On 10/21/10 3:45 PM, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
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.
Typo cleanup repost:
I agree, but do note (as per my earlier response) the success of the LOD
cloud pictorial as marketing collateral isn't something that's arisen by
deliberate exclusionary actions on anyone's part per se*. 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 or implying that 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't others simply emulate this process, based on
respective areas of interest, on an individual or group basis? **
[SNIP]
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen
President& CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen
