[okfn-help] Fwd: Universal distributed open government data catalog?

Wed Feb 3 01:24:15 GMT 2010

Interesting thread on eGov IG list...

J.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Peter Krantz <peter.krantz at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 9:24 PM
Subject: Re: Universal distributed open government data catalog?
To: Ed Summers <ehs at pobox.com>
Cc: eGov IG <public-egov-ig at w3.org>

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 second that suggestion. By using e.g. Atom you also get a way of
receiving updates about changed datasets in a machine readable way.

We used Atom as the carrier for RDF data items in a project I was
involved in  (swedish national legal information system). There are
many benefits and it is easy to get started as there are many tools to
create and consume Atom feeds.

If necessary you could extend Atom entries with information about the
specific datasets, or you could just use Atom to carry the pointer to
the rdf for a specific data set (described with whatever vocabularies
necessary). Or use both approaches simultaneously.

With regards to open data my experience is that you have some basic
information you want to capture:

Title (e.g. "Vehicle licence data")
Summary
Publisher
Categories
License
Timestamps
Link to about API page
Link to actual data set (if available)
Link to RDF data about dataset (if available)

Most of these are already available in Atom
(http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287.txt).

You could add licensing info as well if there is a simple way of capturing that.

Anyone who would like to contribute ideas for this in practice is
welcome to join the opengov catalog project here:
http://code.google.com/p/opengov-catalog/

Regards,

Peter Krantz
http://www.opengov.se/

-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://blog.okfn.org

Twitter/Identica: jwyg