Is it possible to write a F# type provider to linked data?

Question

I really like the Freebase and World Bank type providers and I would like to learn more about type providers by writing one on my own. The European Union has an open data program where you can access data through SPARQL/Linked data. Would it be possible to wrap data access to open EU data by means of a type provider or will it be a waste of time trying to figure out how to do it?

Access to EU data is described here: http://open-data.europa.eu/en/linked-data

Answer 1

I think it is certainly possible - I talked with some people who are actually interested in this (and are working on this, but I'm not sure what is the current status). Anyway - I definitely think this is such a broad area that an additional effort would not be a waste of time.

The key problem with writing a type provider for RDF-like data is to decide what to treat as types (what should become a name of a type or a property name) and what should be left as value (returned as a list or key-value pairs). This is quite obvious for WorldBank - names of countries & properties become types (property names) and values become data. But for triple based data set, this is less obvious.

So far, I think there are two approaches:

• Additional ontology - require that the data source comes with some additional ontology that specifies what are the keys for navigation. There is something called "facet ontology" which is used on http://mspace.fm and that might be quite interesting.

• Parameterization - parameterize the type provider (in some way) and give it a list of relations that should become available at the type level (and you would probably also need to provide some root where to start).

There are definitely other possibilities - and I think having provider for linked data would be really interesting. If you wanted to do this for F# Data, there is a useful page on contributing :-).