Re: call to arms

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 1:11 PM, Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 18 April 2010 12:54, Michael Schneider <schneid@fzi.de> wrote:
>> Danny Ayers wrote:
>>
>>>when do I plant my tomatoes?
>>
>> We are in early Spring now. Tomatoes don't grow well in this period. At
>> least not in the outside. Well, you can find them in the greenhouse, but
>> that's probably not what you are looking for. So, I'm afraid, you have to be
>> patient.
>
> Thank you Michael, but I wish to make you redundant. This box of
> circuits in front of me should have told me that.
>
> Did you take into consideration that I live on this side of the
> Garfagnana valley?

When I think about linked information these days, I see three major flavours:

* information in classic document form (analog stuff made of bits;
human-oriented prose, video, imagery)
* information in source-attributed RDF claims (aka Linked Data, quads, etc)
* information in people's heads

For me, the RDFWeb/FOAF story I think has always been about the 3-way
relationship between these different equally important ways of
learning about the world. Linked people *and* linked information.

You can think of lots of aspects of SemWeb as positioned as edges of
this simple triangle where the nodes are the categories above. RDF
syntaxes, GRDDL for microformats, RDFa, Adobe XMP, ebook metadata,
Dublin Core etc are often links between classic document forms and RDF
quads. Sometimes RDF quads are more to summarise what the document
says about the world; other times they are to help find it. Similarly,
provenance, authorship and other people-describing RDF, also
people-describing non-RDF information, can all help us to find whose
*head* might have the right information. A YouTube video can capture
something of a person's subjective knowledge of the world and put it
out there in document form for others to find; tags and RDF stuff can
help others find that video and either learn directly or get in touch.
SemWeb people (all of us) can easily focus only on one of these forms
of information, at the expense not only of the other two, but their
rich interconnections. Machine-unfriendly video, images, audio or .xls
files can still be very useful, and the 'RDF as metadata about files'
use case is one we too easily neglect.

> Did you take into consideration that I live on this side of the Garfagnana valley?

In this case I think the answer is best found in the heads of your
neighbours, rather than on the Web. How's your Italian coming along?

cheers,

Dan

Received on Sunday, 18 April 2010 13:17:49 UTC