Semantic Web and Drupal expert Lin Clark has created some excellent screencasts that demonstrate how to harness the power of open data in your own Drupal site. Clark’s article notes, “There are a lot of data providers who publish their data openly for reuse. Surprisingly, the CIA is one of them. Because of this, data geeks can take it and turn it into something that’s easy for others to reuse, using open data formats. And because it’s available in an open data format, platforms like Kasabi can load it on to their big servers and provide ways for other sites to access and query it, like a SPARQL endpoint. And because it is provided in a SPARQL endpoint, it is easy to reuse it in your Drupal site using Views.

“This screencast,” Clark continues, “shows how you can access the CIA World Factbook (or data in any SPARQL endpoint) and reuse the content on your site.” Clark follows up on this screencast  with an additional screencast, adding, “You can enhance these views further by using relationships to get information about related things, such as bordering countries, and you can use contextual filters to tailor the SPARQL results to your node content.”

To learn more about SPARQL, there are still a few seats at SemanticWeb.com’s upcoming free webcast, “SPARQL Queries, SPARQL Technology,” (August 25, 2011, 2:00pm ET).

Image: Courtesy CIA