The Swiss Federal Office of Energy publishes "Linked Data

"Linked data is a technology that allows data from different sources to be linked and related to each other in order to derive new knowledge from the confluence of the data. The Internet plays an important role here, as it makes the data available in the current version at any time and can also be linked.

Up to now, data was often provided as a file download. The user has to download these data and process them on his computer. Thanks to "Linked Data", the user can now directly retrieve each entry of a data set via a unique link (URI) and link it to other data. The data is thus given a context. In addition, the most current version of the data is always available.

This is particularly important for reference data that is often used by other data collections, for example municipal boundaries, such as those of the municipality of Bern: https://ld.geo.admin.ch/boundaries/municipality/351:2016

The municipal boundaries can now be easily linked to further information. Thanks to the open data collection Wikidata, for example with the current or current mayor or with the link to the official website.

Together with the Swiss Federal Office of Topography, the Swiss Federal Office of Energy has published its first own data set as "Linked Data": Swiss hydroelectric power plants can be accessed as "Linked Data": https://ld.geo.admin.ch/data/hydroPowerPlants

Thanks to the "Linked Data" interface, Switzerland's hydropower plants can now be easily queried and linked to other data. A few examples:

- Show me the 10 largest hydroelectric plants in terms of annual energy production: http://yasgui.org/short/uzkHYCX4P
- Where are the largest hydropower plants in Switzerland? http://yasgui.org/short/5AyU0W7fj
- Additional information on "Linked Data" can be found at https://lindas.admin.ch/

In the following video the advantages of "Linked Data" are explained briefly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9miuepW03Aeature=emb_title

Martin Hertach and Nico Rohrbach, SFOE Geoinformation Service