I'm not convinced that the Big Boys didn't see the problem long ago and chose to ignore it. Broad, shallow claims are their Business Model. Woody Allen had a great line about this years before Linked Data: "I took a speed reading course and read War & Peace in 4 hours. It's about Russia.".
There are several entailments - Data packed for transport is a bit different than data packed for storage - just like physical goods. In trade, the keyword is "Said to Contain" (STC). This is different from provenance as in origin, and allows a package to cross borders with a simple certification that <i>if unpacked</i> the package would match the detailed manifest. This abstraction is necessary to curtail the Big Boy Ego and coverage claims. The atomic unit is not Triple, it's Dataset. Metering the atomic unit is a Business Plan and combined with the ability to make up atomic units and sue your competitors for making up atomic units in a similar way is a very lucrative Business Plan, but it has little to do with content. - It probably is the case that Snake Oil - Data is an Azeotrope, not a mixture. The need for a distillation method is not quite the same thing as having a distillation method, but "value" can be assessed as if you did, and the key point, <i>with or without the permission of the supplier</i>. It may be that whole warehouses are hopelessly tainted and useless due to Snake Oil contamination. Positive identification will make some people very cross with you, so it is better to describe in detail what Snake Oil contamination looks like or might look like. A simple example: Americans speak English (UK residents please take that lemon out of your mouth) but if you actually ask them, they use 110+ languages at home[1]. - Facebook can't elect you to any Office or "grant control" to anything at the moment, and for the foreseeable future. If one-seventh (1/7) of the world has a FB page that's 14%. Whoo Hoo. If they relinquished the "right" to make stuff up the numbers would be higher and they would probably say "well, it's the 14% who <b>are</b> somebody". Fine if you believe in such things, but Social Networking is wed to the service of "early adopters" in any case, and however you define "early". Like that iconic poster of the Milky Way with the "You Are Here" balloon, a map only if you think so. Roughly 86% of mankind lives with six degrees of separation, if you can call that living. --Gannon [1] http://www.census.gov/hhes/socdemo/language/data/other/detailed-lang-tables.xls ________________________________ From: Barry Norton <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2012 8:31 AM Subject: Re: Reuse On 21/06/2012 11:33, Hugh Glaser wrote: > So I don't think it is specifically a SemWeb/Linked Data problem; it is more > akin to a SEO problem. Agree 100% > But perhaps we do have a Linked Data story along the lines of what has been > discussed - which is what the well-behaved small boys in Linked Data do, and > what the Big Boys should do (and hopefully will, unless schema.org or fb > becomes all-encompassing, which is quite possible.). > It's just frustrating waiting ;) In a sense what I'm trying to draw attention to is that the Big Boys should see the problem now (with Twitter's new announcement) Barry
