This post includes four articles from Government Computing News. After reading the first article you’ll quickly realize why information professional will be? could be? should be? essential in the development of the semantic web.

1) The Web’s next act: A worldwide database (7 pages)

“Now I want you to put your data on the Web,” Berners-Lee said at a talk hosted by the Technology, Entertainment, Design organization earlier this year, where he introduced his concept of Linked Data. He identified the U.S. government as a candidate for early use of this format.

[Snip]

For many, Linked Data is still a difficult concept to understand. After all, isn’t data already on the Web, in terms of text on Web pages? Berners-Lee told the TED crowd, “You can read [documents] and follow links from them, and that’s [about] it.… There is still huge unlocked potential.”

[Snip]

RDF is based on making associations. It describes data by breaking each data element into three nodes: a subject, predicate and object. For example, consider the fact that Yellowstone National Park offers camping. “Yellowstone” would be the subject. “offers” would be the predicate and “camping” would be the object. All three elements get uniform resource identifiers, or a globally recognized Internet addresses.

2) How the Semantic Web would work (2 pages)

Rendering data into RDF, which is used to create the Linked Data necessary to the Semantic Web, can make it easier to interpose it with other sets of data to create entirely new datasets and visualizations, [project researcher Li] Ding said.

3) 2 examples of how government data linking can work (2 pages)

4) 13 Resources for Government Linked Data

Note: The links for the three W3C documents do not work. Here are the correct links.
+ RDF Primer
+ Web Ontology Language Primer
+ RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing

Source: Government Computing News

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