RE: [LD-Outreach] Meeting Reminder

Sandro,
We have certainly run into almost all of these questions.  One of the
big ones I run into is the confusion over RDF Vs schema based XML - as
these both come from W3C and can be used for overlapping purposes, users
seem unclear where there are two standard "stacks", complete with their
own schema, query language, etc.  After all, many have only just warmed
up to XML!
The position we are taking is that RDF is the web data model (period) -
publish data in other ways, but always have RDF as the normal form so
tools can interoperate across data sets without a lot of unnecessary
complexity.
But, it then has to be very clear how this data is identified, linked,
queried, browsed, etc.  The provenance has to be rock-solid.  As some of
these things are not fully cooked, it makes adoption hard - the
supporting community needs to complete this picture.  Perhaps we just
need to say - for gov data, this is how it should be done and provide
some open implementations that do it that way.
The other side is non-technical, governments need to STOP ACCEPTING DATA
in non-standard and unstructured formats.  If the FAR required all data
to be delivered in RDF, publishing it would be much less of an issue.
My 2c.

-Cory

-----Original Message-----
From: Sandro Hawke [mailto:sandro@w3.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, February 24, 2010 10:04 PM
To: Cory Casanave
Cc: W3C e-Gov IG
Subject: Re: [LD-Outreach] Meeting Reminder


> The phone meeting for LD-Outreach will be Thursday @ 10AM EDT.
> 
> Topic... : what are the pressing technical issues for government
> linked data, and what guidance can we provide?

Seriously.  What do you need to know?  What do you think others need to
know?   Especially, what can't be found from existing sources?

If you can't come to the meeting (and even if you can), spend a few
minutes and send e-mail right now.

Some strawman ideas that come into my head:

 - Which tools can I rely on to build my systems?  Which are production
   quality and here for the long term?
 - Do we really need to understand the RDF Semantics?
 - What about the RDF/XML syntax.... Can we just use Turtle?
 - Can we use XSLT?
 - Do we have to use OWL?
 - Does SPARQL scale?
 - What are quads good for?
 - Is there a good way to get RDF out of our SQL database?
 - What should our publication URLs look like?
 - How do make sure those URLs will be around, long term?
 - Who will mint identifiers for things like other agencies, or
   geographic locations, which we need to refer to in our data?
 - How do we represent numbers with units (physical measures, dollar
   amount)

etc, etc.  :-)

I can go on like this forever, but I don't know which questions actually
matter to the folks doing this for a living.  And many of these
questions -- maybe all of them -- are in no way government specific, so
they're probably out of scope for us.

   -- Sandro

Received on Thursday, 25 February 2010 20:28:43 UTC