This project seeks to convert government data with the aim of providing a testbed for the implementation of the linked data principles advocated by Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C.
The ecosystem of government data is essentially that of a decentralized knowledgebase. The W3C Semantic Web standards provide unique features in the context of decentralized data exchange:
- the use of RDF and URLs provides a browsable, machine- and human-readable graph of government data using permalinks, enabling a web of data from previously disparate data islands;
- the SPARQL protocol provides a universal API via a graph database query service using HTTP and JSON;
- standardized vocabularies such as GeoSPARQL, the Data Cube Vocabulary and Akoma Ntoso provide a common database schema for common datasets;
- R2RML, JSON-LD and the Linked Data API provide the prospect of an incremental upgrade path for existing deployments.