In my previous blog post I was trying to demonstrate the virtues of data.gov.uk making the descriptions of their datasets available as RDFa. Just this morning I learned from Mark Birbeck that the folks down under at data.australia.gov.au did this last October!

For example this page describing a dataset for public Internet locations has this RDF metadata inside it:

The recent public release of the UK Government’s data.gov.uk site got picked up by the press last week in articles at The Guardian, Prospect Magazine and elswhere. These have been supplemented by some more technical discussions at ReadWriteWeb, Open Knowledge Foundation, Talis, Jeni Tennison’s blog, and some helpful emails from Leigh Dodds (Talis) and Jonathan Gray (Open Knowledge Foundation) on the w3c egovernment discussion list.

One thing that I haven’t seen mentioned so far in public (which I just discovered today) is that data.gov.uk is using RDFa to expose metadata about the datasets in a machine readable way. What this means is that in an HTML page for a dataset like this there are some extra HTML attributes like about, property, rel that have been thoughtfully used to express some structured metadata about the dataset, which can be extracted from the HTML and expressed say as Turtle:

Kesa’s good friend Gillian from college days in NOLA sent around an email asking for people’s favorite five songs of last year.

For some reason picking individual songs is hard for me. I guess because I rarely put on a song, and almost always put on an album–as antiquated as that sounds. I do occasionally listen to suggestions on last.fm or random songs in my player-du-jour — but then I don’t really remember the song names.

Anyhow here’s the list I cobbled together, with links out to youtube (that’ll probably break in 28 hrs):