When data meets the enterprise. How we turned a merger of organisations into a confluence of information.
Koen Van Daele, Maarten Vermeyen, Sophie Mortier, Leen Meganck
Abstract In 2012 Flanders Heritage Agency was created as a central agency dealing with immovable cultural heritage - broadly defined as archaeology, built heritage and cultural landscapes - in Flanders. Prior to this, tasks of this agency were carried out by several independent agencies. The merger created a very heterogenous set of business processes, IT-components and systems. This, together with a new heritage legislation, prompted a re-evaluation of these systems and their business processes.
This paper will delve into our system architecture, built on a core separation of concerns between data driven applications and proces driven applications. We will explain how we came to implement this in a service oriented architecture . We will detail how and why we chose to go with REST services instead of SOAP services.
The resource oriented focus of REST services has served us well in creating inter-linking datasources that are firmly grounded in the world wide web and the HTTP protocol. We will demonstrate how we link these resources by using cool URI's. While a majority of our links are between the resources we create and maintain ourselves, we will also look at how we interact with external resources and services when it comes to specific domains such as vocabularies and GIS.
Finally we will look at how we are further enhancing our data by more formally publishing it through the use of semantic technologies such as RDF. We aim to create truly linked open data in this way. We will look at some of the stumbling blocks we have encoutered along the way. The most significant one to date being the clash between open data and privacy regulations and how to implement access control on linked data.
