At 15:45 -0400 21/10/10, 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.
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.
Absolutely! I never said (and I would never say) that there was any
deliberate exclusion. I am just pointing out that this is a negative
side-effect of the success of the activity.
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.
Again, there is no blaming involved. I am just saying that because
there is a methodology associated with LOD and methodologies are
normally associated with quality, people assume quality when quality
is not (necessarily) there.
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?
Of course, they can.
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 :-)
Uhm...I know you are saying this in a jokey way, but I don't think I
am trying to characterise it as a burning bush.....And, unless we are
all dreaming, I would argue that a LOD initiative does exist......
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?
Of course, there is SPARQL and a very fine-grained and efficient API.
In addition, we are working on automatically generating a variety of
links between semantic resources, e.g., agreement/disagreement,
versioning, inclusion, inconsistency, etc.... - see
http://watson.kmi.open.ac.uk/DownloadsAndPublications_files/keod09.pdf
for an overview of the overall framework and
http://watson.kmi.open.ac.uk/DownloadsAndPublications_files/ontoqual2010.pdf
for an example of the approach, which focuses on characterizing and
automatically detecting agreement and disagreement between ontologies.
Enrico
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