Re: Linked Data Dogfood circa. 2013

On 01/04/2013 02:02 AM, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
> On 1/3/13 7:50 PM, Sarven Capadisli wrote:
>> On 01/04/2013 12:34 AM, Bernard Vatant wrote:
>>> Dog Food People
>>> http://data.semanticweb.org/person/
>>
>> [Off topic]
>>
>> Given that the people in that list originally published their papers
>> using anything but machine friendly Web practices, would anyone care
>> to enlighten me the dogfood bit in "Dog Food People"?
>>
>> I do think that data.semanticweb.org is doing a great thing i.e., they
>> are the ones dogfooding! It is unfortunately a limited "patch" to a
>> problem that the Semantic Web / Linked Data community is too careless
>> to tackle head on!
>>
>> -Sarven
>>
>>
>>
> [On topic]
>
> So why don't we all make a concerted effort in 2013 to clean up these
> kinds of issues. Basically, let's make dogfooding meaningful since its
> the ultimate demonstrator of technology utility :-)

Enter Sarven's Rant:

I acknowledge that sometimes it is indeed complicated (e.g., too many 
variables) to eat our own dogfood in every corner, when faced with all 
the business' needs, for whatever reasons they may be. I don't wish to 
debate whether the solutions that SW/LD offers are realistic enough or 
can be fulfilled or not. We use the tools we can to get the work done. 
Everyone does what they can.

However, what's frustrating to see, not to mention the ongoing 
facepalms, is the situation that the self-proclaimed SW/LD conferences 
and academia puts themselves into.

Every year, the conferences primarily requests the research work to be 
submitted in PDF/Word and then maybe the source in LaTeX for 
camera-ready versions which is then handed off to the (print) 
publishers. Similarly, that's what happens in academia too.

That is precisely what data.semanticweb.org is "patching", the bits the 
SW/LD community shouldn't be intentionally breaking in the first place. 
It is not good enough to get some metadata when all is said and done. 
What's that? The leftover from the conferences and publishers? G, 
thanks, but, no thanks, we can do better. We ought to do better.

All the value in research work is locked up in desktop-friendly formats 
(yes, Google showing a preview of the PDFs is a hack too) or maybe gets 
printed for others researchers to consume from. But, wait a minute, 
wasn't the SW/LD community fighting to get machines to do something? You 
know it exactly as I do. We need to get a hold of all that awesome 
information in those papers; from hypotheses, results, claims, 
conclusions, references, to.. in a way that we can point at it.

Is the current situation seriously something we can't fix or improve on? 
Is the community at the mercy of cool conferences, organizations, 
publishers, academia or die hard followers of archaic methods?

How about a possible solution to steer towards in the right direction:

* SW/LD conferences asks research work to be submitted *first* in a 
machine-friendly format (e.g., HTML+RDFa); if you are responsible for 
its organization, please make it right and first serve the *Web* 
community. Otherwise, you are the ones that's holding things back!

* If you are an author, researcher, or whatever, put your word where 
your mouth is and *first* publish it on the Web yourself and make sure 
it is machine friendly. Give its URI to the conference or your academic 
institution. Otherwise, you are the ones that's holding things back!

* If you are an SW/LD academic supervisor, ask and encourage your 
students to publish or submit their work in such fashion. Otherwise, you 
are the ones that's holding things back!

Do your bit :)

-Sarven

Received on Tuesday, 8 January 2013 16:37:53 UTC