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I have to construct a dataset of hospitals. For each hospital, I will indicate the the town/region in which it is located.

I already have dataset of towns/regions of the concerned geographic area.

In order to not repeat informations about towns/region in my new hospital dataset, I wonder if is it possible to be linked to my existing towns/regions dataset.

Many Thanks.

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  • Linked Data is an approach designed specially to solve this issue. Linked CSV is a set of conventions for CSV files that enable them to be linked together. I can't understand how your question is related to data.gov, probably these approaches is inapplicable in your case. – Stanislav Kralin Jul 28 '17 at 7:09
  • Thanks @StanislavKralin. Please, I want to know why Linked Data is not applicable is not applicable in my case ? – Moh_BOB Jul 28 '17 at 13:21
  • It sounds like it could be useful to make your data suitable for putting into GIS by giving each hospital co-ordinate data (perhaps it already comes with geographic location?) – Martin Hügi Jul 28 '17 at 18:16
  • Yes, each hospital has co-ordinate data. But the administrative location (town/department) is as important as co-ordinate. Thanks – Moh_BOB Jul 29 '17 at 8:45
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First model the relationships from the geographic area and probably expand it more:

Dallas > located_in > Texas
Dallas > country > USA
Dallas > located_in > USA

Texas > first_level_administrative_division_of > USA
Texas > located_in > USA

Then do the same for the hospitals list, and merge those that match completely.

You can also create a fake identifier of the kind USA/Texas/Dallas and again merge on that criteria. The tree can be as deep as you want.

Hope this helps.

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  • Thanks @marfi. Please, I want to know if the data.gov of countries are constructed in a linked way ? – Moh_BOB Jul 28 '17 at 13:21
  • data.gov is a portal, what file in particular you are working with? – marfi Jul 29 '17 at 14:42
  • Sorry, I didn't know that "data.gov" was the US open data portal. By data.gov I meant to say a generic open data of a country. – Moh_BOB Jul 29 '17 at 15:30
  • It is not getting any clearer. You have to give a specific example. In Europe we use LAU and NUTS in US you use FIPS, it is not one standard. – marfi Jul 30 '17 at 11:22
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Why don't you assign a ID to each relevant geographic combination in your address database:

ID; Town; State; Country

1 ; Miami; Florida; USA

after you did than you could add a column to your hospital list (like "geo_id") and assign the correct geo_id to each hospital.

hospital name ;[...]; geo id

as a result the geo_id would link to the correct information on the other table.

If you have to join both tables you can do that by "hospital.geo_id = address.id"

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  • 1
    Ok, your idea is the basic of relational databases. But I want do this in Linked Data manner. The difference is that in the later, this contribute to the web of data. – Moh_BOB Aug 1 '17 at 11:48

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