Namespaces at the Swiss Confederation

In the Linked Data World, the use of namespaces help to organize the identifiers of subjects (data points) and predicates (the attributes). A well defined and organized common namespace for all public and also internal data on the level of the Swiss Confederation brings a variety of advantages:

• A well constructed namespace results in stable and reliable IRI.
• Stable IRI are important for reuse of the data in other projects and applications.
• A well and logical organised namespace leads to the data being self-descriptive via namespace. This results in a reduced need for external documentation to discover the data.
• A common contract on status and availability of data in certain namespaces can be defined and communicated.

ld.admin.ch

The Standard I003 - Chapter 2.3.2 defines ld.admin.ch as the namespace for all Linked Data publications of the Swiss Confederation.

Anatomy of a Namespace

A namespace encompasses the sub-domains, domain and path. Usually the sub-domains and domains are defined by a common scheme, occasionally also the first levels of the path can be defined.

Overview

            ld.admin.ch -> Shared Core Entities for the Swiss Confederation
            ld.admin.ch/vocabulary/ -> Controlled Vocabularies shared for the Swiss Confederation
     schema.ld.admin.ch -> Ontology specific to the Swiss Confederation
   register.ld.admin.ch -> Registers published through the Swiss Confederation

agriculture.ld.admin.ch/ -> Core entities for agriculture
agriculture.ld.admin.ch/<name>/ -> Content, Datasets
agriculture.ld.admin.ch/vocabulary/ -> Controlled Vocabularies for agriculture

    finance.ld.admin.ch -> dito
     energy.ld.admin.ch -> dito
environment.ld.admin.ch -> dito
    culture.ld.admin.ch -> dito
        geo.ld.admin.ch -> dito
        law.ld.admin.ch -> dito

A new thematic sub-domain can be demanded by the Federal Chancellery as described in Standard I003 - Chapter 2.3.2.