A new RDF Working Group, chartered to update the 2004 Recommendations for W3C’s Resource Description Framework, recently held its first face-to-face meeting in Amsterdam. Focusing on priorities established at a June 2010 workshop, the new working group aims at updating and extending the 2004 specification without disrupting existing usage.

The working group is currently discussing an extension to RDF to provide support for “multiple graphs and graph stores”, sometimes known as “named graphs”. The group has yet to settle on terminology, noting that the term “graph” has been overloaded, referringly variously to a (mutable) container for triples, to an immutable snapshot thereof, or to a serialization of a snapshot. The goal is to clarify which of these types of “graph” should have identifiers while ensuring that the term is used in a way consistent with the SPARQL query language. The outcome of this effort will inform a revision of the popular, user-friendly Turtle syntax, possibly with support for “quads” (i.e., triples extended with additional contextual information).

Another major goal of the working group is to standardize the use with RDF of JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) — a lightweight, human-readable data interchange format popular among Web application developers as an alternative to XML. The group has identified three existing and potential uses of JSON in exchanging RDF data: for expressing RDF graph structures, for exposing RDF data to JavaScript developers through APIs, and — more challengingly but with potentially higher impact — as a simple format that Web developers might use to expose data for consumption by RDF tools without needing to engage with the underlying RDF triple model.

Before the end of its charter in January 2013, the group will undertake “clean-up” actions, such as marking lesser-used and less-well-understood features of RDF as “archaic”. Progress of the working group can be tracked on their wiki and mailing list.

Working Group wiki: http://w3.org/2011/rdf-wg/wiki/Main_Page
Working Group charter: http://w3.org/2010/09/rdf-wg-charter.html
Working Group mailing list: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-wg/
2004 RDF Recommendation: http://www.w3.org/standards/techs/rdf#w3c_all
2010 RDF Workshop: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/wiki/RDF/NextStepWorkshop
2011 Face-to-Face: http://www.w3.org/blog/SW/2011/04/15/rdf_working_group_meets_face_to_face_in_

Early this year, a couple of new geographic vocabularies became freely available, to be accessed by machines and humans via web services.

The “Library of Congress Authorities and Vocabularies Service” (http://id.loc.gov) made available three new vocabularies, the MARC Code Lists for: a) Geographic Areas, b) Countries (with mappings to equivalent ISO 3166 codes) and c) Languages (mapped to ISO 639-1, 639-2 and 639-5). The same site offers Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) since 2009.
The main goal is to provide machine access to LC data and selected links to other vocabularies, e.g. in the context of Linked Data. The data is encoded in SKOS/RDF.
Individual concepts are accessible via a web browsing and searching interface for human users or programmatically via content-negotiation.

OCLC offers a demonstration Web Service for FAST geographic headings. The complete FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology) vocabulary contains over 1,6 million authority records, reworking LCSH for easier use and application (http://www.oclc.org/research/activities/fast/).
The Web Service (RESTful standard, http://www.oclc.org/developer/services/MapFAST) takes the chosen geographic coordinates and returns a ranked list of FAST headings near the specified location. Alternative name forms, the type of geographic feature, selected events at the location and other information from the authority records is displayed. Developers can use the Web Service to develop their own applications (mobile, geolocation services).

The MapFAST demonstrator (http://experimental.worldcat.org/mapfast), using the same Web Service, is a mashup prototype that uses a Google Maps interface to present FAST Geographic authority records and, via links, allows geographic subject searching in WorldCat.org or Google Books. The prototype demonstrates a strength of the subject faceting approach of FAST over coordinated subject headings.

This information is based on press releases and mails from LC and OCLC, respectively.