Open Government data

In light of the discussion on standards  and with respect to the Semantic Web

The current draft still includes the negative reference as follows:


"Governments would need to publish the required interfaces so third parties could query their information in distributed Web applications. This could provide huge benefits:

Publishing a PDF document on a portal provides almost no means for automation - where Semantic Web would indeed provide a high degree of automation.
While current technologies (Web Services, REST, etc.) provide such automation, public administrations need to create some set of queries and offer them as an API. This provides value, but requires design - and the decision on which queries are supported (and which not). It is impossible to foresee all the scenarios of data usage, so usage is therefore limited."

I am concerned that the representation of PDF here is unfair. While not an expert in the Semantic Web, the experts within Adobe assure me such statement is misleading and does not reflect the current capabilities of PDF.

Can we remove such reference, perhaps replacing it with

Publishing a static document on a portal provides a uniquely challenging effort for automation - where Semantic Web constructs would indeed provide a high degree of automation easily.

davemc
--
Dave McAllister
Director, Standards and Open Source
650-523-4942 (GC)
408-536-3881 (Office)
Dwmcallister (Skype, Aim, YIM)
http://blogs.adobe.com/open