On 6/12/11 2:26 PM, Lin Clark wrote:
Again, this strikes me as speaking from very little experience. I
spend a good deal of my time collaboratively developing ontologies and
working with users of them. I've yet to encounter a person who didn't
understand the difference between a book about Obama and Obama.
My experience is with an extensible system which powers about 2% of
the Web, which has over 10,000 contributed modules and 1,000
developers working on the core platform—Drupal.
100% of the Web and Internet is powered by "data access by reference" .
It the most basic building block of computing, even pre silicon.
I have been one of the two primary people developing and educating
users about the use of Linked Data technology in Drupal 7. This may be
different than your experience, but it certainly isn't negligible
experience when talking about the successful adoption of these
technologies.
You are looking from Semantic Web narrative outwards instead of looking
from the outside in. Do that and you'll grok Alan's point.
It depends on the manner in which the system is made extensible.
Architecture and good design matters. However, It is this attitude
that has led, in part, to the prulgation of schema.org
<http://schema.org> as a closed
architecture.
The system is extensible via the hook system, which basically follows
the aspect oriented paradigm. It also uses what can be considered a
Presentation Abstraction Control architecture (also called
Hierarchical MVC), where the different agents at different levels of
the hierarchy can come from different modules designed by different
developers. This extensibility means developers with a very wide range
of knowledge and experience can contribute parts of the functionality.
I think this is a good thing, as do many others who attribute Drupal's
success to these architectural features.
Because different parts of the EAV relationship are extensible and can
be developed by different developers in Drupal, it requires that all
parties understand the distinction between info resource and thing
resource and how to put that in practice.
"Information Resource" is a poor invented replacement due to overloaded
use of "Resource".
A chunk of data at a location is a Resource. It can bear representation
of a Document or be more granular by bearing data objects (via EAV/SPO
3-tuples using links).
We used have a Web of Document Addresses (URLs) and now via Name
indirection (i.e., de-referencable Names) we have a new layer of
abstraction. Imagine if you used DNS as your annecdote re. evolution of
the Web. Once we had NIC addresses and then we had Names, courtesy of
DNS. Imagine an InterWeb of NIC addresses vs one driven by Names. Even
simpler example, imagine a Spreadsheet without Cell Naming capability?
Most people start their Spreadsheet experience with Cell Addresses and
then evolve to using Cell Names. As I keep on saying, the pattern is
old, the use of Hyperlinks and ubiquity of WWW combine to deliver new
context for old concepts.
This means teaching them to/sometimes/ use hash URIs when content is
entered (which overloads the hash URI with different meanings, as it
is already used for another purpose in HTML) or to use 303's with
content negotiation (which even some vocabulary publishers deeply
embedded in the SemWeb world don't seem to understand how to do).
Good design does matter, but we have to define what we are optimizing
for when we say good design:
* If you are optimizing for correctness, then good design means
making everyone understand and use this new distinction and
changing the workflow.
* If you are optimizing for large scale participation, then good
design means you work with the workflows that users are already
familiar with and just supplement those workflows with SemWeb
technology where the technology has the chance of making
something easier.
I do believe that if someone steps back and thinks about it, making
the distinction between a Web page about a person and the person
themselves does make sense. But most people aren't stepping back and
thinking about it, they are doing... and we aren't there in the room
with them to tell them to take a step back and think. We can wag
fingers all we want at these people, but really the most successful
Web designs Don't Make Me Think.
I think we also have to understand what is the best solution for
now—when people don't yet understand these technologies and we need
adoption—and what is the best solution for 10 years from now—when, if
we have been successful at getting the tech adopted, people will
understand the fundamentals of this technology and can be taken a step
further.
Not understanding can be a function of chosen anecdote. This is the case
most of the time re. Linked Data, RDF, and Semantic Web.
Best,
Lin
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen
President& CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen
