Hi Jim, all,
I think size matters too, but counting bubbles or triples in the LOD cloud will not help us much. The Semantic Data Web will only be successful, if it does not fit in any cloud anymore - I remember these early days of the Web, when people liked to draw maps of the WWW, and these really quickly disappeared when it got big. I hope that happens to the Data Web, too. Hopefully soon. But my current estimate is that the Data Web is probably rather shrinking right now (when compared to the still exponentially growing size of the Web). You can find a comparision of indicators regarding both sizes in [1]. From my point the challenge currently is not to have many triples (its not so difficult to convert some really large DBs to RDF), but to have really many data sources, whose sum gives us more than the individual parts. But maybe this message is to complicated for panels and not really a success story yet...
Sören [1] http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~auer/publication/triplify.pdf -- -------------------------------------------------------------- Sören Auer, AKSW/Computer Science Dept., University of Leipzig http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~auer, Skype: soerenauer
