To quote Prime Minister Gordon Brown in his opening speech today at the Global Investment Conference 2010 “from today you will be identify centres of excellence at the click of a button”.  Obviously in a general global stage speech, a Prime Minister cannot go in to detail, but he was referring to a project  delivered in super quick time to the UK Government which is launched today – The Research Funding Explorer.

It was less than a month ago when the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) asked us at Talis if we could use the Linked Data Principles and practice demonstrated in our work with data.gov.uk to produce an application to help them with their mission.  Specifically they wanted a way to demonstrate to those looking to invest in the UK, where the centres of excellence are located.

You can’t beat the focus of a fixed delivery date to stimulate innovation.  So when we were asked to not only come up with the the pilot for a real application but also have it ready in two weeks, in time for the preparation of the Prime Minister’s Conference, the team behind it were filled with challenge and trepidation in equal measure – especially as at this time we hadn’t had a close look at the data.

They wanted something that could join the list of applications on the data.gov.uk Apps List and show how Linked Data from several sources could be brought together to deliver real benefit in a way that each source alone could not.   The data originated from organisations such as the the Technology Strategy Board, the Medical Research Council, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and the Intellectual Property Office mostly in the form of large spreadsheets.  The data was extracted from these, transformed in to RDF and loaded in to the Talis Platform utilising URIs for concept which will be compatible with rest of the RDF to be found on data.gov.uk.  With great input from visualisation developers at  Iconomical, the Research Funding Explorer was born.

In the limited time available it was not possible to ingest and display data for all research topics, so for that demonstrate the UK’s investment in leading technologies were chosen: RFID, Advanced Composites, Regenerative Medicine, and Plastic Electronics.  Running the animation on the home page of the site clearly shows the funding hot spots for these topics of UK research.   Zooming in to the map shows the location of the organisations involved. The graph on the visualisation tracking the national cumulative investment in these subjects, overlaid with an indication of the number of patents granted for each.

The obvious wow of this application is the visualisation, but the real power of storing this data in RDF, and using SPARQL to query it,  becomes apparent when you start navigating it via the subjects, regions, and organisations, seamlessly following the associations between them.  For a quick whiz through what the application is capable of, checkout this short screencast:

At the moment the data is all stored within a single Talis Platform store (if you are at home with SPARQL, check it out here), over the next couple of weeks this data will be made available via stores available via data.gov.uk so that it can be used to drive other innovative applications.

This is only a start, but already this project has demonstrated that publishing data as Linked Data in a queryable store can stimulate innovation beyond the ubiquitous demo mashup towards real full-blown applications that can deliver commercial benefit.