Re: Silk - Link Discovery Framework Version 2.4 release

Hi Mischa,

I'm glad you are still on this list.

I think that reactions to Paolo's email from the list confirm to me that it has "a great number of nice, helpful, intelligent people", although maybe it is not full of them :-)

NIce:
Many communities I know would have instantly descended into an aggressive shouting match at the sort of accusations made, without any reliable evidence being provided - at least we haven't so far.
And only describing the message as "harsh" was impressive - you are clearly at home.

Helpful:
Actually engaging with the issue in any case.
People sat back and thought, "Hmmm, I wonder what Paolo is on about - let's think about the validity of these comments."

Intelligent:
I suspect that most people, as I did, read Paola's message and immediately assumed that it was based on a typo - I didn't even need to go and look at the page, which Paolo has very kindly circulated, and indeed, as has been pointed out, there is an obvious typo.
OK, perhaps it didn't take much intelligence to click once as you did, or see the dates were screwed in the page, but it did take a little.

So I trust that the list's reaction will confirm that you will remain a fellow-traveller on this exciting journey.
Cheers
Hugh

On 1 Jun 2011, at 16:35, Mischa Tuffield wrote:

> Hi, 
> 
> I don't usually write to this list, and have no idea what SILK is about (Sorry SILK people!), but I found the below email to be incredibly harsh. 
> 
> Look at the git history of the project (which was 1 click way from the email I am referring to below!), it does seem to be in active development, with a number of committers: 
> 
> http://www.assembla.com/code/silk/git/node/logs?page=1  (apache license 2.0)
> 
> And the page DOES seem to reflect this: 
> 
> http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/silk/ 
> 
> Perhaps there was a bug in the HTML(?), I don't know - but I would give people the benefit of the doubt before pointing fingers in public. I do think a personal email to Robert would probably have sufficed, but perhaps I am just that way inclined. 
> 
> I have recently unsubscribed from a few of the SW based mailing lists because of trolling and people being incredibly rude - and I hope I don't have to remove myself from any others. The Semantic Web community is full of a great number of nice, helpful, intelligent people, and I find it a pleasure and an honour to be involved with this international community of awesome....  Lots of people put lots of time and effort into writing open specs and open-source code - and i don't see how finger pointing helps anyone!
> 
> Mischa
> 
> http://mmt.me.uk/ 
> 
> On 1 Jun 2011, at 16:16, Paola Di Maio wrote:
> 
>> Robert
>> 
>> thanks  lot for the update, I look forward to be trying it out
>> 
>> I see from this page
>> http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/silk/
>> 
>> that SILK V 2.4, announced on this list today was actually released
>> last year: See the snippet below
>> 
>> 2010-06-01: Version 2.4 released including the new Silk Workbench, a
>> web application which guides the user through the process of
>> interlinking different data sources.
>> 
>> I also seem to understand from the project page that much of LOD2
>> software are tools developed in previous years (ie, nothing new!)
>> 
>> Am I reading something wrong?
>> 
>> In the past decade or so, millions of euros of tax payers money have
>> been paid for projects for which the codebase had already been
>> developed, either by funded projects from prior calls( ie, for which
>> the tax payer had already paid ) or by other companies.
>> 
>> In essence, as it has been already pointed out, the public has been
>> paying for the same semantic web tools to be rebranded over and over,
>> and each time it has costed lots of public money, and each time it has
>> not delivered the semantic web functionality the public is waiting for
>> (ie, a useable web based application layer)
>> 
>> Since LOD2 has become a funded EU project in September 2010, I would
>> be grateful if you could explain what part of the tool/functionality
>> has been developed after September 2010, and for what part of this
>> development is the public funding being used for
>> 
>> 
>> Thanks a lot in advance
>> 
>> PDM
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 3:35 PM, Robert Isele <robertisele@googlemail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi all,
>>> 
>>> we are happy to announce version 2.4 of the Silk - Link Discovery
>>> Framework for the Web of Data.
>>> 
>>> The central idea of the Web of Data is to interlink data items using
>>> RDF links. However, in practice most data sources are not sufficiently
>>> interlinked with related data sources. The Silk Link Discovery
>>> Framework addresses this problem by providing tools to generate links
>>> between data items based on user-provided link specifications. It can
>>> be used by data publishers to generate links between datasets as well
>>> as by Linked Data consumers to augment Web data with additional RDF
>>> links.
>>> 
>>> Link specifications can either be written manually or developed using
>>> the new Silk Workbench. The Silk Workbench, is a web application which
>>> guides the user through the process of interlinking different data
>>> sources. It’s being shipped with the 2.4 version of Silk.
>>> The Silk Workbench offers the following features:
>>> - It enables the user to manage different sets of data sources and
>>> linking tasks.
>>> - It offers a graphical editor which enables the user to easily create
>>> and edit link specifications.
>>> - As finding a good linking heuristics is usually an iterative
>>> process, the Silk Workbench makes it possible for the user to quickly
>>> evaluate the links which are generated by the current link
>>> specification.
>>> - It allows the user to create and edit a set of reference links used
>>> to evaluate the current link specification.
>>> 
>>> The Silk Link Discovery Framework includes three applications to
>>> execute the link specifications which address different use cases:
>>> 1. Silk Single Machine is used to generate RDF links on a single
>>> machine. The datasets that should be interlinked can either reside on
>>> the same machine or on remote machines which are accessed via the
>>> SPARQL protocol. Silk Single Machine provides multithreading and
>>> caching. In addition, the performance can be further enhanced using an
>>> optional blocking feature.
>>> 2. Silk Server can be used as an identity resolution component within
>>> applications that consume Linked Data from the Web. Silk Server
>>> provides an HTTP API for matching instances from an incoming stream of
>>> RDF data while keeping track of known entities. It can be used for
>>> instance together with a Linked Data crawler to populate a local
>>> duplicate-free cache with data from the Web.
>>> 3. Silk MapReduce is used to generate RDF links between datasets using
>>> a cluster of multiple machines. Silk MapReduce is based on Hadoop and
>>> can for instance be run on Amazon Elastic MapReduce. Silk MapReduce
>>> enables Silk to scale out to very big datasets by distributing the
>>> link generation to multiple machines.
>>> 
>>> More information about the Silk framework, the Silk Link Specification
>>> Language, as well as several examples that demonstrate how Silk is
>>> used to set links between different data sources in the LOD cloud is
>>> found at:
>>> 
>>> http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/silk/
>>> 
>>> The Silk framework is provided under the terms of the Apache License,
>>> Version 2.0 and can be downloaded from
>>> 
>>> http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/silk/releases/
>>> 
>>> The development of Silk was supported by Vulcan Inc. as part of its
>>> Project Halo (www.projecthalo.com) and by the EU FP7 project LOD2 -
>>> Creating Knowledge out of Interlinked Data (http://lod2.eu/, Ref. No.
>>> 257943).
>>> 
>>> Thanks to  Christian Becker, Michal Murawicki and Andrea Matteini for
>>> contributing to the Silk Workbench.
>>> 
>>> Happy linking,
>>> 
>>> Robert Isele, Anja Jentzsch and Chris Bizer
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
> 

-- 
Hugh Glaser,  
              Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia
              School of Electronics and Computer Science,
              University of Southampton,
              Southampton SO17 1BJ
Work: +44 23 8059 3670, Fax: +44 23 8059 3045
Mobile: +44 75 9533 4155 , Home: +44 23 8061 5652
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~hg/

Received on Wednesday, 1 June 2011 17:48:38 UTC