Re: Linked Data Demand Discussion Culture on this List, WAS: Introducing Semgel, a semantic database app for gathering analyzing data from websites
However, just to balance the picture slightly ... There are *some* clear, well documented examples of semweb/RDF/LD delivering business value through data integration. The most famous of these being probably: Garlik (now Experian), Amdocs and arguably the BBC. In my experience for every publicised example there are several non-public or at least less visible examples of companies quietly using the technology internally while not shouting about it. I've come across examples in banking, publishing, travel and health care - at different levels of maturity. Yes, for me these are all great results. However, the problem for me is convincing other industries, and the toughest question I am always faced with is and why could I not solve the issue with established technology XYZ, which my engineers already know?. As long as we cannot answer this question, it will not be easy. AMEN Not saying the business value story is perfectly articulated or the evidence is watertight, but it's not totally absent :) While it's not your main point, I would also say we have reasonable arguments for the value of linked data over just CSVs for publishing government statistics and measurement data. The benefits include safer use of data because it's self-describing (e.g. units!), ability to slice and dice through API calls making it easier to build apps, ability to address the data and thus annotate it and reference it. The more advanced government departments approach this as publish once, use many. One pipeline that lets people access the data as dumps, through REST APIs, as Linked Data or via apps - all powered by a shared Linked Data infra-structure. It's not CSV or Linked Data it's CSV *and* Linked Data. Yes. It was actually not really an argument from my side, I just wanted to point out the kind of discussions I face with people out there. I totally agree with what you say. Greetings, Sebastian -- | Dr. Sebastian Schaffert sebastian.schaff...@salzburgresearch.at | Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft http://www.salzburgresearch.at | Head of Knowledge and Media Technologies Group +43 662 2288 423 | Jakob-Haringer Strasse 5/II | A-5020 Salzburg
Re: Linked Data Demand Discussion Culture on this List, WAS: Introducing Semgel, a semantic database app for gathering analyzing data from websites
Hey all, speaking of (business) use cases for Linked Data, there is a number of them on W3C site: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/sweo/public/UseCases/ However I needed to present a few cases as a minimal slide deck, so here it is -- maybe it will be helpful to someone: http://www.slideshare.net/graphity/linked-data-success-stories (Disclaimer: my project is mentioned in the end) Martynas graphity.org On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 6:26 AM, Harish Kumar M. har...@semgel.com wrote: 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
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
Re: Linked Data Demand Discussion Culture on this List, WAS: Introducing Semgel, a semantic database app for gathering analyzing data from websites
On 7/20/12 11:48 AM, Sebastian Schaffert wrote: [SNIP] -- so that we can focus on the key non personal points. My claim is founded in the many discussions I have when going to the CTOs of*real* companies (big ones, outside the research business) out there and trying to convince them that they should build on Semantic Web technologies (because I believe they are superior). Believe me, even though I strongly believe in the technology, this is a very tough job without a good reference example that convinces them they will save X millions of Euros or improve the life or their employees or the society in the short- to medium term. Why do you assume that others (like myself) that don't share your views, don't talk to CTOs? BTW - there are a number of companies that actually have paying customers using Linked Data effectively; these companies may not necessarily believe in announcing every customer closure related to Linked Data. Random sample answer from this week (I could bring many): So this Linked Data is a possibility for data integration. Tell me, why should I convince my engineers to throw away their proven integration solutions? Why is Linked Data so superior to existing solutions? Where is it already in enterprise use?. I don't know how you've concluded that Linked Data is a rip and replace approach to technology adoption. Its quite the contrary. Linked Data's most powerful virtue is its ability to enhance what already exists re: 1. data object identity 2. data object representation 3. data object access 4. data object serialization 5 data object access control lists and policies. Please read some of the older threads on this mailing list. Do you think Facebook publishes Linked Data for no good reason? Ditto the U.S. and UK governments amongst many other contributors to the LOD cloud? Likewise any other enterprise that's already effectively using Linked Data as a conceptual model oriented virutalization atop disparate data sources etc? The big datasets always sold as a success story in the Linked Data Cloud are largely irrelevant to businesses: - they are mostly dealing with internal data (projects, people, CRM, ERP, documents, CMS, …) where you won't find information in the LD cloud anyways There is a difference between the Linked Open Data (LOD) Cloud and Linked Data. There's also a subtle difference between Linked Open Data and the LOD Cloud. Linked Open Data is about standards based structured data representation and access, based on a specific use of de-referencable URIs to augment said data representation and access. LOD Cloud is about publicly accessible application of the above, with contributions from a plethora of sources, across a variety of subject matter domains. - they do not trust just some data from the Internet to build multi-million business decisions on top See my comment above. That isn't what I am talking about. - they find the data in the cloud too messy (as an example: try finding country codes on DBPedia …) and too unreliable (most servers do not respond in sufficient time) Ditto, not my point. The LOD cloud is a distributed lookup table and that's about it. Mike has actually assembled some very nice blog posts on related topics: -http://www.mkbergman.com/917/practical-p-p-p-problems-with-linked-data/ -http://www.mkbergman.com/859/seven-pillars-of-the-open-semantic-enterprise/ I am no stranger to Mike. Sometimes it helps if you do a few lookups to provide context for your responses. And if you look at the recent troubles with Semantic Web business models you see the consequences. Please clarify what you mean as that statement is quite unclear. What recent troubles are you speaking (so definitively) about re., the business model scalability and viability of Linked Data and/or the broader Semantic Web vision? I was referring to the recent bankruptcy of Ontoprise and the fact that Talis is reducing its Linked Data involvement, essentially shutting down their we help you publish Linked Data service. I thought you might have guessed. Why should I guess. You over simplify those items and I am not in the business of speaking about other companies. Talking about markets, technologies, and business models are fine for me, but It stops right there. You are not the only one in the community, so please don't say we've passed the issue. Of course I am not the only one in the community. But, I think you are missing a critical point: this forum/list/community is about Linked Data. Thus, I would expect product announcements to be related to Linked Data, at the very least. What's really confusing to me, right now, is the fact that I simply sought an actual Linked Data connection from Hatish (assuming there had to be one somewhere), received push-back about demand and a string of replies that are responding something else inferred from my response . The problem is that in most of your
Re: Linked Data Demand Discussion Culture on this List, WAS: Introducing Semgel, a semantic database app for gathering analyzing data from websites
Kingsley, Am 20.07.2012 um 20:20 schrieb Kingsley Idehen: Again, how have you arrived at the Linked Data vs CSV scenario? Secondly, if you'd done some background lookup, you would have stumbled across comments I've made about CSV and Linked Data. This is exactly the kind of comment by which you prove my point (regarding the discussion culture). I refrain from any further discussion on the topic until you stop assuming everyone else is stupid when he does not agree on your points, like I already announced in private discussion. Have a nice weekend. Sebastian -- | Dr. Sebastian Schaffert sebastian.schaff...@salzburgresearch.at | Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft http://www.salzburgresearch.at | Head of Knowledge and Media Technologies Group +43 662 2288 423 | Jakob-Haringer Strasse 5/II | A-5020 Salzburg signature.asc Description: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail
Re: Linked Data Demand Discussion Culture on this List, WAS: Introducing Semgel, a semantic database app for gathering analyzing data from websites
On 7/20/12 4:05 PM, Sebastian Schaffert wrote: Kingsley, Am 20.07.2012 um 20:20 schrieb Kingsley Idehen: Again, how have you arrived at the Linked Data vs CSV scenario? Secondly, if you'd done some background lookup, you would have stumbled across comments I've made about CSV and Linked Data. This is exactly the kind of comment by which you prove my point (regarding the discussion culture). I refrain from any further discussion on the topic until you stop assuming everyone else is stupid when he does not agree on your points, like I already announced in private discussion. Have a nice weekend. Sebastian You are not going to get away with misrepresenting me in public. It won't happen. Here is what you posted en route to my response: Where is the convincing business application? Since most of the data is statistics anyways, where is Linked Data superior to say CSV? To clarify my response: What in my thread or past commentary would lead you to asking me, or anyone else for that matter such a question? Links (via simple Google search) : 1. http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/2010-10/msg00263.html -- ontolog forum post that leads to discussion about CSV and Linked Data 2. http://bit.ly/QhGBXY -- explaining how CSV output from SPARQL endpoints delivers powerful hooks into Google Spreadsheet 3. http://bit.ly/NP8uWv -- ditto for Microsoft Excel. -- Regards, Kingsley Idehen Founder CEO OpenLink Software Company Web: http://www.openlinksw.com Personal Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen Twitter/Identi.ca handle: @kidehen Google+ Profile: https://plus.google.com/112399767740508618350/about LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kidehen smime.p7s Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
Re: Linked Data Demand Discussion Culture on this List, WAS: Introducing Semgel, a semantic database app for gathering analyzing data from websites
Hi Sebastian, I completely agree with what you say about: o Harish's original post being relevant to linked data and this list o that the culture of this forum can be counter productive o that the evidence for linked data delivering business value needs to be a lot stronger However, just to balance the picture slightly ... There are *some* clear, well documented examples of semweb/RDF/LD delivering business value through data integration. The most famous of these being probably: Garlik (now Experian), Amdocs and arguably the BBC. In my experience for every publicised example there are several non-public or at least less visible examples of companies quietly using the technology internally while not shouting about it. I've come across examples in banking, publishing, travel and health care - at different levels of maturity. Not saying the business value story is perfectly articulated or the evidence is watertight, but it's not totally absent :) While it's not your main point, I would also say we have reasonable arguments for the value of linked data over just CSVs for publishing government statistics and measurement data. The benefits include safer use of data because it's self-describing (e.g. units!), ability to slice and dice through API calls making it easier to build apps, ability to address the data and thus annotate it and reference it. The more advanced government departments approach this as publish once, use many. One pipeline that lets people access the data as dumps, through REST APIs, as Linked Data or via apps - all powered by a shared Linked Data infra-structure. It's not CSV or Linked Data it's CSV *and* Linked Data. Dave On 20/07/12 16:48, Sebastian Schaffert wrote: Kingsley, I am trying to respond to your factual arguments inline. But let me first point out that the central problem for me is exactly what Mike pointed out: In your enthusiasm and cheerleading you as often turn people off as inspire them. You too frequently take it upon yourself to speak for the community. Semgel is a nice contribution being contributed by a new, enthusiastic contributor. I think this is to be applauded, not lectured or scolded. Semgel is certainly as much on topic as most of the posts to this forum. The message you should hear is that many people are frustrated by the way the discussions in this forum are carried out and have already stopped contributing or even reading. And this is a very bad development for a community. The topic we are discussing right now is only a symptom. Please think about it. Am 20.07.2012 um 16:43 schrieb Kingsley Idehen: On 7/20/12 4:06 AM, Sebastian Schaffert wrote: Am 19.07.2012 um 20:50 schrieb Kingsley Idehen: I completely understand and appreciate your desire (which I share) to see a mature landscape with a range of linked data sources. I can also understand how a database or spreadsheet can potentially offer fine-grained data access - your examples do illustrate the point very well indeed! However, if we want to build a sustainable business, the decision to build these features needs to be demand driven. I disagree. Note, I responded because I assumed this was a new Linked Data service. But it clearly isn't. Thus, I don't want to open up a debate about Linked Data virtues if you incorrectly assume they should be *demand driven*. Remember, this is the Linked Open Data (LOD) forum. We've long past the issue of *demand driven* over here, re. Linked Data. But I agree. A technology that is not able to fire proof its usefulness in a demand driven / problem driven environment is maybe interesting from an academic standpoint but otherwise not really useful. So are you claiming that Linked Data hasn't fire proofed its usefulness in a demand drive / problem driven environment? Indeed. This is my right as much as yours is to claim the opposite. My claim is founded in the many discussions I have when going to the CTOs of *real* companies (big ones, outside the research business) out there and trying to convince them that they should build on Semantic Web technologies (because I believe they are superior). Believe me, even though I strongly believe in the technology, this is a very tough job without a good reference example that convinces them they will save X millions of Euros or improve the life or their employees or the society in the short- to medium term. Random sample answer from this week (I could bring many): So this Linked Data is a possibility for data integration. Tell me, why should I convince my engineers to throw away their proven integration solutions? Why is Linked Data so superior to existing solutions? Where is it already in enterprise use?. The big datasets always sold as a success story in the Linked Data Cloud are largely irrelevant to businesses: - they are mostly dealing with internal data (projects, people, CRM, ERP, documents, CMS, …) where you won't find information in the
Re: Linked Data Demand Discussion Culture on this List, WAS: Introducing Semgel, a semantic database app for gathering analyzing data from websites
Sebastian, all, I'm on your side here. But regarding Linked Data, consider the following points that slow down its adoption: - data-heavy players such as Facebook and Google might not be interested in adopting a new open, even if superior, data approach, since it is in their interest to keep as much control over the data as possible - in the corporate world, big vendors like Microsoft and Oracle have created a lock-in, and big companies and organizations are hesitating to invest in new long-term solutions - the long term is where Linked Data really shines, because while the global data interconnectedness increases, it provides linear integration costs instead of exponential as in the Web 2.0 API-to-API approach - RDF and Linked Data are quietly doing their job at research institutes and innovative organizations like BBC and are not receiving the marketing dollars thrown at NoSQL solutions such as MongoDB. However when it comes to production use, NoSQL is no less problematic than triplestores (I have some experience in the startup world), while RDF is the only standardized NoSQL/graph data model, which even has a query language and quite a few tools. - RDF and Linked Data are taught at very few schools. Even in computer science studies, web application development is often stuck at PHP+MySQL level, or Web 2.0 and RESTful APIs at best. So I would say Linked Data is like electrical vehicles -- most who understand the technology would find it superior, but there are a lot of different agendas and interests that not necessarily result in what is better for the public. And then there is ignorance as well. When it comes to Linked Data applications, I'm about to release to open-source code which I hope will make it easier. Martynas graphity.org On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 5:48 PM, Sebastian Schaffert sebastian.schaff...@salzburgresearch.at wrote: Kingsley, I am trying to respond to your factual arguments inline. But let me first point out that the central problem for me is exactly what Mike pointed out: In your enthusiasm and cheerleading you as often turn people off as inspire them. You too frequently take it upon yourself to speak for the community. Semgel is a nice contribution being contributed by a new, enthusiastic contributor. I think this is to be applauded, not lectured or scolded. Semgel is certainly as much on topic as most of the posts to this forum. The message you should hear is that many people are frustrated by the way the discussions in this forum are carried out and have already stopped contributing or even reading. And this is a very bad development for a community. The topic we are discussing right now is only a symptom. Please think about it. Am 20.07.2012 um 16:43 schrieb Kingsley Idehen: On 7/20/12 4:06 AM, Sebastian Schaffert wrote: Am 19.07.2012 um 20:50 schrieb Kingsley Idehen: I completely understand and appreciate your desire (which I share) to see a mature landscape with a range of linked data sources. I can also understand how a database or spreadsheet can potentially offer fine-grained data access - your examples do illustrate the point very well indeed! However, if we want to build a sustainable business, the decision to build these features needs to be demand driven. I disagree. Note, I responded because I assumed this was a new Linked Data service. But it clearly isn't. Thus, I don't want to open up a debate about Linked Data virtues if you incorrectly assume they should be *demand driven*. Remember, this is the Linked Open Data (LOD) forum. We've long past the issue of *demand driven* over here, re. Linked Data. But I agree. A technology that is not able to fire proof its usefulness in a demand driven / problem driven environment is maybe interesting from an academic standpoint but otherwise not really useful. So are you claiming that Linked Data hasn't fire proofed its usefulness in a demand drive / problem driven environment? Indeed. This is my right as much as yours is to claim the opposite. My claim is founded in the many discussions I have when going to the CTOs of *real* companies (big ones, outside the research business) out there and trying to convince them that they should build on Semantic Web technologies (because I believe they are superior). Believe me, even though I strongly believe in the technology, this is a very tough job without a good reference example that convinces them they will save X millions of Euros or improve the life or their employees or the society in the short- to medium term. Random sample answer from this week (I could bring many): So this Linked Data is a possibility for data integration. Tell me, why should I convince my engineers to throw away their proven integration solutions? Why is Linked Data so superior to existing solutions? Where is it already in enterprise use?. The big datasets always sold as a success story in the Linked Data Cloud are
Re: Linked Data Demand Discussion Culture on this List, WAS: Introducing Semgel, a semantic database app for gathering analyzing data from websites
Dear Martynas, Thanks for your constructive answer. I completely agree with all your points, and I am looking forward to your software (already checked the README ;-) ). We will surely try it out (maybe as a client for our Linked Media Framework). The problem I am facing is that part of my (and my group's) current job is to try bringing the technologies we are developing in research into ordinary industry. Not the Microsofts, Facebooks or Oracles (who are all highly innovative in Web and database technologies), but small and big companies from the (traditional) media sector and manufacturing industry who have big IT departments and infrastructures and could benefit greatly from Linked Data and related technologies. They often still live in the world of CORBA, ERP and file systems, and not necessarily in the Web. With the partners we have we silently follow the Linked Data approach by trying to solve their immediate problems and using Linked Data in the background. While in the media sector this is quite successful (see e.g. http://search.salzburg.com, 1.1 million news articles all as Linked Data but the interface is facetted search), it is significantly more difficult explaining the advantages to e.g. manufacturing industries. Some typical problems I already mentioned in my previous post (lack of trust, lack of relevant data, lack of quality). Some others - indirectly related to Linked Data: - they have proven and working infrastructures, and they have experienced IT engineers knowing their stuff; why should they adopt a new technology? They don't have a Linked Data problem per se - IT in such companies is typically a central department and not a business division; they have only limited resources for technology innovation, why invest in Linked Data and not in some other technology where they can say it will save us X million Euros? Maybe we are targetting the wrong or too difficult sector, true. But I am convinced that the technology is useful especially in such settings, so I want to prove it by building applications that would not be possible otherwise. Unfortunately, I am lacking convincing business cases that shows THEM that the technology is superior. Noone needs to convince ME about the virtues of Linked Data, or otherwise I would not develop software of publish scientific articles related to it. ;-) 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. Greetings, Sebastian Am 21.07.2012 um 00:16 schrieb Martynas Jusevičius: Sebastian, all, I'm on your side here. But regarding Linked Data, consider the following points that slow down its adoption: - data-heavy players such as Facebook and Google might not be interested in adopting a new open, even if superior, data approach, since it is in their interest to keep as much control over the data as possible - in the corporate world, big vendors like Microsoft and Oracle have created a lock-in, and big companies and organizations are hesitating to invest in new long-term solutions - the long term is where Linked Data really shines, because while the global data interconnectedness increases, it provides linear integration costs instead of exponential as in the Web 2.0 API-to-API approach - RDF and Linked Data are quietly doing their job at research institutes and innovative organizations like BBC and are not receiving the marketing dollars thrown at NoSQL solutions such as MongoDB. However when it comes to production use, NoSQL is no less problematic than triplestores (I have some experience in the startup world), while RDF is the only standardized NoSQL/graph data model, which even has a query language and quite a few tools. - RDF and Linked Data are taught at very few schools. Even in computer science studies, web application development is often stuck at PHP+MySQL level, or Web 2.0 and RESTful APIs at best. So I would say Linked Data is like electrical vehicles -- most who understand the technology would find it superior, but there are a lot of different agendas and interests that not necessarily result in what is better for the public. And then there is ignorance as well. When it comes to Linked Data applications, I'm about to release to open-source code which I hope will make it easier. Martynas graphity.org On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 5:48 PM, Sebastian Schaffert sebastian.schaff...@salzburgresearch.at wrote: Kingsley, I am trying to respond to your factual arguments inline. But let me first point out that the central problem for me is exactly what Mike pointed out: In your enthusiasm and cheerleading you as often turn people off as inspire them. You too frequently take it upon yourself to speak for the community. Semgel is a nice contribution being contributed by a new, enthusiastic contributor. I think this is to be
