Re: Data "on" the Web vs Data "in" the Web

Steve,

The RDF "market" is the amount of money organizations are spending on RDF
> technologies.  This includes the companies Phil mentioned, which btw are
> not using RDF databases exclusively.  The same organization are also using
> traditional databases and unstructured repositories too, and probably their
> RDF use amounts to less than 5% of their total overall data storage.
>
It's interesting to try to define a market value to "RDF". Is this term
referring to the data model ? or to the thing you find in triple stores
(which are just databases optimised for some usage) ? or to a way to write
dumps of open data ? or a serialisation format (here, the market value of
RDF/XML is shrinking fast as we're getting bored with it) ?
Nobody said you must use a triple store when you want to publish data in
RDF and indeed many won't switch everything to a triple store from one day
to another. This is why specs such as http://www.w3.org/TR/r2rml/ so
important.
Then, for all the different meaning of RDF one could define different
market value and compare these to similar things. That is compare RDF dumps
value to the market value of SDF or that of DSPL, or compare the market
value of a triple store to that of Neo4j (and similar tools), or compare
the market value of RDFa to that of microformats... But I bet most of the
individuals from the target market don't care about the technology and just
want something to be done, hence the market value of "web-based open data"
is probably the thing to look at.
By the way, I was just reading an article quoting big number for the value
of the "data science" market - they did not try to assess the value of
Gephi or the .net graph serialisation file format.

I am not disputing that there is RDF adoption.  Nor am I disputing that RDF
> is a great solution for some data needs.  I am simply providing evidence
> that RDF is so far a very minor database technology and when we base our
> Best Practices recommendations ONLY on RDF we are creating standards with
> very minor impact.
>
I thought the goal of this WG was explicitly not to limit ourself to
Semantic Web technologies and take a broader look. And so far the only core
things I saw mentioned are to use HTTP URIs for things and use some kind of
shared vocabularies for annotating the data. This is not harder than HTML
(by the way, what is the market value of HTML ?) and leave room for many
many different implementations using RDF or JSON or anything else. We
should just guide people into using all the relevant technologies in a good
way. IMHO we could compare our tasks to what ReST did to the usage of HTTP
to make APIs, this well acclaimed approach to do things is essentially a
best practice guide for using HTTP. Before that many of us where just
abusing HTTP GET is all kinds of way (e.g. get "
http://example.org/api?id=1&action=delete" to delete something). It was
working to some extent but very inconsistent from site to site as everyone
add his own tricks. Now with ReST you can expect that an HTTP GET will
return something and that a DELETE will delete it. It's much clearer and
better for everyone. So I hope we'll produce some kind of guidelines for
"ReST-like" Open Data (based on a restful usage of HTTP).

Cheers,
Christophe

This may not be what people want or like to hear.  But it is what the
> market is so far telling us and I think it behooves us to listen.
>
> Best Regards,
>
> Steve
>
> Motto: "Do First, Think, Do it Again"
>
>
>  From: Leigh Dodds <leigh@ldodds.com> To: Steven Adler/Somers/IBM@IBMUS
> Cc: Phil Archer <phila@w3.org>, public-dwbp-wg <public-dwbp-wg@w3.org>
> Date: 03/25/2014 11:27 AM Subject: Re: Data "on" the Web vs Data "in" the
> Web
> ------------------------------
>
>
>
> Hi,
>
> On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 6:06 PM, Steven Adler <adler1@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> > I understand your point of view and you've written a passionate defense
> of
> > RDF and Linked Data. Its not my intent to challenge your beliefs, but I
> > would like to point out some facts and my interpretation.
> > 1. According to IDC the RDF market was $10M in 2012 and is estimated to
> grow
> > to $170M in 2017. That might sound like a lot but in comparison to the
> > overall database market of about $30B its peanuts.
>
> What is "the RDF market"?
>
> >
> > 2.  There might be government implementations of RDF but there are no
> Open
> > Data implementations.
>
> I'm having trouble understanding that statement when Phil has pointed
> you at a lot of examples of government and non-government deployments
> of RDF that are Open Data.
>
> Are you talking about RDF triple stores rather than people using RDF?
>
> L.
>
> --
> Leigh Dodds
> Freelance Technologist
> Open Data, Linked Data Geek
> t: @ldodds
> w: ldodds.com
> e: leigh@ldodds.com
>
>
>
>


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