On 10/21/10 3:23 PM, Enrico Motta wrote:
Chris
I strongly agree with the points made by Martin and Giovanni. Of
course the LOD initiative has had a lot of positive impact and you
cannot be blamed for being successful, but at the some time I am
worried that teh success and visibility of the LOD cloud is having
some rather serious negative consequences. Specifically:
1) lots of people, even within the SW community, now routinely
describe the LOD as the 'semantic web'. This is not only dramatically
incorrect (and bad for students and people who want to know about the
SW) but also an obstacle to progress: anything which is not in the LOD
diagram does not exist, and this is really not good for the SW
community as a whole (including the people at the centre of the LOD
initiative). Even worse, in the past 12-18 months I have noticed
that this viewpoint has also been embraced by funding bodies and
linking to LOD is becoming a necessary condition for a SW project.
Again, I think this is undesirable - see also Martin's email on this
thread.
I agree, but do note (as per my earlier response) the success of the LOD
cloud pictorial as marketing collateral isn't something that arisen by
deliberate exclusion actions. Methinks many have simply slapped it into
their presentations devoid of actual presentation goals. This single
activity has helped and hurt the LOD cloud pictorial. Hurt meaning:
creating the perception you describe above.
2) Because the LOD is perceived as the 'official SW' and because
resources in the LOD have to comply with a number of guidelines,
people also assume that LOD resources exhibit higher quality.
I hope not, and I don't think so. Even if it were to be true, would you
blame the production of the pictorial for that? Really though, I don't
recall anyone saying: LOD pictorial is the Linked Data gospel.
Unfortunately in our experience this is not really the case, and this
also generates negative consequences. That is, if LOD is the 'official
high quality SW ' and there are so many issues with the data,
automatically people assume that the rest of the SW is a lot worse,
even though this is not necessarily the case.
So, as other people have already said, maybe it is time to re-examine
teh design criteria for LOD and the way this is presented?
But this should simple be a case of people from the community producing
additional collateral. The LOD cloud has some interesting history that
goes something like this:
1. Banff 2007 (Linked Data coming out party) -- Chris was giving a
DBpedia demo showing its inter-connectedness, TimBL then suggest to
Chris to turn it into a cloud with periodic updates for demonstrating
growth
2. Richard (working with Chris at the time) picked up the challenge and
refined the initial graphic
3. People started using it to show growth of DBpedia which also implied
LOD cloud since the connections in the pictorial were reciprocal
4. Cloud pictorial caught fire re. powerpoint presentations +
exponential effect of slideshare.
Thus, why can others simply emulate this process, based on respective
areas of interest?
For instance, it would be beneficial to the community if LOD were to
focus more on quality issues, rather than linking for the sake of linking.
Who is this LOD entity? You make this entity sound very much like the
one represented as a burning-bush when providing instructions Moses :-)
And in addition, a less static approach to listing resources could
improve the visibility of so much more stuff out there.
Yes, so no harm in making a real graph from the actual pool of linked
data out in the wild.
Enrico
PS
I agree with you that it would be much better, if somebody would set
up a
crawler, properly crawl the Web of Data and then provide a catalog
about all
datasets.
Actually this is exactly what our Watson system does, see
http://watson.kmi.open.ac.uk
And I would assume there are APIs or even a SPARQL endpoint that would
enable interested parties generate a dynamic cloud, right?
Kingsley
At 13:12 +0100 21/10/10, Giovanni Tummarello wrote:
> But again: I agree that crawling the Web of Data and then deriving
a dataset
catalog as well as meta-data about the datasets directly from the
crawled
data would be clearly preferable and would also scale way better.
Thus: Could please somebody start a crawler and build such a catalog?
As long as nobody does this, I will keep on using CKAN.
Hi Chris, all
I can only restate that within Sindice we're very open to anyone who
wanted to develop data anlisys apps creating catalogs automatically.
At the moment a map reduce job a couple of week ago gave an excess of
100k independent datasets. How many interlinked etc? to be analyzed.
Our interest (and the interest of the Semantic Web vision i want to
sposor) is to make sure RDFa sites are fully included and so are those
who provide markup which can however be translated in an
automatic/agreeable way (so no scraping or "sponging") into RDF. (that
is anything that any23.org can turn into triples)
If you were indeed interested in running your or developing your
algorithms in our running dataset no problem, the code can be made
opensource so it would run on others similarly structured datasets.
This said yes i think too that in this phase a CKAN like repository
can be an interesting aggregation point, why not.
But i do think the diagram, which made great sense as an example when
Richard started it is now at risk of providing a disservice
which is in line which what Martin is making noticed.
The diagram as it is now kinda implicitly conveys the sense that if
something is so large then all that matters must be there and that's
absolutely not the case.
a) there are plenty of extremely useful datasets is RDF/RDFa etc which
are not there
b) the usefulness of being linked is all but a proven fact, so on the
one hand people might want to "be there" on the other you'd have to do
pushing toward serious commercial entities (for example) to "link to
dbpedia" for reasons that arent clear and that hurts your credibility.
So danny ayers has fun linking to dbpedia so he is in there with his
joke dataset, but you cant credibly bring that argument to large
retailers so they're left out?
this would be ok if the diagram was just "hey its my own thing i set
my rules" - fine but the fanfare around it gives it a different
meaning and thus the controversy above.
.. just tried to put in words what might be a general unspoken feeling..
Short message recap
a) ckan - nice why not might be useful but..
b) generated diagram : we have the data or can collect it so whoever
is interested in analitics pls let us know and we can work it out
(matter of fact it turns out most uf us in here are paid by EU for
doing this in collaborative projects :-) )
cheers
Giovanni
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