Re: the white house uses RDFa

Hi Mark

Putting my SW Activity hat one for once:-)

Do you think we could have a SW Use Case for the gazette case? Ie, an
entry to

http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/sweo/public/UseCases/

I do not have the necessary personal contacts for this, you may have them...

Cheers

Ivan

Mark Birbeck wrote:
> Hi Manu,
> 
>> Pardon me as I retrieve my jaw from the floor...
>>
>> I thought government was supposed to be years behind the curve.
> 
> I also had to retrieve my jaw from the floor (although it was over a
> year ago), when UK government departments undertook even more
> ambitious RDFa projects.
> 
> I did a presentation at XML 2008 in December on two projects that I've
> been working on with the Central Office of Information:
> 
>   <http://webbackplane.com/node/103>
> 
> The key design criteria for both projects is that a number of
> government departments should be able to use their existing publishing
> tools to make important data available for re-use, but that the data
> should be in a standard vocabulary.
> 
> RDFa answers both requirements, because it can be embedded into HTML
> -- meaning each department can choose its own method of publishing,
> and other departments and third parties can extract it -- and that
> it's RDF -- meaning that the data can be published using existing,
> well known, vocabularies.
> 
> And although I'm pleased with those projects, they weren't actually the first.
> 
> Jeni Tennison had already been working with the Stationery Office on
> RDFa-ising the London Gazette:
> 
>   <http://2008.xtech.org/public/schedule/detail/528>
> 
> This is an exciting project, and shows RDFa in a slightly different
> scenario; there are certain categories of information for which there
> is a legal requirement that they be published in the Gazette, such as
> insolvencies, bankruptcies, certain types of roadworks, and so on. By
> using RDFa to describe them when they are published, third-parties are
> able to make use of the information, but the interesting thing is that
> the information is authoritative.
> 
> I would imagine that the increased publication of RDF-enabled
> information by governments, using RDFa, will have an impact in turn on
> encouraging the private sector to see RDFa as a viable semantic
> publication mechanism.
> 
> It all bodes well. :)
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Mark
> 

-- 

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
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