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knowledge graphs · tourism · Ireland

Off the Beaten Track

Knowledge Graphs for Tourism, from Dingle to the Glen

· Peter Winstanley · 22 min read

The bus from Tralee reaches Dingle on a Saturday afternoon in late November, and the friend is waiting at the stop. The last article followed the journey. This one follows the visit. There are three days, a car borrowed from a neighbour, and a list of places the traveller has wanted to see for years: the Blasket Islands and the centre at Dún Chaoin that tells their story, the drive around Slea Head, the oratory at Gallarus and, if the sea allows, a boat to Skellig Michael.

Now ask some ordinary questions:

  • What is open this weekend, in November?
  • Which way round Slea Head should the borrowed car go, and does it matter at this time of year?
  • What are the places called in Irish, and will a map or a sat nav know them by those names?
  • Another friend wants to come at New Year. Where could they stay, and is the place they find lawful?
  • What's on next weekend, and on which dates?
  • Can a visitor get out to the end of the peninsula without a car?
  • And the friend's own question, as someone who lives there: what does all this visiting do to the place?

Each question has an answer, and each answer is held by someone different: Fáilte Ireland, which lists attractions on its Discover Ireland website and from December keeps the register of short-term lets; the Office of Public Works, which runs the Blasket Centre and controls landings on Skellig Michael; Kerry County Council, which looks after the roads and decides planning; the Placenames Branch and the Logainm database; the National Monuments Service; Údarás na Gaeltachta; the community groups behind Dingle Peninsula 2030; the Local Link bus; the festival organisers; the booking platforms; and the businesses themselves, each with a website of its own. Each knows its own part. Nobody holds the visit. Once again the visitor becomes the integration layer, and in a different way so does the place.

This is the seventh article in a series on knowledge graphs. The first six were for investigators and analysts (Joining the Dots), on the land question (Who Owns the Glen?), on the food system (Field to Fork and Back Again), on forests (The Wood and the Trees), on electricity (Down the Line) and on the journey that brought the traveller here (Across the Water). The earlier pieces followed oats, timber, electrons and a traveller. This one stays put, and looks at a place being visited. The argument is the same: the facts exist, held by many keepers in many shapes, and the difficulty lies in the joins between them.

A short history of visiting

Dingle's tourist trade has a starting point. At the end of the 1960s David Lean brought the cast and crew of Ryan's Daughter to the peninsula, for a film meant to take weeks to shoot that took almost two years to complete. The town they found was, in the words of the author of a book about the film, impoverished, suffering massive emigration, with its fishing drying up. The film, released in 1970, transformed it (irishexaminer.com).

Off the end of the peninsula lie the Blaskets. The Great Blasket was home to a small Irish-speaking community until 1953, when the remaining islanders were moved to the mainland (en.wikipedia.org). Its writers left a literature out of all proportion to its size: Tomás Ó Criomhthain's An tOileánach (The Islandman, 1929), Muiris Ó Súilleabháin's Fiche Bliain ag Fás (Twenty Years A-Growing, 1933) and the books of Peig Sayers. The Blasket Centre at Dún Chaoin, run by the Office of Public Works, tells their story.

Then came the dolphin. For more than a generation a dozen local families earned their living taking visitors out to see Fungie, a bottlenose dolphin who lived in Dingle harbour. The summer of 2021 was the first in four decades without him (irishtimes.com). In 2014 Fáilte Ireland launched the Wild Atlantic Way, a touring route of 2,500 kilometres down the west coast, as its answer to the financial crash. Ten years later it reported nearly two million more visitors to the route than in 2013, and tourism along it worth €3 billion a year (hospitalityireland.com).

Success has its costs. In January 2021 Fáilte Ireland published a development plan for the peninsula that had taken three years to prepare. It found that the peninsula did well for reputation and for numbers, but that visitors spent little time and little money there. Coaches clogged the roads around Slea Head and over the Conor Pass while bringing little value. Dingle town was a hot-spot, seen as having a nine-month season, while smaller communities benefited for three months of the year, and tourism had made little of the Irish language. "It is widely regarded," the plan said, "that tourism on the Dingle Peninsula is at a crossroads" (irishexaminer.com).

One visit, five questions

The themes of the earlier articles return, asked this time of a single peninsula: the season, the bed, the money, the limits and the names.

The season. The traveller has come in November. The Blasket Centre closed for the year on 8 November, after a season that began on 6 March (heritageireland.ie). Skellig Michael's landing season normally runs from mid-May to the end of September. In 2026 it ended early, on 21 September, because of the weather and the sea (travelextra.ie). A visitor who looks would find both facts, on two websites, in two forms. The town's food festival, held on the first weekend of October, is seven weeks gone (dingle-peninsula.ie). Fáilte Ireland publishes open data on its listed activities and attractions, updated daily (data.gov.ie). I downloaded all 6,261 records. None carries opening hours or a season. A couple of hundred mention them in their descriptions, in prose. "What is open this weekend?" has an answer for every place on the peninsula, but the answers are scattered across websites, signs on doors and the heads of people like the friend.

The bed. The peninsula has plenty of beds for visitors and too few homes for the people who work there. A Trinity College Dublin study, presented in Baile an Fheirtéaraigh in October, found 289 holiday or visitor dwellings in Dingle town against 603 permanent homes, and in Dún Chaoin 96 holiday homes against 82 lived in all year. On a typical day more than 1,000 Airbnb listings were on offer, and repeated searches found no long-term rentals at all. A council meeting heard that parts of the Gaeltacht risked being "consumed" by non-Irish speakers because of the housing crisis, and the researchers warned that the future of Irish as the language of the community was at risk (irishexaminer.com). The researchers had to count by searching the platforms by hand. That is about to change. An EU regulation on data about short-term rentals has applied since 20 May 2026. Ireland's register of short-term lets, run by Fáilte Ireland, opens on 1 December 2026, and every host who lets for 21 nights or fewer must register by the end of the year. Each unit gets a unique number, which must appear in every listing. Platforms must send Fáilte Ireland data every month through a single digital entry point, including the nights rented, the number of guests, the listing's web address and its registration number. The bill behind the register was published on 6 October and is still before the Oireachtas (enterprise.gov.ie). Scotland has required a licence number in every listing or advert for a short-term let since its licensing order of 2022 (legislation.gov.uk).

The money. The Dingle plan found that only some pockets benefit from what visitors spend. Scotland has started to charge visitors directly. Since 24 July 2026 Edinburgh has charged 5% on the first five nights of paid accommodation, expected to raise up to £50 million a year. Accommodation providers keep 2% of what they collect, to cover the cost of running the scheme and "collecting visitor data" (edinburgh.gov.uk). The Highland Council is consulting on a flat charge of £5 a room a night for hotels, guest houses, B&Bs and short-term lets, and £2 for hostels, campsites and caravan parks, for nine months of the year, leaving out December to February. It would raise around £9 million a year, half of it, on the council's indicative plan, for visitor management, infrastructure and services. Councillors decide on 10 December, and if they agree, the levy cannot start for another 18 months (highland.gov.uk). A levy is a data problem before it is a tax: every night, in every bed, in every licensed property, counted and paid for, and the money followed to where it is spent.

The limits. The road around Slea Head is narrow, and in summer it is full. Since 2022 Kerry County Council has asked drivers to go round it clockwise, starting in Dingle. In 2026 the scheme ran from 26 June to 11 September, with a council worker stationed at Com Dhíneol from half past ten until four each day to steer drivers onto the route (radiokerry.ie). Further south, landings on Skellig Michael are limited by permit: fifteen boats, twelve people to a boat, 180 visitors a day (irishtimes.com). These are rules about places, and they live in press releases and permits. Walkers meet a limit of another kind. The land article asked who owns the glen; here the question is who lets a walker cross it. In Scotland the law gives a right of responsible access to most land. In Ireland, walking routes such as the National Waymarked Ways cross private land through the goodwill of its owners, and the Walks Scheme pays landholders to maintain the trails that cross their land (wld.ie). The other answer to traffic is the bus. Dingle Peninsula 2030, a community-led climate project started in 2018 with ESB Networks among its partners (ucc.ie), counts among its results a new Local Link bus whose passengers grew from 14,000 to 36,000 in a year (researchireland.ie).

The names. The traveller arrived in a town with three names, as the last article described. The peninsula has many more. The council's notice about Slea Head, as Radio Kerry reported it, names the villages on the loop in Irish only, from Ceann Trá to Com Dhíneol, Dún Chaoin and Baile an Fheirtéaraigh. English-language maps call them Ventry, Coumeenoole, Dunquin and Ballyferriter. Fáilte Ireland's listings use both, packed into a single field: "Ceann Sléibhe (Slea Head)", "An Chonair (Conor Pass)", "The Blasket Centre - Ionad an Bhlascaoid", "Músaem Chorca Dhuibhne - West Kerry Museum". A person can read those. A machine has to guess which half is in which language, and whether the brackets or the dash separate two names or a name and a description. The authorities exist. Logainm, the Placenames Database of Ireland, built by Gaois at Dublin City University with the Placenames Branch, is published under an open licence (data.gov.ie). As long ago as 2014, a project called Linked Logainm turned it into RDF and linked it to DBpedia (link.springer.com). The National Monuments Service publishes the Archaeological Survey of Ireland as open data under the same licence (archaeology.ie), and a survey of the peninsula published in 1986 described 1,572 sites and monuments, from the Mesolithic to the seventeenth century (castlegregory.ie). The Dingle plan found that tourism had made little of the language. The Trinity study found that housing threatens it. Names are where the two meet.

Every one of these questions is about the same peninsula. Each is answered by different people, with different data, under different rules.

Sentences about a visit

As in the earlier articles, the basic parts are short sentences of subject, verb and object. A slice of the peninsula might read:

The Blasket Centre — is in —> Dún Chaoin

The Blasket Centre — is governed by —> the Office of Public Works

The Blasket Centre — was open —> from 6 March to 8 November 2026

Skellig Michael — admits at most —> 180 visitors a day

Cottage 101 — has registration number —> EX-STL-000101

Ceann Sléibhe — is also called —> Slea Head

(All real except the fifth.) Semantic Arts' gist (github.com), used throughout the series, has the pieces a visit needs:

  • Places (gist:Landmark, gist:isGeoContainedIn). In gist a landmark is something permanently attached to the Earth. Each one lies within a townland, and so within a county and, on this peninsula, the Gaeltacht.
  • Identifiers (gist:ID, gist:isIdentifiedBy, gist:isAllocatedBy). A registration number is an identifier allocated by Fáilte Ireland.
  • Permissions (gist:Permission). A landing permit is a permission the Office of Public Works gives to a boat.
  • Governance (gist:isGovernedBy). Who controls a site, and so who sets its season and its limits.
  • Events (gist:ScheduledEvent). A festival, a boat trip or a season, each with planned and actual dates. Skellig's season was due to run to the end of September and actually ended on the 21st.

Schema.org, the vocabulary search engines read, covers much of this already. It has types for tourist attractions and tourist destinations ("in principle any Place can be a TouristDestination"), and properties for opening hours with the dates between which they apply, for capacity, for public access and for the languages spoken (schema.org).

Some of this already speaks RDF:

  • Fáilte Ireland. The open data on attractions is published in JSON-LD using schema.org, under a Creative Commons licence (data.gov.ie). Ireland's national tourism body is publishing linked data already, whether or not anyone calls it that.
  • Germany. The German National Tourist Board commissioned a German Tourism Knowledge Graph, public since June 2023 (germany.travel). The marketing organisations of all sixteen states load their data into it daily, usually mapped from their own systems with RML, and every record is checked against SHACL shapes before it goes in. In March 2024 it held 239,000 events, 118,000 points of interest, 23,000 trails and 25,000 places to stay, enriched with links to charging points and public transport stops, and anyone with a free key can query it in SPARQL (arxiv.org).
  • A shared schema. Its schema comes from the Open Data Tourism Alliance, which has written 24 "domain specifications" based on schema.org, for attractions, events, trails, certifications, protected areas and more (germany.travel).
  • The Alps. Researchers at Innsbruck built a Tyrolean Tourism Knowledge Graph from schema.org annotations gathered from destination management organisations (arxiv.org). In South Tyrol, the Open Data Hub and Ontopic unveiled a SPARQL endpoint over tourism and mobility data in 2020, built as a virtual knowledge graph that leaves the data in its original systems (opendatahub.com).
  • Names. Linked Logainm, as above.

There is a small one closer to home. The endpapers published with the electricity article (semantechs.co.uk) were drawn from the knowledge graph behind my SPARQL course, which describes an invented trail of bookshops, their events and the paths between them. That is a tourism graph in miniature: places, opening times, events and routes.

As with the grid and the railways, parts of the core already speak RDF. What doesn't is the visit: the joins between a listing and a place, a place and its names, a bed and its register, a site and its limits.

Master data for a visit

The last three articles argued for data-centric architecture in Dave McComb's sense: a single, simple model that applications visit, with the data allowed to stay where it lives. Tourism shows what happens without it, in data that is open, well-meant and useful.

Identifiers. In Fáilte Ireland's JSON, each record has an identifier, a long random string. The CSV version of the same data has none. In the JSON the identifier sits in a field called "id", which under schema.org's JSON-LD rules means a web address. When I loaded a record into my triplestore with schema.org's rules applied, the identifier became an address relative to the feed, which leads nowhere. The German graph lets each regional organisation keep its own identifiers, and wraps them in an address that does resolve. From December the register will give every short-term let in Ireland a number that every platform must display: a master identifier, required by law.

Things and listings. Skellig Michael appears twice in Fáilte Ireland's data. One record, under its Irish and English names, describes itself as the Wild Atlantic Way's discovery point for the island, and is placed 11 kilometres from it. The other, its English name misspelt, gives the island's position but an address at a visitor centre on Valentia Island. Both link to the same web page. It is the question from the first article in the series, whether two records describe one thing, met on a tourist board's website. One boat company in Dingle appears as seven listings, one for each kind of trip it offers. Is a listing a place, a business or a product? The model has one type for all three: every one of the 6,261 records is a TouristAttraction, the pubs and pizzerias included. The categories that matter are in tags. In 5,108 records the tags arrive as a list. In the other 1,153 they arrive as a single string separated by spaces, so that "Activity Operator" cannot be told apart from "Activity" and "Operator". The catalogue entry gives the reason: the data is "generated from the Content Management system". It is the website's content, published as it stands. It serves the website well. That is McComb's point: data shaped by one application serves that application.

Time. Seasons and opening hours, as above, are missing from the data. Events are copied. Other Voices, the music festival that fills Dingle's church and pubs at the end of November, comes the weekend after the traveller leaves. One listing gives its dates as 27 to 29 November 2026 (go-to-ireland.com), another as 28 November to 1 December (dingle-peninsula.ie). Each copy of an event drifts from the organiser's own record, unless there is one record to point to.

Data held by platforms. A visit leaves a trail of bookings and reviews, and most of it sits with the platforms. Since Booking.com was designated a gatekeeper under the EU's Digital Markets Act, hotels and other travel services must be able to offer better prices on their own websites, and have real-time and continuous access to the data they provide or generate on Booking.com (digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu). It is the electricity article's idea about consent again, applied to a business: data that a business generates on someone else's platform is, in part, the business's to use.

Each of these is what an application-centric architecture leaves behind: identifiers that serve one system, one type stretched over everything, names fused into strings, times kept as prose, and copies that drift. McComb's alternative applies to a peninsula as it does to a forest: one identifier for each place, listing, business, bed and name; a small shared model of how they relate; and applications (Discover Ireland, the sat nav, the register, the levy, the council's traffic plans, the next housing study) that visit the data rather than keeping private copies of it.

Holons for a destination

A destination divides naturally into holons, in Koestler's sense of wholes that are also parts. Each business is a whole, with its own opening hours, prices and staff, and also a part of the place. So is each site the Office of Public Works runs, each village, and each festival.

As with the hillside and the journey, the divisions overlap: the peninsula, Corca Dhuibhne; the Gaeltacht, with its own language planning area; the county council's area and its planning rules; the Wild Atlantic Way; the Office of Public Works' estate; the register of short-term lets; the platforms; and, for a visitor from Scotland, the levy and licensing areas at home. None of these divisions is the destination, and the destination belongs to none of them.

The five tests for dividing a graph, from the forestry article, work here too:

  1. Custody. Each business keeps its own hours and prices, and each restaurant the story of where its food came from, as the food article described. The Office of Public Works keeps its sites, Fáilte Ireland the listings and the register, the Placenames Branch the names, and the National Monuments Service the monuments.
  2. Rules. Each holon has rules of its own: planning, registration, landing limits, the clockwise loop, the levy, and the official forms of names in the Gaeltacht.
  3. Audience. A visitor's app, the council's traffic plan, Údarás na Gaeltachta's language plan, a housing study and the national statistics are projections of the same facts.
  4. Sensitivity. A listing is public. The register asks each host for a Personal Public Service Number and a date of birth, which are not.
  5. Time. Opening hours change by season, a landing is decided on the morning by the sea, registration is renewed every year, and a festival's dates are announced months ahead.

The German graph shows what this looks like in practice. Sixteen state organisations keep their own data in their own systems, map it to a shared schema, and have it checked against shared shapes before it joins the national graph. That is a federation of holons, arrived at by a tourist board for practical reasons.

I should declare an interest once more: HOLOS (pypi.org), the triplestore I have been building, organises data as holons of named graphs, each with its own shapes, event log and access policy. The limits I described in the earlier articles still apply.

Seasons and limits as shapes

A season and a limit are rules waiting to be written down. I took nine real listings for the western end of the peninsula and for Skellig Michael from Fáilte Ireland's open data, and converted their JSON-LD into Turtle with the values unchanged. Then I added an invented second layer: each listing tied to the place it describes, with its English and Irish names separated and tagged by language; the published seasons for the Blasket Centre and Skellig Michael; Skellig's real limits of twelve to a boat and 180 a day; a register of short-term lets with three invented listings; and an invented day of landings at Skellig in June 2027.

Three shapes check the result. The first says every name must say which language it is in, and any place in the Gaeltacht must have a name in Irish. The second says every short-term let must show a registration number that is on the register, for no more guests than registered. The third says no boat may land more than twelve, no day more than 180, and only permitted boats may land at all. The heart of the third is a few lines of SPARQL that add up a day's landings:

SELECT $this ?day (SUM(?n) AS ?total) (SAMPLE(?limit) AS ?max) WHERE {
    $this vt:maxPerDay ?limit .
    ?trip vt:lands $this ; vt:passengers ?n ; gist:plannedStartDateTime ?start .
    BIND (SUBSTR(STR(?start), 1, 10) AS ?day)
}
GROUP BY $this ?day
HAVING (SUM(?n) > SAMPLE(?limit))

My SHACL engine and HOLOS's validator found the same fourteen problems:

  • none of the nine published names says which language it is in;
  • at Skellig, 189 visitors on the day against a limit of 180, one boat carrying thirteen, and one boat with no permit;
  • one let quoting a number that is not on the register, and another advertised for six guests when it is registered for four.

A corrected copy of the second layer passed in both.

The same graph answered the traveller's first question in SPARQL: what is open on Saturday 21 November? The answer comes in three kinds. The Blasket Centre and Skellig Michael are closed, because their seasons are recorded and the day falls outside them. Slea Head, Dunquin pier, Ventry strand and the Skellig discovery point are open, because nobody locks a headland, a pier or a beach. For the Great Blasket, the West Kerry Museum and Díseart, the honest answer is "not known", because nobody has published a season for them in a form a machine can read.

Other rules fit the same pattern:

  • a Highland levy, if it comes: nine months of the year, a rate for each kind of accommodation, and a count of nights from every licensed property;
  • the clockwise loop round Slea Head, with its dates, for any sat nav that cares to read it;
  • the EU's rules on green claims, which since 27 September 2026 have allowed a generic environmental claim only where excellent environmental performance can be shown, and sustainability labels only if they rest on a certification scheme or are set up by a public authority (eu-ecolabel.de). An eco label on a listing becomes a claim to be checked against its scheme.

Shapes check records, not roads. Someone still has to stand at Com Dhíneol in July. What shapes change is whether the coach company's booking system, the sat nav and the council all know the rule, and whether a listing breaks the law before anyone has to search for it by hand.

The rules are moving

As in the earlier articles, regulation is moving towards more data, tied to places, shared between keepers:

  • Europe. The regulation on data about short-term rentals, applying since May 2026; the Digital Markets Act's obligations on Booking.com; the rules on green claims since September 2026. Behind them, the Commission is funding a common European tourism data space.
  • Ireland. The register of short-term lets from 1 December 2026. New planning rules restrict new permissions for short-term lets in towns of more than 20,000 people. Hosts in smaller towns, such as Dingle, have two years from 23 October 2026 to meet planning requirements (enterprise.gov.ie).
  • Scotland. Licence numbers in every listing since 2022. Edinburgh's levy since July 2026, and the Highland Council's decision due on 10 December.
  • Places. The Slea Head scheme each summer, and Skellig's permits each season.

Read across the list and the same facts keep coming up: where a place is and what it is called, when it is open, how many it can take, who runs it, and under which number or permit. That is the data-centric argument once more. Hold each fact once, with its keeper and its provenance, and a new rule becomes a new shape and a new projection, not another register built from scratch.

What others have learned

  • Germany: shapes at the door. The German Tourism Knowledge Graph checks every record against SHACL shapes as it arrives, so that sixteen organisations can publish to one graph without a central team cleaning up after them (arxiv.org).
  • Germany, Austria and Switzerland: agree the vocabulary first. The Open Data Tourism Alliance agreed its domain specifications across three countries and built them on schema.org, so that the same data serves search engines, chatbots and national graphs (germany.travel).
  • South Tyrol: leave the data where it is. The Open Data Hub's virtual knowledge graph answers SPARQL over data that stays in its source systems, which is the data-centric idea without the copying (opendatahub.com).
  • Europe: pilots before platforms. DEPLOYTOUR, launched in October 2024 with 43 partners from 13 countries, is building the common European tourism data space through five pilots, from the Alps and the Canary Islands to Paris, Syros and Lapland (data.europa.eu).

The lessons for Ireland, Scotland and their neighbours:

  • give every place, business, product and bed its own identifier, and keep them apart;
  • publish seasons, opening hours and limits as data, not only as prose;
  • give every name its own field, tag it with its language, and link it to the naming authority;
  • check data against shared shapes when it arrives, not afterwards;
  • let data stay with its keeper, and query it where it lives.

A proposal for the peninsula

The earlier articles proposed federations of holons for Scotland's land, food, forests and electricity, and for a journey that crossed borders. A destination needs the same, built from the place outwards.

The hooks are already there:

  • Fáilte Ireland's open data, already in schema.org JSON-LD;
  • the register of short-term lets and its single digital entry point, from 1 December;
  • the development plan for the peninsula, and Dingle Peninsula 2030;
  • Údarás na Gaeltachta's language planning, and the Trinity housing study;
  • Logainm and the National Monuments Service's open data;
  • Kerry County Council's traffic scheme at Slea Head;
  • in Scotland, the licence numbers, Edinburgh's levy and the Highland Council's decision in December.

What I would propose has five elements:

  1. A single, simple, shared model for the joins. gist at the top; schema.org and the Open Data Tourism Alliance's domain specifications for listings, events and trails; GeoSPARQL for place; PROV for provenance; Logainm for names in Irish and English; the National Monuments Service's records for monuments; and the register's numbers for beds.
  2. Holons for those who keep the facts: each business, the Office of Public Works, the council, Fáilte Ireland's listings and register, the Placenames Branch, Údarás na Gaeltachta and the community groups.
  3. Rules as shapes: registration, limits, seasons, the official forms of names, green claims and, in Scotland, the levy, each kept by whoever owns the rule.
  4. Projections for each audience:
    • a visitor's view of what is open today, in Irish and English;
    • the council's view of traffic, coaches and car parks;
    • a housing view of holiday homes and lived-in homes, townland by townland;
    • a language view for Údarás na Gaeltachta;
    • in Scotland, a levy view of nights, rates and spending.
  5. Pilots before platforms:
    • Open today. Seasons and opening hours for the peninsula's attractions as data, in both languages.
    • One register, many listings. The register's numbers joined to the platforms' monthly returns and to the census, by townland, so that the next housing study does not have to search by hand.
    • Slea Head. The clockwise scheme, coach bookings and parking as data that booking systems and sat navs can read.
    • Names from the source. Every listing linked to Logainm, so that Com Dhíneol and Coumeenoole are found as one place.
    • The levy and the glen. If the Highland Council goes ahead, the levy's nights and spending held as data, place by place.

None of this needs a single app first. If you run a business on the peninsula, or in the glen:

  • publish your season and opening hours as data, not just on the door;
  • show your registration or licence number, and use it as your identifier;
  • give your Irish name its own field, and link it to Logainm;
  • keep your business, its places and its products apart;
  • mark up your website with schema.org rather than inventing a format.

Back up the road

On the last morning the friend drives the traveller out to Dún Chaoin, clockwise, though in November nobody minds. The Blasket Centre is shut until next year. From the cliff the Great Blasket lies across the sound. Tomás Ó Criomhthain ended The Islandman with a line that has been quoted ever since: "mar ná beidh ár leithéidí arís ann", for the like of us will not be there again. The islanders wrote down their world because they knew it was ending. A knowledge graph is a humbler kind of writing down. It cannot keep a language spoken or a house lived in. What it can do is let everyone who keeps a piece of a place, from the Office of Public Works to whoever runs the café by the pier, see the same place: one set of names, one record of what is open, how many it can take and who it belongs to. Next summer the friend is coming to the glen, which has listings, licence numbers and, perhaps by then, a levy of its own. The same graph would serve both.