Government Linked Data Working Group Charter

Deliverables

Note on "optional" items: where items are described as "optional", they are to be considered a lower priority and produced only if the chairs decide addressing them does not significantly endanger the schedule. Typically, the production of optional elements is done in a loosely-coupled task force, with the output later incorporated by the Working Group if ready in time.

In all of its work, the group will design for personal privacy and information security, documenting considerations and the possible impact of its work.

Community Directory

The Working Group will construct and maintain an online directory of the government linked data community, containing the following items:

1. Deployments, at every stage of the effort from initial consideration to maturity, with (when available) success stories, lessons learned, and ongoing challenges (concrete use cases)
2. Vendors of linked data products and services
3. Contractors (firms and individuals) offering linked data services
4. End-User Applications which are available to the general public
5. Optionally: Research groups, researchers, and sources of research funding
6. Optionally: Outreach and Advocacy groups, individuals, and funding sources
7. Optionally: Training materials and programs, including classes, tutorials, and books

Optionally, other items deemed relevant and appropriate by the group may be included.

All items are to be listed and described from a neutral point of view, without the group performing any evaluation or expressing any judgments. If any material in the directory is contested, the group may decide to cite and quote third-party refutations.

The group is only charged with building and maintaining the directory until the end of its charter. Optionally, the group will construct the directory to be largely self-sustaining and arrange for its control to be transferred to some responsible party, either inside or outside of W3C.

Optionally, the directory may serve as a demonstration (or "dogfood") project, but the group is strongly advised to focus on content, not mechanism, using something like wiki pages, unless a better system is available.

Because of the brand association between this directory and W3C, W3C management reserves the right to final say in any disputes concerning the directory, even if hosting and day-to-day maintenance are provided by a third party.

Best Practices for Publishing Linked Data

The group will produce one or more Recommendations which address the following issues:

1. Procurement. Specific products and services involved in governments publishing linked data will be defined, suitable for use during government procurement. Just as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines allow governments to easily specify what they mean when they contract for an accessible Website, these definitions will simplify contracting for data sites and applications.

2. Vocabulary Selection. The group will provide advice on how governments should select RDF vocabulary terms (URIs), including advice as to when they should mint their own. This advice will take into account issues of stability, security, and long-term maintenance commitment, as well as other factors that may arise during the group's work.

3. URI Construction. The group will specify how to create good URIs for use in government linked data. Inputs include Cool URIs for the Semantic Web, Designing URI Sets for the UK Public Sector (PDF), and Creating URIs (data.gov.uk). Guidance will be produced not only for minting URIs for governmental entities, such as schools or agencies, but also for vocabularies, concepts, and datasets.

4. Versioning. The group will specify how to publish data which has multiple versions, including variations such as:

   • data covering different time periods
   • corrected data about the same time period
   • the same data published using different vocabularies, formats, and presentation styles
   • retracting published data

5. Stability. The group will specify how to publish data so that others can rely on it being available in perpetuity, persistently archived if necessary.

6. Legacy Data. The group will produce specific advice concerning how to expose legacy data, data which is being maintained in pre-existing (non-linked-data) systems.

7. Cookbook. The group will produce a collection of advice on smaller, more specific issues, where known solutions exist to problems collected for the Community Directory. This document is to be published as a Working Group Note, or website, rather than a Recommendation. It may, instead, become part of the Community Directory site.

Standard Vocabularies

The group will develop one or more W3C Recommendations to guide governments publishing data in which RDF vocabulary terms to use in information about certain common concept areas. The publishing granularity, in terms of which topics are covered in which documents, is left to the group to decide.

The group will have to determine whether it is better to reuse existing widely-deployed terms such as foaf:name and dc:temporal, in their existing name space, or mint new URIs in a w3.org name space. Even if the group decides to mint new URIs, it should link them to equivalent concepts (using, for example, owl:equivalentProperty links) unless there are strong reasons not to.

The decisions behind these deliverables will be closely related to the Best Practice advice on Vocabulary Selection (above), although the factors affecting W3C URIs are somewhat different from those affecting government URIs.

The group will gather and publish use cases and requirements for vocabularies to cover each of the following areas, and it will produce W3C Recommendation(s) defining the meaning and usage of each element in these vocabularies, where they are not already defined in suitable open standards. The group will also produce documentation, examples, and, optionally, test cases and OWL ontologies for these vocabularies.

1. Metadata, suitable for provenance (in coordination the Provenance Interchange Working Group), data catalogs (see the dcat data catalog vocabulary and the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network CKAN, and VoiD), data quality, timeliness of data, status, refresh rate, etc. The Library Linked Data Incubator Group reports offer some use cases and possible technical inputs.

   One challenge in metadata is granularity, as some attributes apply to vast ongoing collections of data, while others apply to particular triples, and most apply to some intermediate size dataset or graph.

2. Statistical "Cube" Data. The group will produce a vocabulary, compatible with SDMX, for expressing some kinds of statistical data. This need not be as expressive as all of SDMX, but may provide a subset as in the RDF Data Cube vocabulary. It may also include ways to annotate data to indicate its assumptions and comparability.

3. People, such as elements of FOAF or vCard in RDF. This is an area for particular attention to privacy considerations.

4. Organizational Structures. Such as the Epimorphics the organization ontology (see also its requirements document).

5. optional: Geography, Spatial Information, such as latitude and longitude. Inputs include W3C Geospatial Ontologies Incubator Report the European INSPIRE Directive, and vocabulary elements of GeoSPARQL. (See liaisons.)

Schedule

Milestones

Milestones

The group will document significant changes from this initial schedule on its home page.
Websites	Initial "Beta" Release	Stable Operation		Transition to Post-WG Operation
Community Directory	Sep 2011	Dec 2011		Jan 2013
"Cookbook" Advice Site	Dec 2011	Mar 2012		Jan 2013
Specifications	FPWD	LC	CR	PR	Rec
Best Practices for Publishing Government Linked Data	Dec 2011	Oct 2012	Dec 2012	Mar 2013	Apr 2013
Recommended Vocabularies for Government Linked Data	Dec 2011	Oct 2012	Dec 2012	Mar 2013	Apr 2013

Timeline View Summary

• May 2011: First teleconferences
• 29-30 Jun 2011: First face-to-face meeting (Washington DC) (details)
• Sep 2011: Initial "Beta" Release of Community Directory (not fully populated)
• 28-29 Sep 2011: Second face-to-face meeting (London, UK) (tentative)
• Dec 2011: Third face-to-face meeting (TBD)
• Dec 2011: Initial "Beta" Release of "Cookbook" Advice Site (not fully populated)
• Dec 2011: Stable operation of Community Directory
• Dec 2011: First Public Working Draft of Best Practices
• Dec 2011: First Public Working Draft of Recommended Vocabularies
• ...etc, as in table, above.