RE: Universal distributed open government data catalog?

Antti,
Re: "How the interoperability of the different data katalogs could be
done so that the national, regional and independent catalogs could
produce together a universal, but distributed open government data
catalog?"

That is precisely the use case for linked open data.  Publish all of the
catalogs as RDF with dereferenceable URIs and SPARQL query end points.
All of the data is then owned and controlled by the publisher but can be
queried, linked, extended and combined as a virtual web DBMS.  You may
want to format this data as "striped RDF" so it is also more usable by
non-rdf XML tools.
Of course RDF-LOD is not the only form you may want to publish in, you
will want user accessible web pages that access the same data
(preferably through the RDF interface).
For more seamless integration try and normalize the vocabularies of
these data sets in a common, shared vocabulary. You may also want to
build on some of the public vocabularies already accessible.  Of course
it is also fine for a particular data set to have some of its own terms
- but where practical you can relate those terms to some of the common
ones.  You don't want to get into analysis paralysis with the common
vocabularies - it is also ok to publish the data with any "native"
vocabulary and then relate that local vocabulary to some common "hub"
vocabularies using OWL or SKOS.  So the priority should be to get all
the data out and second is to "ground" the terms of that data in some
common hubs.
This path of RDF-LOD and "after the fact" grounding in common hubs
provides a vehicle for immediate returns with integration improving over
time.  
Regards,
-Cory Casanave

-----Original Message-----
From: public-egov-ig-request@w3.org
[mailto:public-egov-ig-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Antti Poikola
Sent: Tuesday, February 02, 2010 8:02 AM
To: eGov IG
Subject: Universal distributed open government data catalog?

How the interoperability of the different data katalogs could be done so

that the the national, regional and independent catalogs could produce 
togeather a universal, but distributed open government data catalog?

We have a simple case here in Finland:

During this year 2010 most propably 3 new catalogs will open

1. National Official
2. Regional (Helsinki capital city region)
3. Independent developer community catalog opengov.fi

How can we make sure that the catalogs work togeather between three of 
them and togeather with the rest of the catalogs: 
http://www.diigo.com/list/apoikola/publis-sector-data-catalogues



 From the EU PSI (Public Sector Information) directive papers:

"Future revisions to the PSI Directive should require the development of

PSI information asset registers using standard metadata. For the benefit

of countries where standards for PSI asset registers are not yet 
developed, work on the development of pan-European standards for PSI 
asset registers should be supported and should take into account 
existing national initiatives."

-Jogi

Received on Tuesday, 2 February 2010 16:10:02 UTC