Hugh Glaser wrote:
Please name applications!
Go on, you must be able to name one to support your view.
That's a fair, but also unfair, question to ask.
Most apps can be categorized in to two categories:
a) those that are for a silo and pull data from that silo.
b) those that pull data from multiple sources.
We must consider both separately.
Regarding a) Many of the big data silos use semantic web techs and
linked data, and thus their applications use it indirectly - they may
even use it directly, but who'd know and what value would that be?
Regarding b) The apps which pull data from multiple sources invariably
do it via a server side application which cleans, analyses and merges
the data (feedly, fliboard, currents etc), or deal with specific media
types like images (500px for example). Again, those server side
applications often use semantic web techs and linked data, and thus
their applications also use it indirectly.
The primary problem is, that for any application to be popular they need
to provide a good reliable user experience, and that requires that they
have dependable clean data, and that usually requires that they
integrate and clean the data before sending it to the app which the end
user is using.
There are only really two viable approaches to providing a good user
experience with data from the wild:
1) Clean the data first
2) Use data which has a simple dependable structure (jpg, atom, rss etc)
"Linked Data" comes under the bracket of (1) often already, but that
won't count in a definition of a "Linked Data Application", and it
doesn't currently come under the bracket of (2) other than the RSS case,
which many would discount, because it can use any old ontology from
anywhere on the web, rather than a rigid well known schema.
Thus, I fear your question is fair, but ultimately if that's your
measurement of how well linked data is doing, you'll always have a very
negative view of it, thus unfair.
Hope that helps the discussion a bit,
Nathan
