François Dongier wrote:
Kingsley,
Looks like you're imagining a scenario in which Wolfram Alpha, after
having done its mathematical computation relevant to a particular user
query, would expose its result in a format that would enrich the web
of data. I agree that this would indeed be pretty nice but I wasn't
asking for so much: I was more thinking of Alpha as an application at
the end of the data processing pipeline (for instance, for data
visualisation), not so much as an application that produces reusable
output.
I really know of no application that doesn't produce some kind of output.
I also know of no kind of output that is devoid of representation :-)
In fact I have two basic questions about Wolfram|Alpha:
1. How can Alpha take advantage of the (not always "curated") data
available on the web? This is the question I was asking, and it's not
about data format but about data correctness: Wolfram insists that
they must "curate" data to make sure it's reliable. I am worried that
they won't be able to catch up, given the explosion of data that will
soon be produced by projects such as Linked Data and Google Fusion Tables.
Of course they won't be able to catchup. I wonder if they've computed
this reality yet.
2. Will Wolfram want to expose its curated data (ideally in RDF),
enabling other applications (say, Sparql queries) to merge it with
other data? Here my question really is: will they want to share this
data, or will they prefer to keep it private? If they want to share
it, then I agree that Linked Data format would be best .
They will share it, in due course. To their credit, they do have an API
that is nearing release, and APIs are always the final step en route to
Linked Data. By this I mean: APIs ultimately accelerate comprehension of
why: Code is like FISH and Data like Wine :-)
Kingsley
Regards,
François
2009/7/3 Kingsley Idehen <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
François Dongier wrote:
I wonder how Wolfram|Alpha could take advantage of all this
data made available both by Google Fusion Tables and by the
Linked Data project. Will Alpha just try to slowly integrate
it through its "curation pipeline"? Wouldn't it be better to
introduce something like "curation coefficients" that would
allow computation to be done by Alpha on imperfect data? This
would make it possible to quickly catch up on the published
data, while introducing some uncertainty in the results Alpha
returns.
Francois,
Since the overall theme is Linked Data (HTTP URIs for data
objects), how does WolframAlpha add any value if the end result is
an opaque HTML resource (one that lacks structure data granularity
or pointers to structured data sources)?
Value comes if Google exposes its Dataspace GUIDs as HTTP URIs,
and then WolframAlpha (or anyone else in the data processing
pipeline) does the same, then you get something that is truly
valuable i.e.:
1. Computation Answer Engine that emits its Linked Data (as per
Linked Data meme)
2. Google's contribution to the Linked Data Web realm via Data
Spaces / Virtual Database technology that also emits Linked Data.
The ultimate value of the Web remains the fundamental separation
of the following re. data:
1. Identity
2. Storage
3. Access
4. Representation
5. Presentation.
We cannot see, comprehend, and appreciate the Web via item #5
solely, which is always the case when the output representation
from a Web service lacks pointers (HTTP URIs) to RDF model based
structured and interlinked data in line with Linked Data meme.
To conclude, things will more than likely get better now that
Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft (naturally) are beginning to see
alignment between their respective customer-driven technology
adoption strategies and the virtues of Linked Data, thanks to RDFa
and the GoodRelations vocabulary.
Kingsley
Cheers,
François
On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 2:28 PM, Chris Bizer <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> <mailto:[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>> wrote:
Hi all,
I’m regularly following Alon Halevy blog as I really like his
thoughts on dataspaces [1].
Today, I discovered this post about Google Fusion Tables
http://alonhalevy.blogspot.com/2009/06/fusion-tables-third-piece-of-puzzle.html
“The main goal of Fusion Tables is to make it easier for
people to
create, manage and share on structured data on the Web. Fusion
Tables is a new kind of data management system that focuses on
features that /enable collaboration/. […] In a nutshell, Fusion
Tables enables you to upload tabular data (up to 100MB per
table)
from spreadsheets and CSV files. You can filter and
aggregate the
data and visualize it in several ways, such as maps and time
lines. The system will try to recognize columns that represent
geographical locations and suggest appropriate
visualizations. To
collaborate, you can share a table with a select set of
collaborators or make it public. One of the reasons to
collaborate
is to enable /fusing/ data from multiple tables, which is a
simple
yet powerful form of data integration. If you have a table
about
water resources in the countries of the world, and I have data
about the incidence of malaria in various countries, we can
fuse
our data on the country column, and see our data side by side.”
See also
Google announcement
http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/06/google-fusion-tables.html
Water data example
http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2009/world/google-brings-water-data-to-life/
Taken this together with Google Squared and the recent
announcement that Google is going to crawl microformats and
RDFa,
it starts to look like the folks at Google are working in
the same
direction as the Linking Open Data community, but as usual
a bit
more centralized and less webish.
Cheers,
Chris
[1]
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~franklin/Papers/dataspaceSR.pdf
<http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/%7Efranklin/Papers/dataspaceSR.pdf>
<http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/%7Efranklin/Papers/dataspaceSR.pdf>
--
Prof. Dr. Christian Bizer
Web-based Systems Group
Freie Universität Berlin
+49 30 838 55509
http://www.bizer.de
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
<mailto:[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen Weblog:
http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
<http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/%7Ekidehen>
President & CEO OpenLink Software Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO
OpenLink Software Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
