Re: LinkedData != RDF ?

On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 5:31 AM, William Waites <ww@styx.org> wrote:
>
> Perhaps the biggest barrier for people
> starting out with RDF is figuring out which vocabularies are appropriate
> and how to use them. I think this comes from the attempt to have global
> scope everywhere (pace blank nodes) and agree that more attention needs
> to be paid to the idea of local dialects and reasoning on neighbourhoods
> of resources rather than trying to work with the entire universe of
> facts simultaneously. This is analogous to the reason why programming
> languages have the concept of scope and it has long been known that
> global variables should be treated with suspicion and distrust. Actually
> I think you may have nailed the key barrier to adoption of RDF here.

I agree. And I am not all too concerned yet.

I am an experienced programmer and worked a good bit with semantic
nets, frames, logic going way back. I am fairly new to RDF, etc. And
so one of my primary areas of effort right now is "figuring out which
vocabularies are appropriate" much more so than figuring out how to
use RDF in an application.

One thing I keep in mind is that this is all still so new. People are
establishing very early vocabularies right now. But 10-20 years from
now, or 50 - a much larger set of "foundational" vocabularies will be
established. I think we need to bear in mind not just our current
situation, but where this is leading. I am encouraged that people are
working on shared vocabularies and logic(s) that can be applied to the
various collaborative scenarios at web, enterprise, and work-group
scales.

-Patrick

Received on Friday, 20 May 2011 16:01:37 UTC