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Hacking Congress
02 Sep 2004 by Ryan Singer
Semantic web frontiersman Paul Ford has a new column on XML.com. In his first installment he describes his plan to create an RDF description of the U.S. federal government.
For the last few years, I’ve wanted to collect as much data on the U.S. government as I could, convert it to RDF, and build a site and a web service that make it possible to explore that data. This will be my goal over the next year, and I’ll document my progress here on XML.com . . . In addition to testing the Semantic Web concept, if all goes well, I’ll have a nicely organized map of the U.S. government, structured using publicly available ontologies, available in a single, reliable format (RDF), which anyone can incorporate into their own Semantic Web projects.
Awesome.
4 comments so far (Post a Comment)
02 Sep 2004 | Taylor said...
Totally unrelated, but the rss feed that is in your <link> tag seems to be non-existent. I did manage to subscribe to index_full though :)
03 Sep 2004 | pb said...
I couldn't tell if that was an indictment of the Senate web site or RDF/SemanticWeb.
People seem to forget that the *sole* reason HTML was outrageously successful is because it is so loose and ugly.
03 Sep 2004 | Paul said...
Standards compliance doesn't matter for most of the web. But the Senate's web page should be designed according to best practices, and it should be accessible to the greatest number of Americans.
If you look at the senate.gov HTML code, or view it in lynx, you'll find that, beyond messy coding, it isn't accessible. The U.S. government is a huge fan of standards (i.e. NIST), and the Senate site would be both more efficient to maintain and more accessible to citizens were it revised to meet established, open standards.
03 Sep 2004 | indi said...
Paul, I hear you about the government and standards, especially not sticking to ones they've mandated. Supposedly if you design pages for the government you have to comply with the Section 508 accessibility guidlines otherwise they aren't allowed to use them. The company I work with was near closing a deal with the VA for providing patient education via the internet. We complied with all standards but lost out to a company whose content was subsidized (and often authored) by a drug company. Of course they weren't compliant but our pleas for sanity and content quality fell on deaf ears.
