Re: Linked Data Demand Discussion Culture on this List, WAS: Introducing Semgel, a semantic database app for gathering analyzing data from websites
In the past months i have worked a lot on the commercialization of RDF basedknowledge technologies so i feel like giving a contribution. We tried to understand what could be of interest to enterprise and came up with the slogan - or lets say adopted - enterprise linked data clouds with an internally matured understanding of what this means and how it deliver value. In our experience, Linked Data that can be of interest to enterprise cannot be further away from so many of the things that have been preached and pushed with prominence (i'll mention a few things like 303s, follow your nose even resolvable data uris, sameAs , 5 star data publishing , vocabolary x y that was never used outside demos... insert here so much more ). Similary is very far away from saying 'replace your existing running system with anything RDF based'. Wont even speak about preaching the value of publishin data as lod. To find value that can be sold i'd go back to the basic a bit. RDF is very nice at Knowledge Representation. Matter of fact might be the most solid industrial tool there is for this. Great way to serialize knowledge with properties attached to the data, great way to merge, great way to ship it to others (and hope they'll understand it) thanks to shared URIs of properties. A mature query language. Ok so where does this come into use SPECIFICALLY? (that is you can demonstrate superiority vs other existing technologies) I'd say only in environments/use cases/ business sectors where * knowledge can come from many sources, AND * new sources popping up all the time, AND * sources which are complex, might have a lot of rich descriptions, * time to explore and understand them is limited, * AND of course sufficient SCALE of the operation/business to support the development/ have time to learn and understand this etc. The first sectors that come to mind with these needs are (at least come to mind to me) pharmaceutical, defense-military, scientific technical publishing. (they're the first that come to mind given that in my ownlittle personal experience these are the sector that 'came to us' and really didnt need pitching or just minimal) One can say that, looking well, a lot of others, potentially, in the future might have similar need. True.. but they might when you put another elements into this: data scale (bigdata) and robustness AND (given the last point of the previous list which is) enterprise strenght credibility. Here we as a community, IMO have not been shining:. * bigdata - just not there. Sorry but publishing a big data set as in LOD doesnt count as a difficult data operation to do. Semantic technologies have notoriously been proposed by academics with very often not even the slightest notion of what traditional data processing systems do, even a basic RDBMS. Get the names of the peoplewho have published and have been incensed on semantic web and intersect that with that of conferences that matter to industry (and the world) * robustness - all systems have been shaky at best again due to being too often just trow away prototypes (when coming from academia). In other cases companies venturing into this field have been way too much distracted/ pressured/ (and finally got self convinced) into implementing and caring about features (see all those mentioned above and more) that were unrequested to begin with, and which value was just based on a conjecture. * missing obvious features. Other features were neglected becouse not fitting with the pure originalvisions why restricting ourself to triples? quads or quintuples for example make so much sense but oh my god what would the community have said. And now systems that have these features e.g. certain graph sstores are the obvious choices in certain cases. Somebody mentioned Garlik as a success story earlier. They got this right, but by concentrating on thigs that made sense for industry (their industry) with minimal features that were needed (their 5store - the production large scale data processing triplestore really implements just a bare subsset of sparql, they reason only with some simple rules etc) but done with proper engineering. So my conclusion in short. There are, in our opinion and analysis, reasons why semantic data technologies/ large scale knowledge representation have a lot to give to society. However to have credibility have some result, the community must get humble , look at what's happening in the real world of data integration and big data. The community must honestly assess where semantic technologies don't fit and on the other hand which features of the semantic web stack make some sense and bring value to the scenarios that have (bring) economic value) Gio On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 1:05 AM, Sebastian Schaffert sebastian.schaff...@salzburgresearch.at wrote: Hi Dave, comments inline. :) Am 20.07.2012 um 23:25 schrieb Dave Reynolds: Hi Sebastian, I completely agree with what you say about: o Harish's
Re: Linked Data Demand Discussion Culture on this List, WAS: Introducing Semgel, a semantic database app for gathering analyzing data from websites
Hi, Thank you all for your observations on Semgel. I was really delighted to see Sebastian taking it upon himself to articulate in some detail about how Semgel aligns with the Linked Data vision. Much appreciated! Its also been great to see some of the interesting thoughts and pointers that have been shared in this thread. I would like to offer (albeit with the risk of rehashing prior discussions in this group) clarifications and observations on a few points . - The need for LinkedData consuming apps publishing Linked data URI's (Kingsley's suggestion that served as a trigger for this thread!) - Balancing idealism(ie dogma) and pragmatism(ie market-driven) in realizing the vision of the Semantic web. (amplifying Bergman Giovanni) - The need for robust Linked Data Usecases which can logically be shown to be superior to other/traditional approaches (amplifying Sebastian) --- *Linked-Data consuming apps should publish Linked-date URI's* First off, I want to clarify that I considered Kingsley's queries and suggestions to be perfectly reasonable and did not perceive them in any way to be negative. I just happened to disagree with him about priorities. And if the cut and thrust of argument can lead to a discussion like this, we don't have much to complain about! Getting back to the point, Semgel's involvement with linked-data is a strategic decision - its a leap of faith. So, in no way am I trying to debate whether there is market of linked-data - after investing a bunch of time and effort, I and most of us in this group are well past that point! However, we would like our tactical decisions to be market-driven. I saw Kingsley's suggestion that linked-data consuming apps too should publish LinkedData URI's as something that should be market-driven. Somewhere in the thread, Kingsley elegantly articulated the technical rationale for doing this ... the application ingests structured data but emits HTML pages (reports) where the actual data keys (URIs) for the data are now dislocated from the value chain? If you consume Linked Data there's no reason to obscure access to those data sources in a solution. There are a number of best practice patterns for keeping URIs accessible and discoverable to user agents How could the geek in me not agree with this! However, wearing the business hat, I need to silence the geek and recognize that this cannot be a priority when we are still trying to firmly establish a basic ecosystem of linked-data publishing and consuming apps. Kingsley reached out to me privately (very gracious of him!) and indicated there is indeed a business case for Semgel to do this. I intend to engage with him with a open mind to better understand his point of view. -- *Balancing idealism and pragmatism in realizing the vision of the Semantic web.* Semweb has always had more than its fair share of idealism and dogma associated with it. However, at the risk of stating the obvious, we do need to balance it with a appropriate amount of pragmatism. We just don't want to go down the path of becoming architectural astronauts! ( http://bit.ly/bFnrDG) When Bergman speaks about seeing linked data as a useful and often desirable technique, but not a means and Giovanni bemoans the fact that features are neglected because they do not fit with the pure original visions and insists that The community must honestly assess where semantic technologies don't fit and on the other hand which features of the semantic web stack make some sense and bring value to the scenarios that have (bring)economic value, I could not agree more! We want to focus on the value we deliver, not on how we deliver it. A user of the Semgel app for instance is never made aware of its semweb roots - although some of them do wonder why some simple ops are sometimes so very slow :) Given Semgel's focus on linked-data consumption in general and UI in particular, we have primarily drawn our inspiration from the work done by the MIT/Simile folks. What makes them stand out for me is their pragmatism. Exhibit, Potluck, Parallax and Refine all have pioneered fundamental ideas without necessarily embracing the full semweb stack. This is what we would like to emulate We also have the brilliant sig.ma from Sindice (which does explicitly expose the underlying uri's) and I am very much looking forward to exploring Martynas's graphity (discovered through this thread!) -- *The need for robust Linked Data Usecases* Sebastian wondered 'if we could collect even a small set of convincing business cases and describe what problems they are solving and how, and also what problems they encountered, I think it would help many of us. Again, I couldn't agree more. When we describe Semgel's architecture to geeks (who have not consumed the semweb koolaid!), they can't help but wonder why we have chosen to perform such elaborate acrobatics to build what is on the surface a relatively straight-forward app. Mashing up data? Why
