Re: ISSUE-66: LinkedDataT

On 08/05/2014 12:16 PM, Ruben Verborgh wrote:
> Hi Erik,
>
>>> I thought the only people who cared about Linked Data were those
>>> in the Semantic Web community. My bad!
>>
>> that's painfully circular.
>
> Forgive my ignorance; I came late to the game (and apparently was
> never told the backstory).
>
>> - the REST community cares a lot about linking data, because that's
>> one of their key architectural principles (probably the most
>> important one).
>
> linking data is, for me, key to self-descriptive responses, which are
> vital to REST.
>
> I always found the Linked Data principles (even minus the RDF) quite
> similar to the uniform interface principles:
> http://ruben.verborgh.org/phd/semantics/#the-hypermedia-connection
>
>> back in 2009, we dared to call this Linked Data and were told we
>> shouldn't.
>
> Perhaps the SemWeb community shouldn't have claimed the term in the
> first place… A bit arrogant to claim to be the only one linking data
> (while others have done it for years).

That would be a revisionist way to look at it.  The *reason* the term 
Linked Data became popular is *because* it was adopted by the RDF 
community.  Some years later a few people -- liking the term and perhaps 
not realizing its origins -- attempted to repurpose the term more 
broadly to mean "any data that is linked" (and they met with an uproar 
of resistance).

Of course people have been linking data together for years -- since long 
before the Web.  But they didn't coin and popularize the term Linked 
Data: TimBL did, as a way to describe a style of RDF use.

>
>> - if you define Linked Data to be exclusively based by SemWeb
>> technologies, then it's not really surprising that only the SemWeb
>> community cares about it.
>
> Sure. It's just how I've always heard it defined; probably because
> that's where I was. Clearly I spent too much time with the same
> people :-)

There's no need to apologize for knowing the established, correct 
meaning of a term of art.

David


>
>> i happen to think that this unnecessarily creates a separation
>> between communities that actually should talk more about principles
>> than pitching technologies.
>
> Oh well, in the first place, both communities should be concerned
> about getting things to work. But that seems more a problem on the
> SemWeb side :-)
>
> Hence my efforts here BTW. I believe in hypermedia and machines that
> can interpret responses.
>
>> but it seems that both bubbles are doing just fine even when
>> separate, so i have accepted that fact. but for people living in
>> neither bubble, the situation can be much more confusing than for
>> us bubble-dwellers. that's really all i wanted to point out.
>
> +1. I learned a lot today (and almost got into the danger zone).
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ruben
>
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 5 August 2014 18:15:52 UTC