Fwd: the white house uses RDFa

Hi Jeni,

If you've been wondering why your ears have been burning...

Ivan asked whether you'd be able to add the London Gazette project as
a case study to the list of semweb use cases, linked to in his comment
below.

I'm CCing him because I'm not quite sure how you go about it. :)

Regards,

Mark


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org>
Date: Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 9:38 AM
Subject: Re: the white house uses RDFa
To: Mark Birbeck <mark.birbeck@webbackplane.com>
Cc: Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>, RDFa
<public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf@w3.org>


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
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
mobile: +31-641044153
PGP Key: http://www.ivan-herman.net/pgpkey.html
FOAF: http://www.ivan-herman.net/foaf.rdf



-- 
Mark Birbeck, webBackplane

mark.birbeck@webBackplane.com

http://webBackplane.com/mark-birbeck

webBackplane is a trading name of Backplane Ltd. (company number
05972288, registered office: 2nd Floor, 69/85 Tabernacle Street,
London, EC2A 4RR)

Received on Thursday, 29 January 2009 11:49:37 UTC