Recently Data.gov, the US Open Government Data Portal, opened vocab.data.gov, a service for publishing and retrieving RDF Vocabularies. This new service currently includes only six vocabularies; a number likely to increase in the near future. The technology behind it is based on Neologism, a Drupal module developed the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) to edit and publish RDF Schema Vocabularies.
The publication of RDF Vocabularies on Government Data Portals is not a new phenomenon. In the UK, data.gov.uk has published vocabularies such as the Payment ontology on its platform already in 2010. These examples demonstrate an increasing need for common vocabularies to publish public sector information.
The lack of semantic agreements (vocabularies) to publish government data is currently still considered a major barrier to its reuse. At the time Public Administrations too often publish government data using their own semantics, which hinders its cost-effective use. The publication of vocabularies as open government metadata is believed to be a necessary step towards increased semantic interoperability.
Neologism
Neologism is a web based tool that has the purpose to more efficiently create, edit and publish vocabularies. The vocabularies can be defined by classes and properties as main building blocks and besides sharing documentation in different formats (images, documents, video’s,) linked data can also be shared. The platform is built on Drupal and reuses the W3C's Best Practice for publishing RDF vocabularies and Cool URIs for the Semantic Web guidelines.
Data.gov
Data.gov is the US Open Governance initiative that is set up to increase public access to high-value, machine-readable datasets that are property of the American Federal Government.
To know more
Data.gov – website
Vocab.data.gov – vocabularies webpage
DERI’s Neologism - website
Related News item
Data.gov.uk uses the RDF Data Cube vocabulary to publish datasets