Project 5: Early Leadership in Semantic Web

Semantic Transformations developed guidance for agencies about the semantic tagging of government websites and datasets. The report considers the challenge of not only semantically tagging government websites, but also how to move towards ‘semanticising’ government and thinking what this would mean for both government employees and end users. They also developed a supporting case study based on the Department of Climate Change website to demonstrate the practical application of this approach. It also provides guidance on what semantic tagging means for government employees and end users.

Author Comments

Working on the Gov 2.0 project was a very rewarding experience for us, mainly because it gave us a huge challenge to address, and the focus and opportunity to do it.  We sought to apply our knowledge and experience to the challenge of “semantically tagging” government websites, but, from our viewpoint, this was much more about the whole move towards “semanticising” government and achieving the objective of not only opening up government data but actually thinking through what this would mean for both government employees and end users.

We deliberately utilised the opportunity of the “climate change” debate to focus our attention on an issue that we knew would be generating major “social” traffic, an from which we could draw a range of implications and scenarios.

The one drawback from the Gov 2.0 project, which is understandable in many ways given the short timeframes, but nonetheless existed, was the isolation of projects which possibly could have been more integrated.  We did speak with a couple of people involved in other projects, but by and large everyone was focused on their “tasks”.  It would be good once all of the reports are up online to perhaps somehow do some sort of cross-project learnings.

Project Documents:

• Project 5 Brief RTF (48k)
• Project 5 Final Report DOC (3623k)