On 21/10/2011 08:09, Leigh Dodds wrote:
Hi,
On 20 October 2011 23:19, Kingsley Idehen<[email protected]> wrote:
On 10/20/11 5:31 PM, Dave Reynolds wrote:
What's more I really don't think the issues is about not understanding
about the distinction (at least in the clear cut cases). Most people I
talk to grok the distinction, the hard bit is understanding why 303
redirects is a sensible way of making it and caring about it enough to
put those in place.
What about separating the concept of "indirection" from its actual
mechanics? Thus, conversations about benefits will then have the freedom to
blossom.
Here's a short list of immediately obvious benefits re. Linked Data (at any
scale):
1. access to data via data source names -- millions of developers world wide
already do this with ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET, OLE DB etc.. the only issue is
that they are confined to relational database access and all its
shortcomings
2. integration of heterogeneous data sources -- the ability to coherently
source and merge disparately shaped data culled from a myriad of data
sources (e.g. blogs, wikis, calendars, social media spaces and networks, and
anything else that's accessible by name or address reference on a network)
3. crawling and indexing across heterogeneous data sources -- where the end
product is persistence to a graph model database or store that supports
declarative query language access via SPARQL (or even better a combination
of SPARQL and SQL)
4. etc...
Why is all of this important?
Data access, integration, and management has been a problem that's straddled
every stage of computer industry evolution. Managers and end-users always
think about data conceptually, but continue to be forced to deal with
access, integration, and management in application logic oriented ways. In a
nutshell, applications have been silo vectors forever, and in doing so they
stunt the true potential of computing which (IMHO) is ultimately about our
collective quests for improved productivity.
No matter what we do, there are only 24 hrs in a day. Most humans taper out
at 5-6 hrs before physiological system faults kick in, hence our implicit
dependency of computers for handling voluminous and repetitive tasks.
Are we there yet?
Much closer that most imagine. Our biggest hurdle (as a community of Linked
Data oriented professionals) is a protracted struggle re. separating
concepts from implementation details. We burn too much time fighting
implementation details oriented battles at the expense of grasping core
concepts.
Maybe I'm wrong but I think people, especially on this list,
understanding the overall benefits you itemize. The reason we talk
about implementation details is they're important to help people adopt
the technology: we need specific examples.
We get the benefits you describe from inter-linked dereferenceable
URIs, regardless of what format or technology we use to achieve it.
Using the RDF model brings additional benefits.
What I'm trying to draw out in this particular thread is specific
benefits the #/303 additional abstraction brings.
+1 that's how I read it
At the moment, they
seem pretty small in comparison to the fantastic benefits we get from
data integrated into the web.
+1
Dave
