Dear Sam, It is not possible to bypass LOD.
Unfortunately the lack of knowledge about LOD, SW and even seemingly unrelated technologies like cloud computing and content management systems make building useful applications cumbersome even for academically trained professionals. Again, there are no easy shortcuts. To lower the thresholds, we may need to expand on how data should be made available. In my humble opinion, it seems that creating online digital repository interfaces where users can readily input data, which gets processed, will be necessary. Most individual researchers, institutes and NGOs lack the expertise and, even more importantly resources to develop the basic SW infrastructure. You mention the creation of localfoodsystems.org which is directly related to our own project Intelligent Design Modular Farming, see http://www.paradiso-fp7.eu/contributions. To achieve building the accompanying web site, and have it be semantic web enabled we have to create multiple language interfaces and build probably a lot from scratch, with the notable exception of the FAO AGROVOC Concept Server. Along the way most LOD users will have to endure investigating more technologies and software than they will care for, first to understand the underlying principles of SW and then actually to make it work. Often the only way forward is to find researchers, institutes and NGOs that have goals, objectives in common to build what needs to be built, frequently from scratch. It would be useful to have a semantic web portal, with documentation, standards, references, publications, conferences, education and outreach materials, tutorials, application and vendor directories and case studies for beginners. Our organization is planning to build one specifically for sustainable development, and more in particular for modular farming. In the definition and planning process we have met with obstacles we did not even conceive of and have found that networking is the only practical way.. There is no getting around LOD, but there is no getting around networking either to avoid getting stuck in figuring out how to make LOD and SW work in your particular area of interest, expertise or (applied) research. This is of particular importance because the availability of information on how to structure knowledge in specific domains of discourse, or simply areas of interest or focus (less structured) in any field is lacking for most of human knowledge. As with any other endeavor, lowering thresholds requires information, education and outreach. Milton Ponson GSM: +297 747 8280 Rainbow Warriors Core Foundation PO Box 1154, Oranjestad Aruba, Dutch Caribbean www.rainbowwarriors.net Project Paradigm: A structured approach to bringing the tools for sustainable development to all stakeholders worldwide www.projectparadigm.info NGO-Opensource: Creating ICT tools for NGOs worldwide for Project Paradigm www.ngo-opensource.org MetaPortal: providing online access to web sites and repositories of data and information for sustainable development www.metaportal.info SemanticWebSoftware, part of NGO-Opensource to enable SW technologies in the Metaportal project www.semanticwebsoftware.info --- On Tue, 1/27/09, Samuel Rose <[email protected]> wrote: From: Samuel Rose <[email protected]> Subject: Re: studies about LD visibility To: "Danny Ayers" <[email protected]> Cc: "Jun Zhao" <[email protected]>, "Olaf Hartig" <[email protected]>, [email protected] Date: Tuesday, January 27, 2009, 6:24 PM Hi Jun, 2009/1/27 Jun Zhao <[email protected]> Our projects have been supporting the needs from users who have little or no techy background. They quite buy the idea of Semantic Web, for making it easier to mash up datasets, technically speaking. However, we are still looking for compelling cases to show that there are things that cannot be done without LD. And I would really want to know what the LD community feels about how far the LD technology is reaching outside the SW community. Things that cannot be done without LD: I don't think there is technically anything that explicitly cannot be done without Linking Open Data. However, there are some things that could be done much more flexibly, in more scalable ways. Without LOD model, you would usually be depending on developers to hard code links between data into multiple applications. You would also need DB access to many different applications. Users would be far more limited in ways that they can combine and explore data. LOD is going to be closest we can come to letting non-programmers/regular software users be able to ask questions of multipe data sets in very flexible ways. It can scale up to many data sets/sources, many ways to view queries, even many ways to turn around and shre the output of those queries with others. >From a developer point of view, making it easy to incorporate LOD into >existing applications is vital. I can imagine, for instance, people working in the site that I am developing at http://localfoodsystems.org, having access to data sets from multiple sources, with an interface that allows them to combine datasources, and query them very easily, to get info on soil conditions, markets, pests, drought report data, etc etc. Or if many people wanted to contribute to local food systems knowledge bases from multiple sources, they could have RDF or RDFa data coming from their various sites. One of the things that I am interested in, is thinking about how to lower the barrier of entry for LOD, by making it easier for more people to be able to output data in standard ways. -- Sam Rose Social Synergy Tel:+1(517) 639-1552 Cel: +1-(517)-974-6451 AIM: Str9960 Linkedin Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samrose skype: samuelrose email: [email protected] http://socialsynergyweb.org/network "When a distinguished elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." Arthur C. Clarke, Clarke's first law
