Open Government Linked Open Data
It was about this time a year ago when it became clear to me that that the Obama campaign’s fact sheet called Connecting and Empowering All Americans Through Technology and Innovation implied developing a government collaboration platform based on Linked Data. Shortly after the election in November and while serving as an invited expert on W3C’s electronic government interest group I wrote the Open Government: Linked Open Data use case that called for “new set of information technology architecture principles that align open government with citizen engagement in a networked society enabled by linked open data.”
Now a year later I am excited to recommend the Building Semantic Web Applications for Government half-day tutorial at International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2009. This tutorial builds on the work that Dean Allemang, Chief Scientist at TopQuadrant, lead for our team the the General Services Administration as well as TopQuadrant’s emerging Ontologies for Electronic Government. In Dean’s own words “The charter of government is to be responsive to the people. As such, government information belongs in the hands of the governed.”
Today, Linked Data is the ONLY Internet-scale collaboration platform for open government. As I have written previously the long-term success of Linked Data for Open Government depends on an information life-cycle where publishing and linking co-evolve with minimal intervention. In the sort-term and to paraphrase John Sheridan of the UK’s Office of Public Sector Information, shiny objects and tiny cost allow the groundswell of innovation to reach a tipping point.
While you’re at ISWC09 be sure to attend Dean’s half-day tutorial on Monday October 26 from 2:00pm to 6:00pm.