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.
I am quite sure that this will happen soon; for example, there are several
large datasets in the pipeline of the "Linking Open Drug Data" task force at
the W3C [1].
But generally, I wonder whether the early (90ies?) WWW is a good comparison
for the current web of data. After all, the current WWW is quite different
from early WWW, right? Besides the distributed blogosphere, a major part of
the life on today's web happens on a handful of very popular web sites (such
as Wikipedia, Facebook, Youtube, and other obvious candidates).
Likewise, there are many information resources for specialized domains, such
as life science. But 90% of the users in this particular domain only makes
use of a small, selected set of the most popular information resources in
their daily work life (such as PubMed or UniProt).
Rather than trying to do a rapid expansion over the whole web through very
light-weight, loose RDFization of all kinds of data, it might be more
rewarding to focus on creating rich, relatively consistent and interoperable
RDF/OWL representations of the information resources that matter the most.
Of course, this is not an either-or decision, as both processes (the
improvement in quality and the increase in quantity) will happen in
parallel. But I think that quality should have higher priority than
quantity, even if it might be harder to, uhm, quantify quality.
[1] http://esw.w3.org/topic/HCLSIG/LODD/Data/DataSetEvaluation
Cheers,
Matthias Samwald
* Semantic Web Company, Austria || http://semantic-web.at/
* DERI Galway, Ireland || http://deri.ie/
* Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution & Cognition Research, Austria ||
http://kli.ac.at/
