Local Standarization Groups

Hi All,

I started quiet a discussion with my remarks about local available 
ontology's.

Let me try to outline in a e-mail what I was trying to point out.

In the charter of the group http://www.w3.org/2011/gld/charter we state 
that the purpose of this group is to provide standards and best practices 
to help governments with publishing linked data.
>From my point of view this is not only to get governments started with 
publishing linked data, but also do it in a manner where the resulting 
linked data actually follows some standards so that interoperability is 
possible.

When I started my work for FD Amsterdam I was contacted by someone from 
ICTU.
ICTU is a Dutch government organization which is responsible for supplying 
and creating standards to make government work more efficient.
They created a 'Government Web Metadata Standard' largely based on DCMI 
terms, and from what I could see from it, this would be pretty useful as 
input for GLD-WG discussions as well.
My first logical reaction was to encourage them to join the GLD-WG, and to 
my surprise / disappointment the organization itself didn't show that much 
interest in W3C.
As a European country Dutch governments and aligned organizations tend to 
be more interested in European based standards then international / 
internet ones.

What I'm afraid of what will happen now is that, although we might come up 
with a great set of deliverables for Government Linked Data, on the 
European side governments might not be interested at all.
This is not meant as a discouragement of what we do, but more a starting 
point for a discussion on how to involve Europe based governments, or get 
involved as GLD-WG in the European process.

Since Open Data is a pretty hot topic in the EU right now, it might be the 
right time to investigate where / who we should talk to to get our work 
noticed.

With Kind Regards/Met Vriendelijke Groet
Bart van Leeuwen

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