Dov WinerThe Jewish Agency

Seminar on Digital Records

Israel State Archive

June 21, 2004

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Summary

eGovernment related initiatives

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RDF main concepts

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eGovernment Initiatives

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The tools

Government Website Guidelines

e-Government Interoperability Framework

e-Government Metadata Standard

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Internet and World Wide Web standards for all public sector systems

XML as the key standard for data interchange

Browser the key interface for all information

Metadata for all government information

Adopts standards that are well supported by the market

Internet based implementation strategy

Mandated on all UK Public Sector Systems

e- GIF – Headline Decisions

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Dublin Core elements and refinements

Additional elements for

improved retrieval

records management

data security

legal requirements; data protection, information access, audit trails…..

The e-GMS is…

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Help for those who don’t know what they are looking for, what its called, or who to ask

List of broad subject headings to aid browsing for public sector information

Local controlled vocabularies can be mapped to GCL

Part of the e-GMS

Government Category List (GCL)

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Thesaurus / Controlled Vocabulary

Tool for vocabulary control

Improve indexing and retrieval

Preferred Terms Terms indexers and searchers are allowed to use

Non-preferred Terms Terms indexers and searchers are not to use

Look non-preferred terms and see what preferred term should be used instead

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Thesaurus / Controlled Vocabulary

Semantic RelationsThesaurus shows relations among different

preferred terms

BT (Broad Term) and NT (Narrow Term) Indicate hierarchical relations. “Above” another

because it is broader in scope

RT (Related Term) RT Reference used for non-hierarchical semantic

relations in a thesaurus

Should an indexer or a searcher considering using X be reminded of the existence of Y?

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English statement

http://www.example.org/index.html has a creator whose valueis John Smith

the RDF terms for the various parts of the statement are:

the subject is the URL http://www.example.org/index.html

the predicate is the word "creator"

the object is the phrase "John Smith"

RDF is about making machine-processable statements. Two things are needed:

a system of machine-processable identifiers for identifying a subject, predicate, or object in a statement without any possibility of confusion with a similar-looking identifier on the Web.

a machine-processable language for representing these statements and exchanging them between machines.

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General form of identifier for these purposes, called the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). URLs are a particular kind of URI.

URIs are not limited to identifying things that have network locations

A URI reference (or URIref) is a URI, together with an optional fragment identifier at the end.

RDF defines a resource as anything that is identifiable by a URI reference

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To represent RDF statements in a machine-processable way, RDF uses the Extensible Markup Language [XML].

XML was designed to allow anyone to design their own document format and then write a document in that format. RDF defines a specific XML markup language

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Since RDF uses URIrefs instead of words to name things in statements, RDF refers to a set of URIrefs (particularly a set intended for a specific purpose) as a vocabulary.

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RDF user communities also need the ability to define the vocabularies (terms) they intend to use in those statements, specifically, to indicate that they are describing specific kinds or classes of resources, and will use specific properties in describing those resources.

RDF Vocabularies: RDF Schema

The resources in the RDF Schema vocabulary have URIrefs with the prefix:http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#

RDF Schema provides basic capabilities for describing RDF vocabularies, but additional capabilities are also possible, and can be useful.

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Richer schema capabilities – Ontology Languages:

cardinality constraints on properties, e.g., that a Person has exactly one biological father.

specifying that a given property (such as ex:hasAncestor) is transitive, e.g., that if A ex:hasAncestor B, and B ex:hasAncestor C, then A ex:hasAncestor C.

specifying that a given property is a unique identifier (or key) for instances of a particular class.

specifying that two different classes (having different URIrefs) actually represent the same class.

specifying that two different instances (having different URIrefs) actually represent the same individual.

the ability to describe new classes in terms of combinations (e.g., unions and intersections) of other classes, or to say that two classes are disjoint (i.e., that no resource is an instance of both classes).

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Agents

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James Hendler: Is there an Intelligent Agent in Your

Future?http://www.nature.com/nature/webmatters/agents/agent.html

Both you and your agent must speak the same language

The agent must be able to act as well as suggest

An agent can do things without supervision

A key ability of good travel agents is that they use their experience to help you

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The Ideal Internet Agent. It must be communicative; able

to understand your goals, preferences and constraints. It

must be capable: able to take options rather than simply

provide advice. It must be autonomous; able to act

without the user being in control the whole time. And it

should be adaptive; able to learn from experience about

both its tasks and about its users preferences.

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Communicative

Useful communications requires shared knowledge

Knowledge about the problem being solved

Ontologies

An Ontology is a formal definition of a domain of knowledge

Taxonomy of class and subclass relations coupled with definitions of the relationships between these things back