--cs
-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Heath [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: 04 April 2008 14:27
To: Chris Sizemore; [email protected]
Cc: Michael Smethurst; Silver Oliver; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Dan Brickley
Subject: RE: imdb as linked open data?
Hi Chris, all,
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Chris Sizemore
Sent: 04 April 2008 13:38
To: [email protected]
Cc: Michael Smethurst; Silver Oliver; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: RE: imdb as linked open data?
all--
so, i was correct in thinking that imdb is interesting to the LOD
community.
Correct :)
i agree that offering "what's a/the Sem Web business model?"
is pretty important in order to get buy in... does anyone have any
contacts in and around imdb?
I think there might be a Bristol connection here. Perhaps danbri can
help. Dan?
***************** forgive the following if it's controversial
-- i'm honestly just trying to understand better ***********
Discussion is good. Bring it on!
however, on a more philosophical note, i DON'T think imdb neccesarily
needs to explicitly opt into the Web of Data in order for the world at
large to find Sem Web value in that data... i suppose it would be very
desirable for imdb to officially provide Open Data/rdf of their
content, but i don't think that's the only way for the Sem Web to gain
value from imdb...
basically, my premise is this: imdb is on the Web of Docs, and that's
good enough for the purpose of answering the question to be posed here
-- http://www.okkam.org/IRSW2008/ (the problem of identity and
reference on the Semantic Web is perhaps the single most important
issue for reaching a global scale. Initiatives like LinkedData,
OntoWorld and the large number of proposals aiming at using popular
URLs (e.g.
Wikipedia's) as "canonical" URIs (especially for non informational
resources) show that a solution to this issue is very urgent and very
relevant.)
at this point in my indoctrination to LOD (i'm a long time semweb
fanboy, tho), i guess i disagree with: "From a SemWeb POV this
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/#thing
<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/#thing> ] is pretty useless since
the URI doesn't resolve to RDF data.
Identifiers on the Web are only as good as the data they point to.
IMDB URIs point to high-quality web pages, but not to data." --
clearly i understand the difference between "data" and "web page"
here, but i don't agree that it's so black and white. i'd suggest:
"Identifiers on the Web are only as good as the clarity of what they
point to..." i don't think there has to be RDF at the other end to
make a URI useful, in many cases...
Chris, yes, I agree; been pondering this myself and for once I don't
agree with Richard; it's not so black and white. I was aiming for
something along these lines with URIs for Email Users:
<http://simile.mit.edu/mail/ReadMsg?listId=14&msgId=15205>
at this point, for example at the BBC, my view is that identifiers and
equivalency relationships are more important than RDF... just barely
more important, granted... having a common set of identifiers, like
navigable stars in the sky over an ocean, is what we need most now, in
order to help us aggregate content across the org, and also link it up
to useful stuff outside our walled garden.
The navigable stars analogy is a beautiful one.
so, i'm one of those who feel that websites like imdb, wikipedia, and
musicbrainz provide great identifiers for non-information resources
even in their Web of Docs form. i know that most of you here will feel
that this is lazy, too informal, and naive of me. but my argument is
that, for sites like those i mention (not all websites, by any means)
we may as well, for the purposes of our day to day use cases, use
their URLs as if they were Sem Web URIs. on these sites, the
distinction between resource and representation (concept and doc about
concept) is not what's pertinent.
i'm aware that most on this list will make a religious distinction
between:
http://dbpedia.org/resource/Madonna_%28entertainer%29
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madonna_(entertainer)
but i think that, by convention, and in the contexts they'd actually
be used, we should treat them both as identifiers for the same
concept, and that they are essentially sameAs's *in common
practice"...
Hmmm...
in other words, as much as i love dbPedia and think it's a brilliant
step forward, i personally was fine with WIkipedia URLs as
identifiers. the incredible thing about dbpedia is the data mining to
extract RDF, not the URIs or content negotiation.
i KNOW that, technically, what i'm saying breaks all our rules -- and
i followed
http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/httpRange-14/2007-05-31/HttpRan
ge-14.html closely -- but philosophically i think there's something to
what i'm saying... if the Web is easy and the Sem Web hard, must we
insist on perfection? must we insist that imdb agree with us and
explicitly opt in?
Perhaps the Web was hard in the early days as well though, we've just
forgotten? I'm not sure the Semantic Web is hard; we've just got to be
clear about how we communicate it to people.
practically, tho, in an "official" LOD grammar sense, this works just
fine for me:
<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Madonna_%28entertainer%29
<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Madonna_%28entertainer%29> >
foaf:isPrimaryTopicOf <http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000187/
<http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000187/> >
<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Madonna_%28entertainer%29
<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Madonna_%28entertainer%29> >
foaf:isPrimaryTopicOf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madonna_(entertainer
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madonna_(entertainer> )
that seems useful and easy. to me, that's allowing a "sameAs"-like
relationship between Web of Docs URLs and SemWeb URIs... i could
really really run with that approach...
but now, to stir things up a bit...
given the above, thus:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madonna_(entertainer
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madonna_(entertainer> ) owl:sameAs
<http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000187/
<http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000187/> >
right? right? ;-)
No way. No way at all :D
Cheers,
Tom.
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