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The charter of government is to be responsive to the people. As such, government information belongs in the hands of the governed. Semantic Web technologies provide an unparalleled capability for making public data genuinely available to the general populace. Common practice in the past has been to publish data in idiosyncratic, disconnected forms. With new policies for information sharing in place, there is a wide appreciation of the need for sharable, connectable government information. This tutorial draws on information sharing projects such as the Federal Enterprise Architecture and the resources at open government web sites like oegov.org to provide attendees with a taste of real semantic web applications and the promise this approach holds for open, shared government. Attendees will learn the basics of the Semantic Web, as well as proven methods for accessing and combining existing information sources (e.g., spreadsheets, XML feeds and databases). Furthermore, we will use hands-on exercises to illustrate how to create applications using government information published as linked data on sites like oegov.org and dbpedia.org.

Content and Schedule

This half-day tutorial will include lectures and exercises on the following topics:

• Integrating existing data – spreadsheets and databases, RSS, Email, XML (half hour)
• Introduction to government semantic resources, probably including FEA and OEGOV(one hour)
• Hands-on exercise: Creating a simple integrated application

Prerequisites

Participants should be familiar with the W3C semantic web standards, RDF, RDFS, SKOS, SPARQL and OWL, as well as fundamental ideas behind linked data and information sharing on the web. A suitable introductory text is Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist. This material will also be covered in the accompanying tutorial, Semantic Web Basics.

Participants interested in the hands-on part of the tutorial would do well to have some experience with the Eclipse IDE framework, on which the hands-on software is based.

Technical Requirements and Software

The hands-on part of the tutorial will use TopBraid Composer Maestro Edition™, a trial version of which will be supplied at the tutorial. Participants interested in the hands-on part of the tutorial are expected to bring their own laptops, running either Windows or MacOS. Participants wishing to experience the tutorial using Linux are also welcome, but will require a special software download.

About the presenters

Dean Allemang specializes in innovative applications of knowledge technology and brings to TopQuadrant over 15 years of experience in research, deployment, and development of knowledge-based systems. He developed the curriculum for Top Quadrant's successful training series for Semantic Web technologies, which he has been presenting to customers world-wide for four years. Dean has completed a master's degree at the University of Cambridge as a Marshall scholar, a PhD at the Ohio State University as a National Science Foundation Graduate Scholar, and is a two-time winner of the Swiss Prize for Innovation in Technology. Along with Prof. Jim Hendler, Dean is co-author of the successful Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist (Morgan-Kaufmann, 2008), already in second printing and translated into Korean.

Course Resources

Open Electronic Government, ontology resources for the course

USASpending.gov

Data.gov

RPI Linked Data wiki

USGov XML.com