ESRI working with feds on data.gov and geodata.gov
White House to tie together mapping and data sites, By Aliya Sternstein NextGov, 05/28/2010. "The White House has contracted with a major developer of mapping software to merge a federal website that publishes geospatial information with Data.gov, the government's depot for downloadable data sets, the company's president said on Thursday. "California-based ESRI began last summer tying Data.gov to Geodata.gov, the geospatial information gateway, said company President Jack Dangermond in an interview with Nextgov." Continue reading
This is big: W3C + Libraries + Linked Data
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the international community organization that develops standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web. Its Incubator Activity division, which fosters rapid development, has formed a new group on Library Linked Data. The mission of this group will be "to help increase global interoperability of library data on the Web." This will bring together people involved in Semantic Web activities in the library community and beyond. The Library of Congress and OCLC are among the members of this new group.
- W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group. The group will explore how existing building blocks of librarianship, such as metadata models, metadata schemas, standards and protocols for building interoperability and library systems and networked environments, encourage libraries to bring their content, and generally re-orient their approaches to data interoperability towards the Web, also reaching to other communities. It will also envision these communities as a potential major provider of authoritative datasets (persons, topics...) for the Linked Data Web.
The changing landscape of librarianship increases their need for visibility and interoperability on the Web. In particular, the ubiquitous growth of digital libraries has led them to broaden their practices, standards and activities. Shared catalogues are going online on the open Web, digitized items collections are being brought together in worldwide initiatives, digital resources like online serials, preprints or web archives are driving the need for re-inventing librarianship. ...A re-orientation in the library perspective on information interoperability is needed, building on existing Web architecture and standards, in order to bring this content to the Web. A lot of structured data is already available within library systems and could be released as Linked Data, using Semantic Web technologies. Cultural heritage institutions could be a major provider of authoritative datasets (persons, topics...) for the Linked Data Web.Continue reading
Lunchtime listen: Video for Gov2.0 Expo now online
Wow that was fast! The Gov2.0 Expo in Washington DC just wrapped up 2 days of speakers, panels, discussions etc and already the video from the Expo is up online (youtube and blip.tv channels). Here's just 2 of the many interesting talks that I've only begun to absorb. Enjoy!
How researchers enhanced Data.gov using semantic technology
How researchers enhanced Data.gov using semantic technology, by Sean Gallagher, GCN, May 18, 2010.
A three-person team at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, however, has demonstrated how one approach can make greater use of the massive sets of data available on Data.gov, using the power of the semantic web. The conversion project has shown how quickly and inexpensively visualization and mash-up applications can be built from government data when it’s put into a web-friendly form.Continue reading
Changes at Data.gov
If you haven't looked at data.gov lately, you should. It was launched one year ago and has had a bit of a makeover recently and has added lots of new data. OMB Watch has a quick overview and comment about the current state of data.gov (Data.gov Celebrates First Birthday with a Makeover, by Roger Strother, OMB Watch. 05/24/10). Check out these highlights:
- Apps where developers are creating a wide variety of applications, mashups, and visualizations. From crime statistics by neighborhood to the best towns to find a job to seeing the environmental health of your community...
- Semantic Web where they highlight a set of data.gov resources reformatted into Resource Description Framework (RDF) format. These allow new kinds of rich interaction with the data. See, for example, the White House Visitor Search. Also see the Thetherless World Weblog from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where some of this work is being done.