The Resource Definition Framework (RDF) has been steadily gaining prominence as the enabling technology for the Semantic Web. (A version of the World Wide Web designed to be understandable by machines as well as people.) Government support for the technology stands to catapult it into mainstream use.
What is RDF?
The Resource Definition Framework is a language for representing information about resources on the World Wide Web. The information is often document metadata — titles, authorship, publication dates, etc. — but can also describe more abstract concepts such as people, products, locations, etc.
What makes RDF unique is that it is intended to be read and "understood" by machines, rather than people. It uses a formal logic to allow information to be combined from disparate sources without a loss of meaning, and allows new information to be inferred from the old automatically.
Why Does the Government Care?
The US government is interested in RDF as part of their bid to make governance more transparent. All levels of the government publish massive amounts of digital data, but there is little if any consistency in format or publication method. Open government advocates complain that the sheer volume of unstructured data is effectively equivalent to not publishing at all — data is useless if it can't be found or understood.
Another common complain from government watchdogs is that the public is only able to see the governments interpretation of data, rather than being able to draw their own conclusions.
RDF has been proposed as a solution. It would allow the government to publish data — financial, demographic, policy, etc. — at a very raw level without loosing meaning. Third parties would be able to perform their own analysis and publish their own interpretations. More significantly, these interpretations could trivially span government entities. RDF data from the EPA can be merged with data from the Forest Service automatically.
Why Should Web Content Providers Care?
RDF is not intended to replace the web — it is primarily a language for machines, not humans — but it is likely to become either a parallel publication medium, or a source medium for many data-intensive sites. If the government does back RDF, it may become a requisite for civil publishing in the near future.
You should start looking for a path to RDF if you are providing large amounts of data for federal, state, or local goverment web sites.
References & Resources
The W3C provides a RDF Primer for people looking for a brief overview of the technology:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/
There is an eGovernment working group within the W3C exploring RDF:
FRII Creative provides technology consulting for government and municipal entities, including RDF roadmap planning:
