Winnipeg City’s NOW [Data] Portal

Frederick Giasson

The Winnipeg City’s NOW (Neighbourhoods Of Winnipeg) Portal is an initiative to create a complete neighbourhood web portal for its citizens. At the core of the project we have a set of about 47 fully linked, integrated and structured datasets of things of interests to Winnipegers. The focal point of the portal is Winnipeg’s 236 neighbourhoods, which define the main structure of the portal. The portal has six main sections: topics of interests, maps, history, census, images and economic development. The portal is meant to be used by citizens to find things of interest in their neibourhood, to learn their history, to see the images of the things of interest, to find tools to help economic development, etc.

The NOW portal is not new; Structured Dynamics was also its main technical contractor for its first release in 2013. However we just finished to help Winnipeg City’s NOW team to migrate their older NOW portal from OSF 1.x to OSF 3.x and from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7; we also trained them on the new system. Major improvements accompany this upgrade, but the user interface design is essentially the same.

The first thing I will do is to introduce each major section of the portal and I will explain the main features of each. Then I will discuss the new improvements of the portal.

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Configuring and Using the OSF Search API (Screencast)

Frederick Giasson

In this screencast, I will show you how you can leverage the semantic power of the OSF Search endpoint into Drupal using OSF for Drupal. You will see how you can configure the OSF SearchAPI module, how you can turn any property into a filtering facet and how you can display the facets into blocks.

Then I will briefly show you how you can create new search results templates and how the template selection works using type inference.

Finally I will show you how you can enable and disable inference in the search feature, and how you can leverage the semantic structure of your data to change the relevancy of the search results returned. You have all the leisure to boost different characteristics of your data to return more relevant results to your users.

 


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Specifying Field Widgets for OSF Entities Fields (Screencast)

Frederick Giasson

In this screencast, I will show you how you can use ontologies to specify the field types to use for the classes and properties we map into Drupal using OSF Entities mapping process. Once the field types will be configured for each Datatype property, I will run the mapping process to generate new fields that will use the configured field types. Once done, I will show you the impact of this configuration into the fields and fields instances that are being created into Drupal.

The second part of this screencast focus on the configuration of the field widgets that are being used by each field. Then I will update a few entities using the new forms. I will tell you how you can modify the form by re-ordering the fields, by changing their titles or other configuration options such as their cardinality.

OSF Entities supports the following 18 field types and 34 field widgets.

 


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Exporting Entities using OSF for Drupal (Screencast)

Frederick Giasson

This screencast will introduce you to the OSF for Drupal features that let you export Drupal Entities in one of the following supported serializations:

  • RDF+XML (RDF in XML)
  • RDF+N3 (RDF in N3)
  • structJSON (Internal OSF RDF serialization in JSON)
  • structXML (Internal OSF RDF serialization in XML)
  • ironJSON (irON serialization in JSON)
  • commON (CSV serialization to be used in spreadsheet applications)

I will show you how you can use OSF for Drupal to export entire datasets of Entities, or how to export Entities individually. You will see how you can configure Drupal such that different users roles get access to these functionalities.

I will also briefly discuss how you can create new converters to support more data formats.

Finally, I will show you how Drupal can be used as a linked data platform with a feature that makes every Drupal Entities dereferencable on the Web1. You will see how you can use cURL to export the Entities‘ descriptions using their URI in one of the 6 supported serialization formats.


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  1. OSF for Drupal follows the Cool URIs for the Semantic Web W3C’s interest group notes ↩

Configuring and Using OSF Ontology (Screencast)

Frederick Giasson

This screencast will quickly introduce you to ontologies, and will explain you what are their rules in the Open Semantic Framework (OSF).

You will see how you can manage ontologies in OSF using the OSF for Drupal web interface. You will be able to import, create, update, delete and export ontologies. You will see how you can search within imported ontologies, how you can manage their permissions.

Finally you will see how you can manage the ontologies themselves: how you can create, update and delete classes, properties and named individuals using the Web user interface.


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