RDF and Open Government Data

More often than not the topic of RDF (W3C’s Resource Description Framework) comes up soon after you get into any conversation about open government data.  It comes up as the discussion strays into ways of making published datasets more valuable to developers and other potential consumers of any data that might be made available.

Well described and semantically tagged data is always going to be at the top end of that spectrum, with the additional metadata making it clearer to the developer what the purpose of the data is and how it can be used. 

I’ve talked before about how much work a government agency might want to put into publishing their data, and conversely how much use that data then is to consumers. With additional usefulness comes additional cost, complexity and governance. Individual governments will decide for themselves how far along this path they want to walk.

The Resource Description Framework (or RDF) has been around for the best part of a decade and was designed, in part, on the basis that we would eventually see massive amounts of machine processable data and information published for consumption on the web – exactly as we are beginning to see as governments publish various national and state level datasets.

As additional background reading on the topic, Tim Berners-Lee talks about how RDF might apply directly to Open Government Data in his June 2009 article: “Putting Government Data online”.

To help explain the concept the W3C have published a comprehensive RDF Primer, which begins with the introductory text;

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a language for representing information about resources in the World Wide Web. It is particularly intended for representing metadata about Web resources, such as the title, author, and modification date of a Web page, copyright and licensing information about a Web document, or the availability schedule for some shared resource. However, by generalizing the concept of a "Web resource", RDF can also be used to represent information about things that can be identified on the Web, even when they cannot be directly retrieved on the Web. Examples include information about items available from on-line shopping facilities (e.g., information about specifications, prices, and availability), or the description of a Web user’s preferences for information delivery.

RDF is intended for situations in which this information needs to be processed by applications, rather than being only displayed to people. RDF provides a common framework for expressing this information so it can be exchanged between applications without loss of meaning. Since it is a common framework, application designers can leverage the availability of common RDF parsers and processing tools. The ability to exchange information between different applications means that the information may be made available to applications other than those for which it was originally created.

… it then goes on to say;

[..] while English is good for communicating between (English-speaking) humans, RDF is about making machine-processable statements. To make these kinds of statements suitable for processing by machines, two things are needed:

• a system of machine-processable identifiers for identifying a subject, predicate, or object in a statement without any possibility of confusion with a similar-looking identifier that might be used by someone else on the Web.
• a machine-processable language for representing these statements and exchanging them between machines.

Anybody with an interest in this area should read both the full RDF primer and the W3C homepage for RDF.

As one further point I thought it might also be useful (in a slightly self serving way) to dig around and find areas where Microsoft has been working with RDF in either research projects, products or within various developer tools.

With the help of a colleague in Redmond we came up with the list below. It is not exhaustive, but does gives a representative sample of the type of work that the company is doing in this area;

(Portions of this article quote the WC3 Primer on RDF which is held under the Copyright of the W3C, full notice and further information: Copyright © 2004 W3C^® (MIT, ERCIM, Keio), All Rights Reserved. W3C liability, trademark, document use and software licensing rules apply.)