A year ago we were very excited about RDFa, and in particular about using it to mark up consultations in our Citizen Space software. By providing certain bits of metadata in a machine-readable format (for example the consultation’s title, start and end dates, target audience, author etc) the consultation record can be used by third-party systems, and potentially incorporated into applications that hadn’t even been envisaged when the data was originally published.
RDFa actually became a mandatory requirement for all central government consultations published after 1st January 2010, but in the past year we have seen very little use of this new wealth of freely available data. There were rumours that Directgov planned to use it to import consultations, but I can’t find any evidence of this on their site.
We were sad that we’d gone to all the trouble* to incorporate RDFa into our clients’ consultations, and nobody was making use of it, so we decided to do something with it ourselves. We’ve made an Aggregator that can collect together consultations from any website as long as it publishes its consultations in an RSS feed and includes the appropriate RDFa markup. It also publishes its own RSS feed so that the aggregated consultations can be fed into a further tier of applications.
We’d be really interested to hear of other apps that are making use of RSS and RDFa in relation to consultation data. Surely we’re not the only ones?
*actually it wasn’t much trouble at all thanks to the helpful guidelines from the COI.
