just another eGov Introduction

Hello eGov,

since 1998 I am consulting the Federal Environment Agency, Germany,
about building and maintaining public information systems, getting more
and more involved in the European discussion following the European
Directive on the Re-use of Public Sector Information, as mentioned in
the eGov charter.

More specific, environmental authorities in Europe have legal
obligations according to Directive 2003/4/EC on public access to
environmental information [1].

This first led to the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the
European Community (INSPIRE) [2], which is based on Standards of the
Open Geospatial Consortium and ISO Metadata.

Since 2007, INSPIRE is complemented by the vision of a Shared
Environmental Information System (SEIS) [3].

Earlier this year I have been co-editor of "Proceedings of the European
conference of the Czech Presidency of the Council of the EU TOWARDS
eENVIRONMENT. Opportunities of SEIS and SISE: Integrating Environmental
Knowledge in Europe. Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, March
2009." [4]

More specific, I chaired the workshop about "Shared Terminology for
SEIS", focussing  on the federation of distributed multilingual
environmental terminology resources by means of the W3C SKOS
Recommendation [5] and Linking Open Data principles [6]. This will be
continued in October at the 5th Ecoterm Meeting in Rome [7]

Most recently I am in discussion with members of the European
Environment Agency about publishing not only reference vocabularies but
also obligatory reporting data in RDF using the Linking Open Data pattern.

These are enough reasons to be extremely interested in collaborating
with the re-chartered eGovernment Interest Group in order to exchange
blueprints and experience on the way to a globally interoperable shared
information space for humans and machines!

What we need are some few powerful common data schemes, one of them may
be a RDFized version of the Observations and Measurements standard of
the OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) suite (see we have to face a
powerful Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) in Europe ...), but this is
just an example.

Some of the specific challenges we are facing with respect to public
authorities are governance, syndication, provenance, trust, not yet
solved sufficiently by the W3C Semantic Web Activity.

Looking forward to a powerful next eGov iteration,
Yours,

Thomas Bandholtz
Principal Consultant

thomas.bandholtz@innoq.com, http://www.innoq.com
innoQ Deutschland GmbH, Halskestr. 17, D-40880 Ratingen, Germany
Phone: +49 228 9288490 Mobile: +49 178 4049387 Fax: +49 228 9288491



[1]
http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/environment/general_provisions/l28091_en.htm
[2] Directive 2007/2/EC, http://inspire.jrc.ec.europa.eu/
[3] http://ec.europa.eu/environment/seis/index.htm
[4] http://www.e-envi2009.org/?proceedings
[5] http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/
[6] http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/pub/LinkedDataTutorial/
[7] http://ecoterm.infointl.com/
[8] http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/om

Received on Thursday, 24 September 2009 18:58:52 UTC