Re: Differing definitions

David,

Imagine 27 countries and 22 official languages and the collective mountains of shared documents, which is the problem the European Union deals with every single day in its 27 bureaucracies.

I recommend looking at:
http://cordis.europa.eu/home_en.html
http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/home_en.html
http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/projects_en.html
http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/info-programmes_en.html
http://www.clarin.eu

ANY project dealing with semantic web technologies should appear in searches you do on these pages.

You may also want to check: the IFLA for information or useful referrals to sources to help you on your quest; www.ifla.org.

Another angle to the issue is "open repositories".

Again some European perspectives, start from this page and search:
http://www.driver-support.eu/linkspubs/organisationlinks.html

Milton Ponson
GSM: +297 747 8280
PO Box 1154, Oranjestad
Aruba, Dutch Caribbean
Project Paradigm: A structured approach to bringing the tools for sustainable development to all stakeholders worldwide by creating ICT tools for NGOs worldwide and: providing online access to web sites and repositories of data and information for sustainable development

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--- On Fri, 12/10/10, David Barber <dmbarber@gmail.com> wrote:

From: David Barber <dmbarber@gmail.com>
Subject: Differing definitions
To: public-lod@w3.org
Date: Friday, December 10, 2010, 2:31 PM

I've had a varied but extensive history of dealing with government data in electronic form.  This started as a government documents librarian helping people find government data in electronic form, continued with sharing it on the early Internet, and most recently managing government data as a government employee.  Throughout this experience one of the major concerns associated with expanding electronic access to government data from multiple sources has been getting people to recognize and take into account the differences in the definitions associated with data elements.  This is particularly important for historical analysis or comparison of multiple governmental units.  For example, two governments will define unemployment differently and the same government will change its definition over time.  Unfortunately, it has been my experience that when people want to do such longitudinal or multi-government analyses they were often not motivated to
 pay attention to these differences.

My question for this list is whether there are any model projects which are effectively using semantic technologies not just to make data open, but also to make the related definitional data more visible and easier to understand or compare across data sources.  It is my hope that the technologies associated with linked open data can make this type of information more useful than when it was buried in the back of government documents.

Thanks in advance for any pointers to such efforts.
David Barber