Re: Agenda eGov IG 2010-01-06 - Item 6

Hi David

Yes and no :) RDA is currently in beta (being tested by various major
national libraries worldwide (Australia, UK, Canada, US) and is due for
official release to the library community around June this year I think.

There is of course an implicit link between .gov.* publications and the
RDA effort.

Very very quick overview - Traditionally, ANY publication which receives
an ISBN/ISSN etc and is catalogued (be it by NLA, LoC, UK Nat. Library
etc) goes onto a world wide system that allows libraries to share
catalogue information. These publications have, to date, been enhanced
with a metadata scheme called MARC21 which allows interrogation of the
various library databases around the world to determine what a publication
is, and where copies are held (including online).

Publishers and book sellers such as Amazon also have thier own system
(ONIX) of metadata that does the same thing.

RDA has been developed to, amongst other things, not only map to ONIX
(thus really allowing for the first time library data and publisher data
to meet) but also to account for the advent of digital publishing in all
forms - MARC21 was really more for the old traditional card systems that
libraries use that deal with physical books etc.

Now, given that for the most part, each and every country in the world has
a National Library, and that for the most part, all .gov.* Departments and
Ministries will have a library/information services that are responsible
for Gov publications produced by them, all Govs are already on a linked
worldwide system that, if one chose to, could pull up results like "every
publication from an Australian government body" or "all gov publications
from the counties of Kent and Surry", or "any publication listed as a
Federal Budget with an URL ending in .gov.*". Or, even better results if a
Government has been allocated a specific ISBN publisher identifer?

RDA will supercharge this level of query to a degree, particularily for
online works - so yes - I'd have to say MOST governments are in some way
using it for official publications. And it would be VERY easy (relative to
most IT projects) for any data.gov.* to build a tool that
leverages/interrogates these databases. I have uploaded a screenshot of
the NLA search function (requires login, hence the image, rather than a
link) to: http://www.w3.org/2007/eGov/IG/wiki/images/4/43/Nlasearch.png -
you'll note that there are specific search checkboxes for Government and
Online for example.

I'm on a steep learning curve with this myself, but I hope to, in the next
few weeks, start to build up a picture of open access points to this data
and hopefully some of the plans for the future from those driving this.
I'm hoping to get a meeting with someone from our National Library here,
but I have to encourage you if you're interested in this, in taking a
quick trip down to your Departments library services as a great crash
course - librarians seem more than happy to share the knowledge about
this, particularily if it means that those they work for start utilising
this tech in deploying documents online - for the most part Web
Services/Web Publishing areas and Library Services in departments are
considered seperate entities and don't talk, which seems odd.

Cheers

Chris


> Chris,
>
> That sounds interesting; is any government using it for official
> publications yet?
>
> David
>
> David Pullinger
> david.pullinger@coi.gsi.gov.uk
> Head of Digital Policy
> Central Office of Information
> Hercules House
> 7 Hercules Road
> London SE1 7DU
> 020 7261 8513
> 07788 872321
>
> Twitter #digigov and blogs:  www.coi.gov.uk/blogs/digigov
>
>
>
>>>> Chris Beer <chris-beer@grapevine.net.au> 06/01/2010 14:34 >>>
> Another good LGD "case" could be all .gov library data world wide, from
> LoC to WorldCat - uses MARC21, soon to be replaced by RDA which is a
> DC/XML friendly schema/ont for publications? Good because it's well
> established all ready and we can provide concrete working examples of
> tools that interrogate that data.
>
> Cheers
>
> Chris
>
> Thomas Bandholtz wrote:
>
>
> Sandro Hawke schrieb:
>
>
> 6. Discussion: Linked Data Demo
> +  What has George Been Up To?
> +  Other ideas for a demo?
>
>     Talking about http://www.w3.org/2007/eGov/IG/wiki/Projects#GLD_DemoI
> see something coming up around the Ecoinformatics cooperation, mainly
> driven by USEPA and
> EEA.http://www.eea.europa.eu/cooperations/eco-informatics
> There has been more and more discussion about Linking Open Data last
> year, and the Ecoterm activity of this coop is currently finalising a
> "Report on the outcome of the Ecoterm V Workshop" to be published soon.
>
> Some preliminary quotes from the current draft:
>
> "The Ecoterm product/service to be developed is a federated approach to
> accessing terminology and knowledge organization systems in the area of
> the environment that would allow them to be accessed, interchanged, and
> used in traditional indexing and search approaches, as well as semantic
> web applications. The idea is to share the content of these rich
> resources in such a way that duplication of effort can be avoided and
> interchange and integration of various structured and unstructured data
> can be enhanced. The approach should allow the vocabularies to be linked
> over time, as appropriate, and for resources to be linked to these
> vocabularies."
>
> "An approach that can be implemented by organizations somewhat
> independent of one another, since the Ecoinformatics International
> Technical Collaboration, while based on an international agreement, does
> not have an extensive governance structure or funding support"
>
> "An approach that can begin as a prototype but is robust enough to grow
> into a useful product/service"
>
> "SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) would be used to publish
> the thesauri and other terminology systems. The SKOS files would also be
> published as linked data."
>
> "Complement this with voiD files (http://rdfs.org/ns/void-guide) which
> are used to describe RDF resources in a linked data environment."
>
> "A simple umbrella web page would be created to aid in the management,
> promotion, and access to this network of linked data."
>
> This comes pretty close to a GLD use case, especially as I am expecting
> USEPA, EEA and national agencies to publish environmental observation
> data around this reference vocabulary.
>
> Actually this is not a demo of the eGov-IG but rather a real world use
> case so far.
>
> I am currently in discussion about cooperating and will point ro the
> report as soon as it gets published.
> Ecoterm is here:http://ecoterm.infointl.com/2009_Files/index.html
> Kind regards,
> Thomas
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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Received on Thursday, 7 January 2010 00:12:43 UTC