Furthering LOD for Open Government

Egov team,

Sorry that I had to drop off of the call a bit early, family matters
intervened.  I had hoped to introduce our viewpoint a bit more on the
call but would like to follow-up on the list.

 

As a specialized contractor and open source developer with substantial
U.S. government clients we feel that the combination of the open
government initiative and linked open data are at a crucial inflection
point, one that this group can help realize.  If LOD becomes the form
for open government data and even 10% of their plans for a more open
government succeed, it will propel this technology into the mainstream -
big time.  If these plans are to be realized we really don't see any
other viable option.  However, success is far from certain and there is
a lot we can do to help.  We hope our involvement in this group can
assist in helping that along.

 

As we all know, there is a lot of FUD in this area - some due to lack of
education and some due to the immaturity of the technology.  We don't
see anyplace stakeholders can go to get a handle on the why and how of
applying LOD to open government.  To this end, the web "landing pages"
that are well publicized, externally focused and well presented are a
crucial asset. We know these efforts are already underway and plan to
contribute to their success.  I suggest that we need a set of such
landing points such as; "LOD For Open Government", LOD for specific
governments (of course our focus is U.S. federal), etc. These can then
provide the overview and links to explanatory materials at the executive
and technical level as well as success stories and resources.  In
addition to web assets, regular introductory sessions in DC (for the
U.S. group) would provide the kind of follow-up that the government
executives and architects will need as they are considering a "plunge"
into LOD.  They have to understand it and be comfortable that it is not
a risky venture - face to face is crucial.

 

Our particular focus is architecture, architecture at all levels from
business architectures to technical systems architectures.  As such we
have an interest in "open linked architectures" - using the LOD platform
to make architectures more accessible, connectable and be able to relate
them to different stakeholders in viewpoints they understand.  We have
been involved with the Object Management Group (OMG) for some years
where modeling standards such as UML, BPMN, SysML, UPDM (DoDAF in UM),
SoaML and Records Management are created and managed.  I am also chair
of the Open Government Workgroup in OMG and will be acting as liaison.
One RFP we are sponsoring in OMG right now (and may be issues at the
meeting in a couple of weeks) will be to standardize the mapping from
these architectural languages (which are all based on the MOF/XMI
standard) to RDF  - thus making models in all of these languages
immediately available as linked open data.  We already have an open
source prototype of this on www.ModelDriven.org
<http://www.modeldriven.org/>  and welcome additional architectures to
publish.  We presented these concepts at ISWC, the presentation is here:
http://portal.modeldriven.org/content/ekb-papers-and-presentations

 

So our "action items", that we hope will be supported by this group are:

*	"Outreach" in the form of web resources and educational sessions
*	Collaboration with the OMG in making architecture and
architectures a part of the LOD cloud
*	Working together to achieve the open government vision be
leveraging LOD

 

Please fell free to contact me for more information on any of the above,
visit ModelDriven.org and also consider attending the OMG meeting in
Long Beach, CA - the week of Dec 7th.

 

 

Regards,
Cory Casanave, CEO

Model Driven Solutions, ModelDriven.org

OMG Board of Director

Chair of the OMG Open Government Workgroup.