A leading US government agency has adopted a set of web tools and standards developed by NUI Galway’s Digital Enterprise Research Institute (Deri).

The US portal Data.gov, which has been billed as an Obama administration priority in facilitating public access to federal government datasets, is using Deri technologies to link web-based information.

Deri tools including Neologism, which facilitates creation of “vocabularies” needed to link data, have been adopted by the US agency.

Another technology refined by Deri – known as the RDF Extension for Google Refine – is also being used. This is described as a “graphical user interface for exporting data from Google Refine as interlinked semantic web data”.

Google Refine is a tool for working with “messy” data.

Data.govis part of a global initiative referred to as the open data movement, which is being pioneered in Ireland by Fingal County Council, the Dublinked consortium and the National Cross-Industry Working Group on Open Data.

Deri was founded in 2003 at NUI Galway with support from Science Foundation Ireland.