Last April, I mentioned the work of the W3C Government Linked Data Working Group (GLDWG) to provide recommendations for governments on which RDF vocabulary terms to use for common concept areas. The GLDWG has announced Last Call working drafts of three vocabularies:
• Organization Ontology (ORG): describes a core ontology for organizational structures, aimed at supporting linked data publishing of organizational information across a number of domains. It is designed to allow domain-specific extensions to add classification of organizations and roles, as well as extensions to support neighbouring information such as organizational activities.
• Data Catalog (DCAT) vocabulary: an RDF vocabulary for expressing the contents of data catalogs, such as government data portals. DCAT is for catalogs of all kinds of data (not just RDF data), but uses RDF to support easy aggregation of catalogs and construction of services which can search across many unrelated catalogs
• Data Cube vocabulary: an RDF vocabulary for publishing multidimensional data, particularly statistical data. It is compatible with the cube model that underlies SDMX (Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange), widely-used ISO standard. The Data Cube Vocabulary brings essential SDMX elements to RDF, providing a standard way for governments to publish statistical information as Linked Data.
The GLDWG is seeking feedback on these vocabularies and all comments are welcome. Please submit comments and feedback directly to the Government Linked Data public mailing list ([email protected]) by April 8, 2013.