The University of Southampton provides open access to some of our administrative data. We believe that this will be of benefit to our own members and visitors, and increase the transparency of our operations.
Open Data is information that's free to use and republish. We're talking about information that's useful to staff, students and visitors, such as where all our lecture theatres are, and how much the canteen charges for a coffee. This sort of information isn't in any way secret, and we really want everyone to know about it.
Linked data is the combination of different types of information, usually from different sources, to provide something that's far more useful than any one of the source datasets are individually, and that's the whole point of this website. Generally if you wanted to answer the question "where can I get a coffee on the way to my lecture", you'd need to check your lecture timetable to get the room the lecture is in, then look up which building that room is in on the Estates and Facilities website, then check the Catering website to find out where in that building sells coffee... with all the information stored in one place, we can get an answer to our question much more quickly and easily.
This site is run by a small group of people within iSolutions' Technical Innovation and Development team (TIDT), using technology developed by the University's Electronics and Computer Science department. Our job is to run around the university collecting as much useful information as we can find, and put it on the web in a form that's easy to use. Most of this site is made up of lists, but we also develop applications and tools that make it easy to use the data. These include our campus map which brings together a whole host of information such as building locations, bus routes, recycling points, breastfeeding friendly spaces and university workstation locations. And because all our data and tools are open, you don't need a password, anyone can use them.
We try our hardest to make our tools useful and user-friendly, but the fact is that sometimes others can do it better than us. That's why we make all the data available in as many computer-readable formats as possible. Our database is a triplestore, so we make everything available in RDF format by default, but depending on the data you might be able to get a JSON representation, a CSV file (which loads in Excel), or, where appropriate, iCal, RSS or Google Earth KML. Download complete datasets from our Data Catalogue, or check the 'Get the Data' box at the bottom of most pages on this site. If you do manage to write a useful tool that uses our data, we'd love to know about it so we can keep you informed in the unlikely event that we need to change anything.
Our data is republished at various intervals throughout the week using automatic scripts. The software that runs and manages these scripts is known as Hedgehog. Each dataset contains a 'hopper' directory in which the collector script runs, and Hedgehog manages the downloading of remote files, the converting of these files into linked data, as well as publishing them to the triplestore and the website and generating metadata and provenance data. It uses several supplimentary tools, the most prominent of these is Grinder, a tool for generating XML from other data formats and applying stylesheets to it (for converting to RDF/XML, for example). We also have custom tools for performing repetitive tasks such as converting spreadsheet file formats and connecting to databases.
Another essential requirement in the management of this website is the ability to convert between different RDF formats, and reason on linked data. For this we use Graphite, a PHP library that simplifies the management of linked data, and potentially allows a developer to call RDF from a triplestore without having to write a line of SPARQL. It's designed to be similar to JQuery, and is based on ARC2. For when we need to delve in and read the data directly, we have PHP-SPARQL-Lib.
We use Github to manage our development. You can download - and even contribute to - our software at the following links.
https://github.com/cgutteridge/Grinder
https://github.com/cgutteridge/Graphite
https://github.com/cgutteridge/PHP-SPARQL-Lib
There are other tools that make our lives easier. SharePerltopus is a tool for accessing Microsoft Sharepoint from Perl. Our friends at the Open Data service of the University of Oxford have a similar tool written in Python. TripleChecker is a tool for checking for typos and common mistakes in RDF documents. We anticipate this functionality will eventually be built into Hedgehog.
https://github.com/cgutteridge/SharePerltopus
https://github.com/cgutteridge/TripleChecker
This site and service is the product of a collaboration between iSolutions (our central IT service) and the School of Electronics and Computer Science.
© 2025 University of Southampton