F2F1 Community Directory Discussion Summary

Discussions

• Initial discussion took place at the W3C Government Linked Data Working Group First F2F June 29-30, 2011.

• Subsequent discussions on requirements, design goals & deployment information in Aug-Sept 2011

Task Force

• Tope Omitola (University of Southampton, UK)
• Ghislain Atemezing (Eurecom, PhD student working on the www.datalift.org project, French Gov't)
• Bernadette Hyland (3 Round Stones, Washington DC area)
• Michael Hausenblas (DERI, Galway Ireland)
• William Brafford (Revelytix, Maryland US) (resigned from GLD WG Sept 2011)

From the Charter

From section 2.1 of the charter.

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

Purposes of the Community Directory

In the discussion, we came up with at least three purposes for the community.

1. To aid government agencies in a procurement process, by showing them what projects have been done, and by showing them which vendors, contractors, and software systems exist in the space.
2. To help the Working Group in later stages of the standards process, so we can solicit feedback, test cases, etc.
3. For outreach - so that people interested in Government Linked Data (civic groups, policy leaders) have a place to start, and so that journalists and bloggers have a resource for writing about our community.

Website Organization

Basic features

We should treat deployments differently from vendors, contractors, and researchers.

For deployments, it would be useful to have something like SWEO Semantic Web Case Studies and Use Cases site. Linked Data project descriptions could vary from short summaries to long, detailed use cases. The site should let users do faceted searches on deployments, technologies utilized, and domain (e.g., energy, law, environment, etc.)

For vendors, contractors, etc., we just need a directory - a "glorified address book" with searching and sorting.

Information Collected/Displayed

The Community Directory Questionnaire is a set of questions whose answers give us all the data below.

In general, the information should either be submitted by an official representative of the project or attributed to a trustworthy source.

Design goals

1. Source of vendor/contractor/researcher & deployment information for governments agencies (local, regional, national)
2. Self-maintaining
3. Data published in a W3C RDF serialization (or submitted W3C Standard)
4. NO discussion/feedback/ratings system - don't want to let companies game the system as a means of advertising.
5. This group is enjoined by the charter to maintain a neutral point of view.

• Project Name
  • Project web site
• Contact information
  • Point of contact (POC)
  • Link to FOAF file
• Participants
  • Participant Name
  • Point of Contact
• Industry or Domain Category
• Technologies used (see http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/#w3c_overview)
• "Star" qualifications (1-5) (add tool tips with info from http://lab.linkeddata.deri.ie/2010/star-scheme-by-example/)
• Stage: prototype, production

Functionality to be supported:

• Named queries
• Visualization of vendors/researchers/deployment on a map view
• pie chart with distribution

As a resource, here is incomplete map of different Open Government Data initiatives around the world.

Vendors/Researcher

We suggest creating an Organization. An Organization can be a product and/or service company.

• Product or Service company (called "Organization Name")
• Contact information ("General Email", "General Telephone")
• website ("Website URL")
• Point of contact ("Contact Person", "Full Name", "Job Title", "Email", "Telephone")
• Experience ("Organizational Experience" = Business Semantics, Consulting, Middleware, Ontology Development, Outreach, RDF Hosting, RDF Store, Research, Training, Visualization)
• Link to FOAF file (TO DO - should be included in Point of contact)
• Years active in area (Format: "Year you first used ____ in a project?") (TO DO)
• Size of project team? (TO DO 1-5, 5-10, 10+)
• Comments: 120 chars (TO DO free text)
• # of Projects in this area? (DEFERRED)

• NO discussion/feedback/ratings system - don't want to let companies game the system as a means of advertising. This group is enjoined by the charter to maintain a neutral point of view.

Products

• Product name (free text entry)
• Vendor name (Instance of Organization)
• Technologies used (RDF, RDFa, OWL, from W3C)
• Product website ("Website URL")
• Point of contact ("Contact Person", "Full Name", "Job Title", "Email", "Telephone")
• Additional Information: (TO DO - e.g., deployments 120 chars)

Outreach

• Create a list of technology policy leaders per country so we know who to engage throughout the world. (Action: Rick Murphy)

• Create a second list of organizations in civil society who we think are important to engage with. (Action: Rick Murphy)

• Links to training courses made by vendors or contractors

• Links to academic resources and training

Possible Technologies to Use in the Site

Website technologies options suggested:

1) Callimachus- Callimachus (kəlĭm'əkəs) is a framework for data-driven applications based on Linked Data principles. Callimachus allows Web authors to quickly and easily create semantically-enabled Web applications.

Benefits of Callimachus approach:

• FLOSS software.
• All pages will have RDFa markup (for organizations, people, etc).
• All data available as Linked Open Data.
• Uses standard vocabularies including vCard, FOAF, Good Relations.
• Flexible RDF Schema (can add new organization types, etc). Triples up & down.
• Hosted on the cloud.
• Hosting can be taken over by the W3C or some responsible party, either inside or outside of W3C, in compliance with Charter.

2) wiki (Mediawiki or otherwise)

• • Semantic Mediawiki. Benedikt Kämpgen (FZI Karlsruhe) offered to provide tech assistance for using SMW because his organization is contributor/sponsor.
• Others? Please suggest others.