This group's mission is to discuss and prepare data and API specifications relating to open government information, which may include:
* people, such as legislators
* organizations, such as legislatures or committees
* people's positions within organizations
* areas, such as electoral districts
* events, such as elections
* documents, such as bills or agendas
* speeches, such as those given by legislators in legislatures
* votes
The group will base its work on existing standards as much as possible, and re-use existing terms (classes and properties) wherever appropriate.
The group may define various serializations of the specifications, including but not limited to RDF and JSON.
The group will seek consensus around, and support for, these specifications which may then be brought to an appropriate Working Group to advance a specification from draft to standard.
The group will coordinate as appropriate with the Web Schemas Task Force of the Semantic Web Interest Group and other relevant groups within the W3C.
Group's public email, repo and wiki activity over time
Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.
A few weeks ago work on a Core Public Organisation Vocabulary (CPOV) started:
The Core Public Organisation Vocabulary aspires to become a common data model for describing public organisations in the European Union.
A Core Vocabulary is a simplified, reusable and extensible data model that captures the fundamental characteristics of an entity in a context-neutral fashion. Core Vocabularies are the starting point for agreeing on new semantic interoperability assets and defining mappings between existing assets to guarantee a level of cross-domain and cross-border interoperability that can be attained by public administrations.
EDIT: On July 4, 2014, I decided to no longer support OParl. The two reasons were:
missing transparent decision processes
a decision by OParl on that day to abolish JSON-LD conformance
I then forked the original OParl specification which was based on JSON-LD and created OpenGovLD. Further work on this specification will be done within the W3C Open Government Community Group and in collaboration with other relevant organizations such as the OKFN.
I only became aware of the W3C Open Government Community Group today.
A grassroots initiative named OParl is active in Germany with the aim to standardize the format of parliamentary data of councils of municipalities, city councils and other similar councils. The text on the website so far is only available in German, sorry, but the identifiers used in the specification are in English.
The initiative is already supported by the major German vendors of council information system software, several city administrations, IT-service providers and Open Data initiatives.
Last week an OParl-workshop decided to base the specification on the W3C standard JSON-LD. In other words: the intention is to create a specification for Linked Parliamentary Data.
One of the intentions of OParl is to extend the community of stakeholders and collaborators and the specification so that it can be used in other parts of the world. And at the same time state and national parliaments should also be able to use it to publish legislative data.
Looking forward to collaboration between OParl and the W3C Open Government Community Group !
Welcome to the Open Government Community Group. For more context on this group’s creation and to introduce yourself, see the Introductions thread on the public-opengov@w3.org mailing list.
