Dan

Thanks for your quick reaction to INSEE publication. Just a preliminary note to apologize about everything being in French in those resources so far. The main point of it is to try and show to French-speaking community that "Web Sémantique" also makes sense in French, and a secondary point is that core target users are in France. But I just suggested to the publisher to provide english translations and comments, for the introduction page and technical explanations, and for the ontology as well. Actually first reactions came from non-French people, so ...

Dan Connolly a écrit : 
Sounds interesting... so I started browsing, and made it as far as

http://rdf.insee.fr/geo/cantons-75-2003.rdf
Good to see that your French allowed you to go that far :-) 
where I see

  <geo:Commune rdf:about="COM_75056"

so that's short for

  <geo:Commune rdf:about="http://rdf.insee.fr/geo/COM_75056"
Correct
but I get 404 @ http://rdf.insee.fr/geo/COM_75056
Also, I see
	<geo:code_commune>75056</geo:code_commune
where
         xmlns:geo="http://rdf.insee.fr/geo/"

but I get 404 @
  http://rdf.insee.fr/geo/code_commune
Indeed. We discussed quite a while to know what kind of answer to provide for various URI in the namespace http://rdf.insee.fr/geo/, and the result is explained at http://rdf.insee.fr/geo/note-uri.html, but there again in French, and there again an english version sounds a good idea.
In a nutshell, INSEE is just at this point at the "proof of concept" stage, and did not want to go further than publication of RDF files which represent packages equivalent to what they usually publish as raw text data. See http://www.insee.fr/fr/nom_def_met/nomenclatures/cog/cog.telechargement.asp, where e.g.,
http://www.insee.fr/fr/nom_def_met/nomenclatures/cog/dbf/2006/txt/depts2006.txt has basically the same information than http://rdf.insee.fr/geo/regions-2003.rdf.
We discussed about setting a proper RDF triple store, so that URIs like http://rdf.insee.fr/geo/COM_75056 actually provide answers following the Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies http://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-vocab-pub/. But this was considered too many technical requirements at that point by INSEE, and actually RDF descriptions of instances are currently distributed in different files. The most extreme case is for instances of "Département", which have elements of descriptions in four different files, which are nowhere gathered in a single description so far. So the decision was that all URIs of both instances and ontology elements such as http://rdf.insee.fr/geo/code_commune should redirect to a default page, giving access to the different files.
This is really suboptimal I agree, and the fact that this default page is a "customised 404" is not maybe the best option. Do you think it would be better to have instead a redirect to http://rdf.insee.fr/geo/, a solution which seems conformant to http://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-vocab-pub/#recipe2 ?
Of course this would not make a distinct answer for elements of the ontology vs instances, but I think it's the best we can do at this stage, unless you have better suggestions.

An alternative would be to have published a single merged RDF file for all resources under http://rdf.insee.fr/geo/, but it would be something like 20 Mo, not sure it's a good idea.
Do you know anybody who is in a position to get these URIs
that they use to work better?
Franck Cotton in cc is technically in charge of this at INSEE. So he is in this position.

--
Bernard Vatant

Bernard Vatant

Knowledge Engineering

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