While working in Washington DC this fall I was introduced to the concept of representing government services, using JSON-LD. This is a lightweight, machine readable JSON file that represents government services, allowing anyone including search engines to ingest and easily represent government services in search engine results and other applications.
I wanted to quickly and eficiently build a list of services at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and decided the path of least resistance was in a spreadsheet. With this in mind I built a simple JavaScript tool that will allow users to manage government services data in a Google Spreadsheet, and easily generate the JSON-LD needed to represent the services.
Next I wanted an easy form that users could use to also generate government services JSON-LD without having to use Google Docs. Anyone could enter the values needed for a valid government services schema and generate using a simple JavaScript form.
No matter which path you choose to generate the government schema, form or Google Doc, many users will need a place to store these generated services schema. Using an approach I developed for other data conversion tools, I will be adding the ability to save JSON-LD to this Github repository, making it a data storage repository that will not just generate, but store and share publicly on the Internet.
After that, possible features might be importing of existing government services schema files, allowing for editing and storage of external services schema. If you have any features you'd like to see, let me know.
This is a work in progress, if you have any questions you can ping me at @kinlane
