tool support

TSO can also develop tools to enable Semantic workflows. TSO's team of developers contribute back to the community by working on Open source projects such as Flint which is free to use by all organisations.

An evolving system

This system is currently evolving and new features are being added. Potential developments may include:

• Push data into the system
• Push data to other systems as new data arrives
• A suite of management tools

Find out more

To find out more about how TSO can help to create and enrich data, visit http://openup.tso.co.uk

To discuss your requirements with one of our experts please email opendata@tso.co.uk
 
TSO is an approved supplier on the Government Procurement Services Framework for Data Conversion and Migration Services and eDiscovery Solutions.

TSO has also been awarded a place on the Environmental Agency Framework for Building Capacity in the provision of Linked Data - this Framework will become available for other public sector bodies.