It's a fair cop, guv. You got me banged to rights. [Translation: I plead guilty as charged.] I was being too provocative.
And thank you for the Knoodl plug - I had seen it more as a collaborative ontology builder than an LD publishing activity. As feedback, I can say that it still looks rather like that - apparently the first thing I have to do is create a community, which is not necessarily my first thought when I want to bang up some RDF into the LD world. But I will revise my view. And all strength to you on it. Hugh On 09/02/2009 16:16, "Michael Lang(Jr.)" <michaelallenl...@gmail.com> wrote: Hugh, I do not understand the notion of "permitting a site to be a member of the Linked Data cloud". As I understand it, being a member of the Linked Data cloud simply involves linking your RDF data to a dataset that is part of the cloud. How do you intend to add any governance to this process? If I am confused about this, please correct me. However, I do not agree that there should be any governance to this process. Rather, I believe that self-governance is the only possible form of governance that could work in this system at the scale of the Web. Publishers of datasets should make up their own minds about what they will supply with their datasets. In time, proper best practices will emerge and proper incentives to follow those best practices will emerge and all publishers will have to publish "good" datasets to be successful. The problem here, which I think several people on this thread have noted separately , is pretty simple: there are still too few datasets and too few apps (both for publishers and consumers). Too few datasets means not enough competition which means that publishers can get away with sloppy practices. Too few apps for consumers means not enough benefit to publishers which means they have little incentive to follow good practices when publishing. Too few apps for publishers means its too hard to publish data which means publishers are sometimes forced to use sloppy practices. (product plug) On the apps for publishers front, part of what we are trying to accomplish with Knoodl.com <http://www.knoodl.com/ui/home.html> is to deliver a tool that provides all the necessary functionality to publish a dataset from scratch, including enabling mapping to other ontologies/datasets, turning it into a SPARQL endpoint, having search for vocabulary terms, allowing for rich documentation of terms, etc. We are still working on many of these features but they are all on our roadmap. Of course, we are always glad to have any feedback regarding the current state of the product or the future direction. Mike Lang Revelytix, Inc. <http://www.revelytix.com> phone: 410-584-0009 (office) 443-928-3782 (cell) skype: michael.allen.lang.jr aim: MikeJrRevelytix
