Re: ISSUE-66: LinkedDataT

On 08/06/2014 06:26 AM, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
> On 8/5/14 5:16 PM, Ruben Verborgh wrote:
>> Perhaps the SemWeb community shouldn't have claimed the term
 >> [Linked Data] in the first place…
>> A bit arrogant to claim to be the only one linking data (while others
>> have done it for years).
>>
> Yes-ish. There should never have been a power-grab for the phrase
> "Linked Data" since it could always have been tagged as "RDF based
> Linked Data" even if to those in the know it was a tautology of sorts.

I slightly disagree on that point, because at the time when TimBL coined 
that term the semantic web community was really suffering from an image 
problem and really needed a term that better conveyed the essential 
idea.  The existing term "Semantic Web" was both putting people off and 
conjuring incorrect expectations.  The term "Linked Data" made a huge 
difference in the community's ability to market the ideas of the 
semantic web.  I'm not sure that would have been achieved if Linked Data 
had been defined more broadly to include non-RDF data.  Also, at the 
time when TimBL coined the term, it was not being used in any widespread 
way for anything else, so I think it's a little unfair to call it a 
power grab.  Contention for the term only arose much later, as a result 
of the term's success, when a few others thought it would be better to 
define it more broadly.

David

Received on Wednesday, 6 August 2014 16:44:33 UTC