Stefano,

On 29 Jan 2007, at 21:02, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
>>> http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/
>>>
>>> What's weird is how they don't have an RDF dump...
>>
>> Why is this weird?
>
> because it would prevent crawlers from hitting their web sites.
>
> If you offer open data as a web service, and you don't provide a dump,
> you are basically asking others to consume a lot of your bandwidth in
> request/responses.

Well, of course offering something on the Web is asking others to  
consume your bandwidth. That's the point of being on the Web.

Actually, if all you offer is a dump, then anyone who is only  
interested in a small part of the data will have to download *all* of  
the data, which will either drive potential users away, or will cost  
you *more* bandwidth.

(I'm coming at this from an RDF browsing perspective, where RDF dumps  
are useless. I guess you're approaching the question from a "big ol'  
repository with Longwell on top" perspective, where RDF dumps are  
nice and convenient. The difference in perspective might sufficiently  
explain the difference in opinion.)

Yours,
Richard


>
> but then again, maybe they don't see enough interests in the data to
> justify their spending time in maintaining an RDF dump... or maybe  
> it's
> just dynamically generates from their database, so an RDF dump  
> would be
> just like crawling their own web sites anyway.
>
> -- 
> Stefano Mazzocchi
> Digital Libraries Research Group                 Research Scientist
> Massachusetts Institute of Technology
> E25-131, 77 Massachusetts Ave               skype: stefanomazzocchi
> Cambridge, MA  02139-4307, USA         email: stefanom at mit . edu
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