[ckan-discuss] RDF for data catalogues (was: Re: Universal distributed open government data catalog?)

[Rufus Pollock]

On 17 February 2010 22:56, Peter Krantz <peter.krantz at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 18:59, Ed Summers <ehs at pobox.com> wrote:
>>
>> My personal opinion is that a key ingredient to making this happen is
>> to publish dataset availability and metadata using a syndicated feed
>> (Atom and/or RSS).
>
> I have implemented the RDF metadata on opengov.se now. All data is in
> swedish but you get the idea if you look at an individual dataset:
>
> http://www.opengov.se/data/42/
>
> ...and its RDF representation (based on dublin core terms):
>
> http://www.opengov.se/data/42/rdf/

Great stuff Peter. For comparison, here's an example of what you get
from ckan.net + semantic.ckan.net:

http://pastie.org/830693

At the moment we redirect into semantic.ckan.net from ckan.net via a
rel=alternative and 303 on the Accept header, e.g try out:

curl -L -H "Accept: application/rdf+xml"
http://ckan.net/package/2000-us-census-rdf

semantic.ckan.net also provides a human readable version of the data:

<http://semantic.ckan.net/data/2000-us-census-rdf>

We've thought quite a bit about integrating directly into ckan.net
(hence the /data/ rather than /package/ on semantic.ckan.net) but the
issue here is that we want to use a proper triple store for the data
so you can query via sparql (currently
http://semantic.ckan.net/sparql). Thus we've gone for the separate but
related model for the present.

Maybe it would be worth getting together for half-an-hour on skype and
etherpad to work on hammering out a shared ontology here? I also know
the people from DERI (Richard Cyganiak especially) are working on this
so we should talk with them.

> I have also made sure an Atom feed contains all datasets (with a link
> element to the RDF representations in each entry element) here:
>
> http://www.opengov.se/feeds/data/

Great. Like you we should add RDF link to our atom feed (which as I've
already mentioned can be found at
http://www.ckan.net/revision/list?format=atom&days=30)

> Please note that the feed contains datasets that are not (yet) open.
> Some may have a commercial license and may not be available on the
> web.

That's also true for us ;)

Regards,

Rufus
-- 
Open Knowledge Foundation
Promoting Open Knowledge in a Digital Age
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