Re: RDF: XULing or Grueling

(working my way backward; I'd prefer to have this on a list I'm  
subscribed to, i.e., semantic-web@w3.org )

On Oct 5, 2007, at 5:04 PM, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
[snip]
> Bijan,
>
> You make valid points.
>
> Personally, my experience is that the SemWeb community hit the  
> classic "chicken & egg" conundrum and unfortunately there where too  
> many "exploitation of RDF based structured data demos via DL"  
> without actual widely accessible interlinked structured data  
> sources expressed in RDF (i.e. Linked Data).

Kingsley, please indulge my devil's advocacy. I've heard the network  
effect argument for *years*. The flipside of the network effect is  
that *most* things can succeed if everyone is using it, however  
crappy. People have *always* been doing big dumps of data into RDF  
(DMoz; musicbrainz; TAP; WorldBook, etc.). So I tend to be skeptical  
about this line, or, at least, about it's analytical content.

> In addition, the RDF/XML serialization and RDF Data Model  
> separation didn't help either.

I dealt with a bit of this in my reply to Harry, but I'll also point  
out that I've encounter loads of people who don't like the model. For  
many purposes, I'm one of them. I think both of the critical XUL  
reflections were critical *of the RDF model* (esp. Hyatt who didn't  
care for the graphs at all).

> Some outside the SemWeb community pointers re. Linked Data:
>
> 1. http://www.mkbergman.com/?p=400
> 2. http://www.mkbergman.com/?p=405

I'm afraid I don't immediately see how that's from outside the  
community.

> I think DBpedia [1] is doing a great job of demonstrating the  
> Semantic Data Web's potential via Linked Data.
>
> Links:
>
> 1. http://dbpedia.org

Perhaps. I didn't find it to have a decent end user interface. I  
didn't see how to get it to do what it claimed to be able to do:

"""Wikipedia currently only supports keyword-based search and does  
not allow more expressive queries like “Give me all cities in New  
Jersey with more than 10 000 inhabitants” or “Give me all Italian  
musicians from the 18th century.” This restricts the overall utility  
of Wikipedia."""

Being able to exhibit data from Wikipedia is, indeed, useful to me.  
But this is more interface than anything else.

This is a bit of a tangent from my original purpose which is to  
figure out what went wrong with some major RDF projects and,  
eventually, to have some sort of sane decision tree for when or when  
not to use RDF.

Thanks for the reply.

Cheers,
Bijan.

Received on Monday, 8 October 2007 00:43:24 UTC