Jeni's Musings

When we encourage people to put their data on the web as linked data, the biggest question is “How?”. There are so many “How?” questions to answer:

• how do we choose what URIs to use for things?
• how do we choose what vocabularies to use?
• how do we handle changing data?
• how do we tell people how the data was created?
• how do we publish it?
• how will other people know about it?

and, of course:

• how do we create it?

data.gov.uk was finally launched to the public last week (still in beta, but now a more public beta than the beta that it’s been in for the last few months). It’s a great step forward, and everyone involved should be proud of both the amount of data that’s been made available and the website itself, which (unlike a lot of UK government IT) was developed rapidly by a small team based on open source software (and at low cost).

This is a first step on a long road.