PDF's usefulness to the semantic web

Calling out PDF specifically here should be reconsidered.

>From a semantic web perspective, PDF is more useful than many other formats, including graphics, imagery, audio and video, all of which are very useful formats for government to consider when becoming transparent. Given that documents are machine readable as well as human readable, technologies do exist today that are capable of extracting an ontology, making the information more useful to the semantic web.

In addition, there simply are times when a secure container is required for publishing information. While typical internet technologies, such as outlined above, are very good for sharing and transparency, they are not necessarily always appropriate for information types that require assurances of authenticity, privacy, authoritativeness, etc.

Further, is the requirement to archive PSI. Again, with consideration that many government processes are document based, PDF/a (ISO 19005-1:2005) provides a standards based approach to ensuring the long term preservation of government information. PDF/a based documents are both machine readable, making them searchable, discoverable and available to the same technologies as an ISO 3200 PDF to extract ontologies. Likewise, the standard's based nature of PDF/a ensures the ability to allow human access to the documents into the future.

I am concerned that this paper is limiting it's focus and not taking into consideration the wider view of government processes, many of which depend upon more traditional document formats for legitimate business reasons.

Thank you for the consideration.

Bobby Caudill




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Bobby Caudill
Solution Architect, Global Government Solutions
Adobe Systems Incorporated
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