I've got the feeling that you're confusing incentives and costs. Someone does something when the incentive (the perceived benefit) is higher than the costs. By making the tools easier to use, we lower the cost. If we increase the incentive, people are willing to take higher costs.
in my opinion, while lowering the cost by providing easier tools is good, we're still missing good incentives. And those data owners who do not want to give data away right now won't do it independently of how good the tools are. Cheers, Georgi -- Georgi Kobilarov Freie Universität Berlin www.georgikobilarov.com From: Juan Sequeda [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, February 09, 2009 3:17 PM To: Georgi Kobilarov Cc: Hugh Glaser; Yves Raimond; [email protected] Subject: Re: Semantic Web pneumonia and the Linked Data flu (was: Can we lower the LD entry cost please (part 1)?) On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 8:13 AM, Georgi Kobilarov <[email protected]> wrote: Wait a second. Publishing Linked Data from relational databases? D2R-Server, Virtuoso Relational Mappings? Juan, you should be familiar with that stuff... Of course... but even though. IMO, not easy enough! I'm taking the position as owner of one of the million web applications out there, powered by a rdbms, and now hearing about the LD thing going on. If I want to be part of it... I would have to invest a lot of time and effort with existing tools such as d2r sever, etc... Easy linking of data? Not quite solved yet. But wait for the Linked Data Workshop at WWW2009... As I said, that is my futuristic position... and I am waiting for things to happen! Georgi -- Georgi Kobilarov Freie Universität Berlin www.georgikobilarov.com From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Juan Sequeda Sent: Monday, February 09, 2009 3:02 PM To: Hugh Glaser Cc: Yves Raimond; [email protected] Subject: Re: Semantic Web pneumonia and the Linked Data flu (was: Can we lower the LD entry cost please (part 1)?) This is a point I have always brought up... it is hard! It is hard to produce LD and hard to consume LD. No sane person will want to do maintain this. Yves just explained everything he goes through and it is wayyy to much! The majority of the data on the web is stored in rdbms. Therefore, IMO, it is crucial to develop automatic ways of creating RDF from relational data and linking it automatically. If this is not going to happen, the whole web that runs on rdbms, will not have an incentive to create LD. This is my futuristic position. Juan Sequeda, Ph.D Student Dept. of Computer Sciences The University of Texas at Austin www.juansequeda.com www.semanticwebaustin.org On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 5:45 AM, Hugh Glaser <[email protected]> wrote: YES! Now I don't have to spend my time writing Part 2. (You did notice the (part 1) in the subject line?) I was wondering of anyone would ask me what was part 2. Well, this was it. Pretty exactly, and very nicely put. Many thanks. Despite what I have said about providing a search facility, I think we need to ensure it is easy to join the LD, and make medium-size-ish (or any) dataset publishers welcome, whatever the perceived paucity of missing facilities or components. Maybe I am thinking two opposite things at the same time? I hope not. On 09/02/2009 10:40, "Yves Raimond" <[email protected]> wrote: Hello! Just to jump on the last thread, something has been bugging me lately. Please don't take the following as a rant against technologies such as voiD, Semantic Sitemaps, etc., these are extremely useful piece of technologies - my rant is more about the order of our priorities, and about the growing cost (and I insist on the word "growing") of publishing linked data. There's a lot of things the community asks linked data publisher to do (semantic sitemaps, stats on the dataset homepages, example sparql queries, void description, and now search function), and I really tend to think this makes linked data publishing cost much, much more costly. Richard just mentioned that it should just take 5 minutes to write such a search function, but 5 minutes + 5 minutes + 5 minutes + ... takes a long time. Maintaining a linked dataset is already *lots* of work: server maintenance, dataset maintenance, minting of new links, keeping up-to-date with the data sources, it *really* takes a lot of time to do properly. Honestly, I begin to be quite frustrated, as a publisher of about 10 medium-size-ish datasets. I really have the feeling the work I invested in them is never enough, every time there seems to be something missing to make all these datasets a "real" part of the linked data cloud. Now for the most tedious part of my rant :-) Most of the datasets published in the linked data world atm are using open source technologies (easy enough to send a patch over to the data publisher). Some of them provide SPARQL end points. What's missing for the advocate of new technologies or requirements to fulfill their goal themselves? After all, that's what we all did with this project since the beginning! If someone really wants a smallish search engine on top of some dataset, wrapping a SPARQL query, or a call to the web service that the dataset wraps should be enough. I don't see how the data publisher is required for achieving that aim. The same thing holds for voiD and other technologies. Detailed statistics are available on most dataset homepages, which (I think) provides enough data to write a good enough voiD description. To sum up, I am just increasingly concerned that we are building requirements on top of requirements for the sake of lowering a "LD entry cost", whereas I have the feeling that this cost is really higher and higher... And all that doesn't make the data more linked :-) Cheers! y
