The Web of documents is an open system built on people agreeing on
standards
and best practices.
Open system means in this context that everybody can publish content
and
that there are no restrictions on the quality of the content.
This is in my opinion one of the central facts that made the Web
successful.
+10000000000
The same is true for the Web of Data. There obviously cannot be any
restrictions on what people can/should publish (including, different
opinions on a topic, but also including pure SPAM). As on the
classic Web,
it is a job of the information/data consumer to figure out which
data it
wants to believe and use (definition of information quality =
usefulness of
information, which is a subjective thing).
+10000000000
The fact that there is obviously a lot of low quality data on the
current Web should not encourage us to publish masses of low-quality
data and then celebrate ourselves for having achieved a lot. The
current Web tolerates buggy markup, broken links, and questionable
content of all types. But I hope everybody agrees that the Web is
successful because of this tolerance, not because of the buggy content
itself. Quite to the contrary, the Web has been broadly adopted
because of the lots of commonly agreed high-quality contents.
If you continue to live the linked data landfill style it will fall
back on you, reputation-wise, funding-wise, and career-wise. Some
rules hold in ecosystems of all kinds and sizes.
Best
Martin
