Re: LOD cloud updated

Sören, Aldo, Peter,

On 31 Mar 2008, at 19:46, Sören Auer wrote:
> Nice I really appreciate your work, but we should also a little  
> careful how to position the LOD effort: it might sound funny to  
> outsiders when the whole LOD Web fit's on one picture

That's up to us -- I'm looking forward to the day where it no longer  
fits on a single picture! It's also worth remembering that 18 months  
ago, the LOD Web did not exist at all.

> and the major LOD news are about updating of that picture ;-)

I'm very open to other ideas for communicating LOD news. Any  
suggestions?

On 31 Mar 2008, at 20:23, Matthias Samwald wrote:
> Well, I am working on linking some RDF/OWL datasets from the life  
> science and health care domain to datasets in the LOD. The tidyness  
> of Richard's LOD graph shall soon be destroyed! ;-)

Bring it on ;-)

On 31 Mar 2008, at 20:55, Aldo Bucchi wrote:
> Is there a vocabulary to describe LOD datasets and their relations?
> You can then publish a dynamic graph from that... using disco or sth  
> similar.
> Or batch generate a raster / svg using a viz framework
>
> This should save mr Cyganiak from the tiny bit of hell waiting  
> around the corner
>
> Specify the amount of data ( resources or triples ).
> Individual and aggregates ( per type? )
>
> Strength is in the numbers!

I agree that a vocabulary for describing datasets would be a good  
thing. And keeping track of and publishing numbers about the amount of  
data would also be good. I'm afraid I don't have the bandwidth to do  
any of those things at the moment, but if anyone has some spare cycles  
and wants to chronicle the project's growth in a more quantitative  
way, that would be great.

> The chart would look more scary if it had some indicator of the amount
> of knowledge it conveys!
> Scarier than a bunch of circles with funny acronyms that don't mean
> anything to most people.

That's a very good point.

On 1 Apr 2008, at 02:17, Peter Ansell wrote:
> I think for one of the most "connected" elements in the graph, FOAF,
> is so distributed that it would be impossible to put a number on it

Actually FOAF is not *that* distributed -- I did some crawls of FOAF  
data, and it seems that the number of individual hand-maintained FOAF  
files out there is fairly small, a few thousand tops. The rest is  
coming from a fairly small number (10-20) of social network sites.

> I would like a Linked Data diagram which explicitly gave the links
> between the FOAF related sites, ie, which sites and whether they do
> actually interoperate

To be honest, I lumped all the FOAF together in a single bubble simply  
because I didn't want to put in the time to research all FOAF- 
producing sites out there to trace their user numbers and links. I  
think the truth is that most of them are “islands” with just internal  
links. It's the hand-maintained FOAF files that tie it all together by  
linking into those islands.

> Just to clarify overall though, is FOAF in its current recommended
> usages, ie, give a name and an mboxsha1sum as the "linked data"
> considered part of the mainstream? Is extending one of these entries
> with a generic seeAlso considered "linked data"? Should FOAF be not
> considered Linked Data unless the items are given dereferenceable
> URI's using a meaningful foaf terminology term?

Let's check Tim's criteria to see if FOAF profiles are linked data:

1. Use URIs as names for things -- check. The FOAF spec also  
recommends giving yourself a dereferenceable URI.

2. Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names -- check.

3. When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information -- check.

4. Include links to other URIs. so that they can discover more things  
-- Well, I would prefer direct foaf:knows links to other people's URIs  
over FOAF's rdfs:seeAlso approach. Still, rdfs:seeAlso to other  
people's FOAF profiles allows me to discover other related resources,  
which is the main point. So, check.

Richard