Tag: architecture

Data flow in the proof-of-concept implementation for PASI

Ash on

We have been exploring the idea of building a platform for the Participatory Accounting of Social Impacts (in Scotland) – PASI.  Waste reduction is the social impact that we are focussing on for our proof-of-concept (PoC) implementation, and the diagram (below) shows the flow of waste reduction related data, through our PoC.

A few notes about this PoC:

  • Potentially any individual/organisaton can be a “participant” (a peer-actor) in the PASI information system. A participant might publish data into PASI’s open, distributed (RDF) data graph; or/and consume data from it.
    In our PoC, participants can…
  • Supply measurement/observational data (quantities, times, descriptions). E.g. the instances of reuse/recycling supplied by ACE, STCMF, FRSHR and STCIL.
  • Provide reference metrics (measuring and categorisation standards). E.g. the carbon impact metric provided by ZWS.
  • Contribute secondary data (joining data, secondary calculations). E.g. the source→reference mappings, and the  calculated standardised waste reduction data contributed by DCS.
  • Build apps which consume the data from the PASI information system. E.g. a webapp which provides a dashboard onto waste reduction, for the general public.
  • Directly use the data in the distributed PASI graph. E.g. a federated SPARQL query constructed by a data analyst.

Data flow in the PASI PoC

The prototype’s architecture – revised

Ash on

“Trialling Wikibase for our data layer” described how we evaluated the use of Wikibase as a key implementation component in our bi-layer architecture. The conclusion was that Wikibase, although a brilliant product, does not fit our immediate purpose.

In our revised architecture…​

Wikibase is replaced with (dcs-easier-open-data) a simple set of data files (CSV and JSON) hosted in a public repository (GitHub). These data files are generated by the Waste Data Tool (dcs-wdt). Together, dcs-easier-open-data and dcs-wdt implement the architecture’s data layer.

In the architecture’s revised presentation layer, the webapp reads (CSV/JSON formatted) data from the dcs-easier-open-data respository, instead of reading (via SPARQL) data from the Wikibase.

The prototype’s bi-layered architecture - revised