Re: Improving Organization of Govt. based Linked Data Projects

On 20 March 2010 21:18, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com> wrote:
> All,
>
> I continue to struggle with easy discovery of Government oriented Linked
> Data (UK and U.S. are examples). Basically, a long time ago, we established
> some core principles for Linked Open Data published to the Web. The
> components where broken down as follows:
>
> 1. Publish RDF Data Set archive URLs to a well known location --
> http://esw.w3.org/DataSetRDFDumps
> 2. Publish SPARQL Endpoints -- e.g., <http://esw.w3.org/SparqlEndpoints>
> 3. Publish Linked Data -- an home page or deeply linked URI will do.

I suspect (and hope) 1 & 2 are redundant if you have 3.

>From what I've heard from the w3c eGov list and bits of offlist chat,
it's still early days for getting government data out there. There
seems to be a lot of momentum, but right now it's directed towards
local issues, getting data into a Web-friendly form (I hate to use the
term "legacy", but a lot of the time it does seem to apply - the
source material is buried in a spreadsheet or even a pdf document).
Getting the stuff translated & exposed, linked into the rest of the
world (beyond just shared vocabs) will be phase 2 I expect.

> DBpedia still provides a very nice template for the above.

Absolutely.

It's worth noting that for the gov depts to maintain credibility, that
provenance information should be associated with any data exposed - a
minor technical hassle, in most cases likely fulfilled by manual
annotation. (see the Open Provenance Model, if I understand being
RDFized in data.gov.uk http://openprovenance.org/).

A related issue (that Jeni Tennison has raised) is the question of
authority over the statements. I believe she has the right idea, that
to link gov data into e.g. dbpedia, intermediary graphs are necessary,
to ring fence the levels of commitment between the national,
centralised expression of "facts" and those other facts we know and
love from the social-web world.

> Unfortunately, most of the Govt oriented Linked Data projects haven't quite
> adopted the scheme above thereby making the process of discovering items 1-3
> quite tedious.

Your impatience is understandable, but from what I can gather, things
are progressing...

> Suggestions:
>
> I think we can tackle this problem by doing the following:
>
> 1. Use the moniker Linked Open Govt Data (LOGD) for all Govt. oriented
> Linked Data projects

Where? A good idea in principle, but we don't really yet have the
material in place to justify a shared e.g. mailing list.

> 2. Use #hashtag #logd on Twitter and "logd" for tagging on del.cio.us -- one
> data is on del.icio.us or Twitter, its basically part of LOD via RDFizers
> etc..

That sounds reasonable. Anything that can help human discovery can't
hurt machine discovery.

> So Far I have:
>
> 1. http://delicious.com/kidehen/logd  -- del.icio.us tag

good-o

Cheers,
Danny.


-- 
http://danny.ayers.name

Received on Saturday, 20 March 2010 20:53:33 UTC