The Obama administration has set the goal of achieving and unprecedented level of openness, participation, transparency, and collaboration in government. This applies especially to the accessibility of government information and the tracking of stimulus expenditures.
This presentation discusses ways that cloud computing, web 2.0, and web 3.0 semantic technologies can be used to deliver citizen-friendly solutions for recovery.gov and data.gov that fulfill the goals of the new administration. Also included is a practical demonstration based on easy-to-use tools developed by Cambridge Semantics.
Thank you for sharing. The term Semantic has been around for a while. Has it really caught on or is it one of those terms that will always be an adjective for the next it thing?
Denise, the compilation of Semantic Web use cases and case studies at W3C might be of help; I’m sure Mills could even add more examples.
The next really big thing for the internet is computing that understands concepts. Slide #14 in the deck makes a point that there are always multiple ways to represent knowledge and compute with it. However, the trend is to represent knowledge about what the data or information means separately from the content file, page, document or other artifact in a form that can be reasoned with using computers, and combined with other knowledge. As this shift of paradigm evolves, the term “semantic” will become less important. Rather, we’ll be asking something like “what sort of semantics do you mean?”
With respect to the requirements of recovery.gov and data.gov, taking a semantic approach has advantages. Once you separate the knowledge about the data, its concepts, structure, provenance, access method from the data set artifact, then it becomes much easier to work with, combine with other information, and present in various ways. The second half of the presentation illustrates how this can be done. What’s interesting is that anyone using these tools does not need to know anything about the “semantic web” or RDF, or OWL, or SPARQL, etc. (whew…thank god) That technology is simply under the hood.
“What’s interesting is that anyone using these tools does not need to know anything about the “semantic web” or RDF, or OWL, or SPARQL, etc. (whew…thank god) That technology is simply under the hood.”
As one who (unfortunately) still needs to code HTML by hand to get it properly coded (and remember, it’s 2009 already), I very much hope so!