Re: Oil spills, hurricanes, et al

>> Resent-From: public-egov-ig@w3.org
>> From: Gannon Dick <gannon_dick@yahoo.com>
>> Date: June 16, 2010 2:59:38 PM EDT
>> To: Mike Norton <xsideofparadise@yahoo.com>
>> Cc: public-egov-ig@w3.org
>> Subject: Oil spills, hurricanes, et al
>> 
>> I agree that there are some interesting things which can be done in the long term.  It will depend on the persistence of Linked Data Sets though, which is something only beginning to be addressed.


One aspect of persistence is the persistence of Linked Data identifiers.  Many of the current identifiers (e.g. DC and FOAF) are redirected from OCLC's purl.org, which has been having trouble dealing with the load in recent times.  That problem lends credence to the idea that the existing infrastructure upon which  the Semantic Web and Linked Data community rely is not ready for prime time.  The infrastructure we have adequately supports research most of the time.  For better or worse, more general uptake of the approach means that nobody is currently positioned to provide production-quality infrastructure at the moment.  

The lack of production readiness is a major use case for the creation of a PURL Federation [1] currently being funded by Zepheira and the National Center for Biomedical Ontology.  I don't know if purl.org will follow that work, but we as a community do need to solve this problem.

Regards,
Dave
--
David Wood

[1] http://zepheira.com/publications/news/#PURLFederationDevelopment


>> 
>> For the current events on everyone's mind there are some existing "resources" to leverage in the collection of raw data, which is a right here, right now sort of thing.
>> 
>> [1] The LOC Twitter Archive
>> http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweet-it-is-library-acquires-entire-twitter-archive/
>> 
>> [2] Just a thought (for Human Resources)
>> This is the Secretary of Commerce's Battle of the Bulge moment.
>> 
>> With tens of thousands of (temp) Census Enumerators hired and in the "field", including the Gulf Coast States, any damage can be documented in detail with a bare minimum impact on logistics. This sort of leverage is exactly what Patton brought to the Battle of the Bulge.
>> 
>> Arguably Patton needed the Battle of the Bulge as much as it needed him. No one cares except Political Wonks. The only important thing was that Patton knew he did not have a month to think about it.