[public-egov-ig] <none>

Hi Hans et. al.,

I've been working on a modular template system for issuance of Government (Statistical) reports.  My thinking is that if the Semantic Web will someday rule the world, it will be an interoperability problem like no other.

I was very impressed with OWMS and used the Netherlands as an example.  I am also very impressed by the amount of factual information in the US CIA's World Factbook and the amount of classification information available in the UN LOCODE data base.  What is missing is a common wrapper.  I call this wrapper "Spookville" (in honor of the CIA).

Spookville is a SKOS Collection of Governments - looking suspiciously like the real thing, with Provinces, States, etc.. To integrate Trade Data into the Government scheme one has to make some minor adjustments to the codes used and you have to make a conceptual adjustment with Time too.

There are three example files posted:

[1] sv.xml This is an XML data base.  It is the Top Level Concepts (Governments) plus one (International Waters).
[2] eu.xml This is an extension to subdivisions of only the EU Member Governments (and Candidates).
[3] nl.xml The Kingdom of the Netherlands only. Provinces plus Aruba and the Antillies.

In theory, the SKOS is modular, that is nl.xml fits in eu.xml which fits in sv.xml.  In practice, the people in Amsterdam (Capital) forget about Aruba and the people in The Hague (Seat of Government) wish they could forget about Amsterdam and Aruba, I expect.  This is where the "Open World Assumption" can get out of control, because of the many Vocabulary Encoding Schemes used.

In any case, have a look and if you have any suggestions I would like to hear them.

--Gannon

[1] http://www.rustprivacy.org/sun/spookville/sv.xml
[2] http://www.rustprivacy.org/sun/spookville/eu.xml
[3] http://www.rustprivacy.org/sun/spookville/nl.xml

Received on Monday, 11 October 2010 21:46:22 UTC