Using RDF to Describe and Link Social Science Data to Related Resources on the Web

Abstract

This document focuses on how best to relate Resource Description Framework (RDF)-described datasets to other related resources and objects (publications, geographies, organizations, people, etc.) in the Semantic Web. This includes a description of what would be needed to make these types of relationships most useful, including which RDF vocabularies should be used, potential link predicates, and possible data sources. RDF provides a good model for describing social science data because it supports formal semantics that provide a dependable basis for reasoning about the meaning of an RDF expression. In particular, it supports defined notions of entailment which provide a basis for defining reliable rules of inference in RDF data. Our findings are discussed in the context of social science data and more specifically, how to leverage existing metadata models to use alongside linked data. We provide a case for leveraging the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) to enable semantic linking of social science data to other data and related resources on the Web. This document is organized into five use cases, which we consider in turn. Use cases include: linking related publications to data, linking data about people and organizations to research data, linking geography, linking to related studies, and linking data to licenses. We briefly discuss emerging or known issues surrounding the potential use of linked data within each of the defined use cases. Following these, we list more topics that could develop into additional use cases. Appendix A lists elements from the DDI-Codebook and DDI-Lifecycle specifications that are relevant to each use case.